Dancing and protesting – Columbia University 1968 and 2024.

1.

A good looking, long haired young Englishman, an SLR camera slung casually around his neck, sits dramatically astride the ridge of a zinc roof.

‘This is the roof of the Mathematics building’ he explains. ‘Inside the building at the moment … there is a revolution. About 100 or 200 students have barricaded themselves inside this building in order to repossess what they believe they ought to own …  themselves. The right to determine their own future. Tonight this building will be liberated by the police force of New York City. The students no doubt will be hurt, fined, imprisoned, suspended, and certainly their careers will be compromised by the decisions and acts of this week’.

This film extract doesn’t show events this month (April 2024)  at one of the Universities in the US where the police have been called in to clear camps of student protesting about their university’s investments in companies supporting the Israeli government’s war in Gaza. The sequence comes from Peter Whitehead’s 1969 film The Fall and shows students at Columbia University protesting against about the way that their university was profiting from the Vietnam War and using predatory real estate practices in neighbouring Harlem.

The students had accepted Whitehead as part of the occupation because of his track record as a radical filmmaker and he became a participant observer in their protest. The Fall includes some gruesome footage of the brutal and bloody way that the NYPD dealt with the students’ occupation.

Shocked by what happened, Columbia University created new mechanisms for facilitating peaceful student protest and decided that in future they would not use the NYPD to deal with protests. In April 2024 Columbia’s president Minouche Shafik overturned this precedent. Photos and videos of NYPD arresting students this April strongly recall the footage that Whitehead had filmed outside the same buildings 56 years earlier. Vietnam then, Gaza now. In both instances, Columbia students were, as Whitehead put it, claiming the right to determine their own futures.

Adam Tooze, who is a professor at Columbia, notes that his University is suffering huge reputational damage. He points out that the financial divestments that the students have, since October 2023, been calling for the University to make, amount to a tiny amount compared with Columbia’s huge financial resources. Student tuition fees make up a little over 3% of the University’s annual revenue. Their biggest income source is externally funded medical research (Tooze 2024 Substack). Students and teaching just don’t count for much in the neoliberal university.

2.

Back in 1968 when Whitehead predicted that, as a result of the University calling in the police, the students would be hurt, fined, imprisoned, suspended, and their careers would be compromised, he was pointing out that they were putting their collective struggle for a better society ahead of individual self-interest.

Whitehead was speaking as part of a revolutionary community. On the evening before the NYPD broke into the Mathematics Building, Whitehead filmed the students dancing. A feeling of community is one of the experiences that dancing can generate and this is what the students’ dancing does here. The first student in this scene with whom the camera engages, kicks off her shoes and to dance. She is not with a particular partner but is one of a loose group. Their movements are not set but improvised in an informal, spontaneous way that allows them all to bounce lightly along to the musical beat in an inclusive way. Their dancing, in effect, expresses communal values.

The students must mostly be in their early twenties, born in the late 1940s while their parents would have been born in the 1920s or earlier. These students are dancing in a very different way from their parents. Rather than dancing cheek to cheek in heterosexual couples, they are moving together in loose groups. The movements of their dancing ,and the music which they’re dancing to, derive from African diasporic cultural traditions.

Eldridge Cleaver, in a beautifully polemic essay published in 1969, describes the twist as

a guided missile launched from the ghetto into the heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books. (Eldridge Cleaver, The Soul on Ice)

While the students are not exactly dancing the twist, their movements are much more African in quality than the sorts of movements their parents would probably have danced. These aspects of the students’ partying add to our knowledge of the contingent, short-term community of which Whitehead was a part, and the revolutionary break it was making with the more restrained values and behaviour of an older generation.

For the soundtrack, Whitehead has used P.P. Arnold’s song ‘Everything’s gonna be alright’.  

HEY, HEY, HEY. Everybody’s gonna say that everything’s alright.

‘Cos if they don’t, then boy there’s gonna be a fight.

I got a little things for you,

it’s all I got and it’s nothing new …

Everybody’s gonna say that everything’s alright.

Dancing to this song, while the police are shown massing outside, conveys a message of hope and resilience.

3.

In April 2024 as I watch posts on social media of police manhandling students on American campuses, I am outraged but at the same time feel hope in the protestors’ resilience. There is music or drumming in some of the clips and I like to think some dancing in the protest camps. The international attention these protests have attracted uncovers some of the contradictions of the neoliberal university. It raises questions about why students and their capacity for critical thinking are so threatening to the senior management of universities today. It shows that it is possible to challenge the power relations underlying the political economy of the university sector.

The sight of these protests gives me hope. Wendy Brown argues that capitalism in its current form assumes that individuals, working in a competitive environment, will make rational economic choices and ‘entrepreneurialize’ themselves as individuals (The Dig podcast). What I see today, however, are people putting a collective struggle for the progressive values they believe in ahead of the selfishly individualistic way it is presumed they will behave.

References

Brown, Wendy (2020, October 24) Ruins of Neoliberalism with Wendy Brown. Podcast: The Dig. (Accessed 29 April 2024). Available from https://thedigradio.com/podcast/ruins-of-neoliberalism-with-wendy-brown/

Cleaver, Eldridge (1968) Soul on Ice. New York : McGraw-Hill

The Fall (1969) Director: Peter Whitehead, London: Lorimer Productions.

Tooze, Adam (2024, April 26) Chartbook 279: Columbia University’s “crisis” – a political economy sketch map. Blog: Chartbook. (Accessed 29 April 2024) Available from
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-279-columbia-universitys

Whitehead, Peter (2016) The Fall. A Screenplay. Hathor Publishing UK. Nohzone Archive.

The Chinese Festival: Noverre, Garrick and a theatre riot in 1755.

On the 18^th November 1755 there was a riot at David Garrick’s Theatre Royal in Drury Lane caused by a ballet. With cries of ‘No French dancers!’, a crowd smashed up the scenery of The Chinese Festival, a ballet created by the up-and-coming young French choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre. A mob even proceeded to Garrick’s home and smashed its windows.

This happened in London where enlightened ideas were being discussed at the Royal Society, in coffee houses, and at the salons of a network of intellectual women. It was the London of painters like William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds, and writers like novelist Henry Fielding and historian Catharine Macaulay. In 1756, the year after the riot, Garrick’s old friend and mentor Samuel Johnson finally published his famous Dictionary, and Benjamin Franklin arrived from Philadelphia for his second, prolonged stay. It is easy to dismiss the events surrounding The Chinese Festival as a row about a superficial piece of decorative rococo entertainment. My argument in this video lecture is that the theatre riot has more to do with enlightened thinking than this suggests.

The Chinese Festival was presented as an ‘afterpiece’ – a lighter entertainment following a play which was the main focus of an evening’s programme. On the opening night, despite the presence of King George II in the Royal box, there had been shouts of ‘No French dancers!’. France and England had been at war four times since the end of the Seventeenth Century [1689-97; 1702-13; 1743-8], and the year after the riot saw the opening engagements of the Seven Years War (1756-63). Hostility against the French in general and French culture and fashion in particular was complicated by class allegiances. In this case, the gentry and nobility who were seated in the boxes and in the amphitheatre (dress circle) wanted to see the ballet. The prosperous tradesmen and members of the professional middle class seated in the Pit (the stalls) were against the ballet. (fn1) Hostility between those in different classes led to arguments and to more and more serious fights breaking out over the run of the ballet. The nobility believed they were entitled to have their tastes catered for and to impose these on everyone else, while the middle-class audience members became increasingly vocal about their patriotic objections to what they saw as the corrupting influence of French culture.

In retrospect, their anti-French feelings appear as an ancestor of the xenophobic national populist politics that, in the twenty-first century, led to Brexit.

Theatre Royal Drury Lane – from Nicoll 1980.

While the riot in 1755 was not the only theatre riot in eighteenth-century London, it was the worst, Garrick apparently loosing £4,000 because of it (Winter 1974, 114). So why did bringing Noverre’s ballet over from Paris have such catastrophic consequences? What lay behind the fighting? To begin to answer these questions we need to look into the ballet itself which began in France as Les Fêtes Chinoises. How did it come to be shown in London, and what do sources about the disturbances reveal about anti-French feelings and cross class antagonism?

The ballet production that Garrick imported had drawn ‘Le tout Paris’ to L’Opéra Comique in Paris in June 1754. In his book on Noverre, Deryck Lynham (1950) translates a description of the ballet from a 1769 book about L’Opéra Comique.

‘The stage represents in the first instance an avenue ending in terraces and steps leading to a palace on a height. This first scene – perhaps a drop curtain? – changes and uncovers a public square decorated for a festival with, in the background, an amphitheatre on which are seated sixteen Chinese. By a quick change of positions, instead of the sixteen Chinese  thirty-two are seen on the gradins (stepped tiers) going through a pantomime. As the first group descends, sixteen further Chinese, both mandarins and slaves, come out of their habitations and make their way to the gradins. All these form eight rows of dancers who, rising and dipping in succession, imitate fairly well the billows of a stormy sea. ­ ­– that’s 48 dancers all in new Chinese costumes creating clever, playful theatrical illusions. All the Chinese, having descended, begin a character march. There are a mandarin, borne in a rich palanquin by six white slaves, whilst two negros draw a chariot on which a young Chinese woman is seated. They are preceded and followed by a host of Chinese playing various musical instruments […]. This march concluded, the ballet begins and leaves nothing to be desired either in the diversity or in the neatness of the figures. It ends in a contredanse of thirty-two persons whose movements trace a prodigious number of new and perfectly designed attitudes, which form and dissolve with the greatest of ease. At the end of the contredanse, the Chinese return to their place on the amphitheatre, which is transformed into a china cabinet. Thirty-two vases, which rise up, conceal from the eyes of the spectators the thirty-two Chinese one saw before’. (Lynham 1950, 21: translating Desboulmiers 1769, 323-4)

The scene changes described here would have made use of eighteenth-century stage machinery with ropes and windlasses not unlike a sailing ship of the period. There are working examples of this from the miraculously surviving eighteenth-century theatre at Drottningholm Royal Palace outside Stockholm.

Les Fêtes Chinoises also drew on an emerging fashion for chinoiserie. As a result of 200 years of Jesuit missions to China, and visits by other Europeans, there was a lot of information about China available in Europe by the 1750s. Confucius’s writings had been translated into French, and there were drawings and paintings of Chinese architecture and authentic costumes worn at the Qing court in Beijing. As Peter Kitson notes, ‘China was both a symbol of imperial excess and of Confucian moderation, alternately a threat and an aspiration’ (2013, 211). While some theatre productions seriously engaged with Chinese philosophical ideas, Noverre’s ballet can only be described as offering audiences ‘the fantasy world of decorative rococo whimsy’ (ibid, 213). The fact that the roles included white and black slaves shows how little knowledge or interest Noverre and his collaborators had about the actual conditions of Chinese society. What the ballet’s chinoiserie offered was an exotic alternative to the strictures of a more conservative classical high culture.

David Garrick and his wife Eva Marie Veigel, by William Hogarth, Royal Collection.

What can we guess about why Garrick brought the ballet to London?  He was probably interested in ballet through his wife Eva Marie Veigel who had trained as a ballet dancer at the court in Vienna under the ballet reformer Franz Anton Hilverding (Winter 1974, 114). Garrick knew Jean Monnet, the French theatre manager at L’Opéra Comique where Les Fêtes Chinoises had been produced. Monnet had unsuccessfully tried in 1748 to present French comedies on the London stage, losing money in the attempt. Garrick had helped him out by holding a ‘benefit’ performance for him which raised £100. Garrick perhaps saw a gap in the market for ballet performances because the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, which had a license to present ballet and opera, was in financial difficulties and was presenting less performances than usual. Some sources suggest that performers from other theatres joined the middle class protestors (see anon 1755 and Ou 2007). Chinoiserie was becoming fashionable in London. Architect Sir William Chambers who had visited China published his ‘Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils’ in 1757 and designed the Great Pagoda in Kew Gardens in 1761. Garrick produced and starred in The Orphan of China in 1759, based on a 12^th century Chinese play. Unlike The Chinese Festival, the play was a success. This suggests that the Chinese setting of the ballet was not in itself a problem, although whimsical rococo Chinoiserie would have been no more attractive to middle class Londoners that more conventional French ballet. It was primarily its French origin that was bringing about increasing polarisation between the upper- and middle-class members of the audience.

Watercolour by William Marlow, from http://www.metmuseum.org

At the fifth performance on Saturday 15th, because the Lords went to see an opera, the rest of the audience rioted and began to smash up the theatre. They only stopped when the management announced that there would be no more performances of the ballet. On Monday 17^th, the Lords and their followers were back and demanded that the ballet be presented again on the Tuesday. In response to shouts from people in the Pit, some Lords jumped down into it with drawn swords and threatened to kill a protestor whereupon Garrick himself jumped down from the stage to intervene claiming that their victim was his friend. He may actually have been a personal friend, but an actor manager in a venue like the Drury Lane Theatre needed to foster the idea that all the audience were his friends. The location of Drury Lane Theatre is significant here. It is to the west of the City of London where merchants and clerks lived and worked but to the east of the West End where the nobility and fashionable gentry stayed when in London. To be economically viable, the Drury Lane Theatre would have drawn on both and needed to keep them all happy. Divisive reactions to Noverre’s ballet threatened to undermine Garrick’s ability to foster common ground between different social groups in the audience.

The Imports of Great Britain from France. L-P Boitard. British Museum

Some members of the nobility were strongly Francophile. For example, Lady Mary Hervey was a key connection between salons in London and Paris, spending much of her time living in France. She was an old friend of Voltaire and knew D’Alembert, and was close to many French aristocrats. English nobles and gentry were avid consumers of luxury imports from France. A satirical print from 1757, the second year of the Seven Years War, shows the arrival from France of people and produce at Customs House Quay in the London docks. A street kid holds his nose at an open barrel of what look like Camembert cheeses, while there are crates of perfume, of ribbons, tippets, muffs and gloves, and barrels of French wine. A French ballet dancer is enthusiastically embraced by a fashionably dressed English woman to the amusement of her black page. An Abbé is introduced to two children he is going to tutor. The print is dedicated to the ‘Laudable Associations of Anti-Gallicans’. The Antigallican society was a middle class dining club who awarded annual prizes for examples of excellent British craftsmanship and needlework.

Antigallican society plate – Metropolitan Museum.

On 18^th November during the final destructive riot at Drury Lane Theatre, people sang the patriotic ballad The Roast Beef of Old England. In this a lady’s maid complains that her mistress is adopting French tastes, including French dancing.

When mighty Roast Beef was the Englishman’s food,

It ennobled our veins and enriched our blood.

Our soldiers were brave and our courtiers were good

Oh! the Roast Beef of old England,

And old English Roast Beef!

.

But since we have learnt from all-vapouring France

To eat their ragouts as well as to dance,

We’re fed up with nothing but vain complaisance

Oh! the Roast Beef of Old England,

And old English Roast Beef!

Hogarth, William; Mosley, Charles; The Gate of Calais, or the Roast Beef of Old England; https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/O51615 Credit line: (c) (c) Royal Academy of Arts /

The Sublime Society of Beef Steaks badge – note the gridiron for frying the steak. image from Wikipedia.

The roast beef of old England is the sub-title of an explicitly anti-French painting The Gates of Calais by Hogarth. Hogarth and Garrick were both members of an artists’ dining club The Sublime Society of Beef Steaks, at whose regular meetings members celebrated English beef and liberty. A member of both clubs was the populist anti-establishment pamphleteer and politician John Wilkes. Hogarth’s 1763 caricature of Wilkes includes a liberty bonnet.

One could easily imagine Wilkes in the Pit mischievously shouting No French dancers! British liberty here referred to the Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, and trial by jury. In the Eighteenth Century liberty also meant calls for freedom of the press, and freedom of election. Catharine Macaulay argued that this was a continuation of an age old Saxon struggle against the Norman yoke. The Normans of course were French. Linda Colley has summarised anti-French feeling among middle class Londoners at the time:

As long as British patricians spoke French among themselves … as long as they favoured French clothes, employed French hairdressers and valets, and haunted Parisian salons on the Grand Tour, as long as the taste for French cultural and luxury imports was allowed to put native artists, traders and manufacturers out of business, national distinction would be eroded and national fibre relaxed. (Colley 1992: 88)

All of this shows that the objections to Noverre’s ballet were part of a much wider set of attitudes among middle class Londoners of patriotic disposition.

A letter from an anonymous Englishman in the January 1756 issue of Tobias Smollet’s The Critical Review took the side of the pro-ballet nobility. Denouncing ‘the headstrong mob’ who had shouted ‘No French dancers!’, the letter writer notes that ‘the fashionable people, who are not subject to those ridiculous national prejudices, espoused the cause of the dancers, resolved to patronise the excellent composer [Noverre] and to support the entertainment’ (Anon 1756: 184). A letter in French published in the December 1755 issue of Journal Étranger gives the most detailed account of events, also taking the side of the nobles. It calls the protestors a cabal and uses the English word Blaggards. It states that the nobles came on Wednesday 12^th November for the second performance of the ballet prepared with swords and bludgeons, following the disturbances on the previous Saturday. When people in the Pit began to whistle at the ballet, nobles jumped down into it from their boxes and began beating people. Their female companions helped by pointing to protestors but, the writer says, many innocent people were hurt. When the ballet performance was resumed, there were raised hats and victorious cries from the nobles of ‘Huzza!’. On Thursday 13^th during the ballet, whistling came this time from the upper circle so the nobles went up there and set about protestors, throwing one of them down the flight of stairs. On Monday 17^th, the ballet having been cancelled in their absence, the nobles interrupted the fifth act of a tragedy to demand the ballet be performed. This led to a lengthy argument which concluded with a promise that it would be performed the following evening. The nobles, finding themselves outnumbered at the final performance retreated from the theatre allowing the protestors to invade the stage and smash the scenery.

The French account, which Deryck Lynham suggests may have been written by Noverre himself, actually reveals how provocative the nobles were. It was they who physically attacked the spectators. There’s no evidence of the protestors fighting back. The French account ends by saying that if the nobles and honest people had been less heated, all might have passed calmly – tranquillement – it is unclear whether this implies some people were dishonest. The anonymous Englishman in The Critical Review came to the hyperbolic conclusion that had it not it not been for the nobles’ ‘prudent retreat, we were upon the eve of a civil war, which indeed, was thought inevitable; and sure an affair so serious was never before produced from such a comical subject’ (Anon 1756: 185).

From a twenty-first century point of view it was class war rather than civil war, that was being acted out at the level of culture. At issue were questions about authentic British identity. This was being defined through confrontation. Though this confrontation would shortly become another major war with France, the confrontation in the theatre was between patriotic members of the middle class and, in their opinion, the unpatriotic upper classes. Conflict about who had the right to dictate what was or was not performed at the theatre was a conscious middle class challenge to aristocratic taste that can be seen as part of a wider political campaign aimed at transforming the social distribution of power. The anonymous Englishman in the Critical Review writes that ‘among a great number of English dancers [in The Chinese Festival] there happened to be a few French’ (Anon 1756, 184). Might the protestors have been disguising their disapproval of aristocratic behaviour with patriotic rhetoric? Were they, in Samuel Johnson’s terms using patriotism as the last refuge of the scoundrel? It is suggested that Johnson was thinking of John Wilkes when he said this. Many American colonists closely followed news of John Wilkes’s struggles with the British establishment. Catharine Macaulay found many readers in the American colonies and was warmly received there when she visited in 1784-85. The playful middle-class English call for beef and liberty became a serious political reality on that side of the Atlantic when the Declaration of Independence called for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I have been arguing that the ballet created more than just, as Peter Kitson put it, a fantasy world of decorative rococo whimsy’ By accident rather than design it became a lightning rod for enlightened political aspirations.

Endnote

1). For more on the class makeup of Garrick’s audience, see Allardyce Nicoll 1980 especially Chapter 4.

References

Anon. (1756) ‘A letter from an Englishman to the authors of the Journal Encyclopedique, at Paris’ The Critical Review January: 184-5.

Anon. (1755) Journal Étranger December, II: 223-235. Genève Slatkine Reprints, 1970.

Colley, Linda. (1992) Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (Yale University Press, New Haven.

Desboulmiers, Jean Auguste Julien (1769) Histoire du théâtre de l’Opéra Comique. Paris : Chez Lacombe.

Kitson, Peter J. (2013) Forging Romantic China. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Lynham, Deryck. (1950) The Chevalier Noverre: Father of Modern Ballet London: Sylvan Press.  

Nicoll, Allardyce. (1950) The Garrick Stage: Theatres and Audience in the Eighteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Ou, Hsin-yun. (2007) ‘The Chinese Festival and the eighteenth-century London audience’. The Wensham Review of Literature and Culture, 2(1), 31-52  

Winter, Marian Hannah. (1974) The Pre-Romantic Ballet London: Pitman Publishing

Pola Nireńska and the Polish Army Choir

Here’s the script for this video

Posted on the Imperial War Museum’s website is a film from 1944 called Kit Bag Songs which features the Polish Army Choir. In one section , Pola Nireńska dances while the soldiers sing an old Polish dialect folk song ‘Kiedym jechał do dzieweczki’.

This song is about a man about to leave his village to go to war who tells his sweet heart about the hardships of a soldier’s life. Nireńska dances the role of the village girl, the film intercutting between the singers and the dancing.

In 1940 there were about 17,000 Polish troops based in Scotland. They had fought the Germans when Poland was simultaneously invaded by Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939, and then fought them again in France before evacuating to Britain. They were quartered in the Scottish Lowlands.

The choir in the film was started to give performances to local people near where they were based. After one performance in August 1940 in Coatbridge near Glasgow, Captain Jan Sliwinski explained ‘that the choir was composed of officers from various regiments now stationed “somewhere in Scotland”. In giving such concerts free of charge in aid of charities … they hoped in some little way to repay the people of Scotland for the great kindness which had been shown to them’ (Coatbridge Leader 17-8-40). Sliwinski first met Nireńska in Vienna in 1935 and it is possibly through him that she ended up working with the choir.

photo from Kostyrko Tancerka Zaglada (2019)

As I noted in the previous video, Nireńska had been dancing to Polish folk songs since her teens in Warsaw, and her repertoire during the 1940s included some Polish folk song themed pieces. A review from 1942 notes Nireńska’s Village Beauty ‘is the beauty of the village and she knows it, and postures and struts and is coy in turn’. Nireńska’s performance in the film seems similar.  Another review perceptively observed that Nireńska was not dancing authentic folk songs. The writer commented on the theatricality of these which convey ‘the atmosphere and style of the particular types of dances by her own choreography and apt costumes rather than by performing actual folk dances and using actual costumes’.

Nireńska – photo by Lee Miller

The writer here was probably more familiar with the revived English folk songs and dances collected by Cecil Sharp and others. Such revivals were surely in part motivated by fear that industrialisation and modernity were leading to the loss of some essential, supposedly pre-industrial Englishness.

Nireńska and her Polish peers were coming from a very different place. After the First World War, Poland had become independent after more than a century as a divided country ruled by Prussia, Austro-Hungary, and Tsarist Russia who in 1795 had carved up and annexed what had been the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the early twentieth century folk songs were used in a modern way in dance schools like that of Janina Mieczynska in Warsaw where Nireńska first studied and then taught. Taking songs and folk steps from different parts of Poland and using them in new ways suggests a creative approach to folk culture that was very different from that of the more conservative ethos of the English folk song collectors. The choreography Nireńska performed with the soldiers may express nationalist sensibilities. But the fact that Nireńska was Jewish and had been living and working outside Poland for over a decade shows that it does so in a liberal, inclusive way.

In the film Nireńska and the soldiers never appear in the same frame. The editing cuts between singers and dancer so that we don’t see the choreography all the way through, only a few phrases of it so that there’s little sense of the form of the piece as a whole.

screenshots from Kit Bag Songs

In what we do see of Nireńska’s dancing – her hand gestures, her foot work, the way she turns on the spot – it is clear that she is not a ballet trained dancer. Instead there are resemblances between her movements and the way her teacher and mentor Mary Wigman danced.

[discussion comparing clips of Wigman and Nireńska]

There is a folk dance quality to Nireńska’s solo and a joyfulness that is very different from the powerfully emotional expression in Wigman’s solos. This is true of some other dancers who trained with Wigman.

Andrea Amort has observed that the Austrian dance artist Hanna Berger, who trained with Wigman a year or two after Nireńska, ‘no longer had to concern herself as much [as Wigman had] with liberating dance from the fetters of tradition and was free to incorporate aspects of many different styles and art forms in her works’ (Amort 2009, 133). The same could be said of Nireńska’s use in this dance of folk steps, costume and facial expressions to convey emotions.

So, what can we learn from this?

This section of Kit Bag Songs does not show Nireńska’s most significant choreography of the period. It would be really useful if there were film of some of the pieces Nireńska was touring later in the 1940s. Her repertoire then included a piece about the Virgin Mary danced to an old Breton hymn Disons Le Chapelet. Reviews suggest that her Homeless Child was tragic, ‘Felina’ – Catty Woman slightly sarcastic and A Scarecrow Remembers wistful. These reviews suggest her choreography and performance were powerful and well received.

What the film of Kiedym jechał does show however is a confident experienced performer with a strong presence who was clearly trained in modern dance rather than ballet. Recent research into mid-twentieth-century dance in England is based on the assumption that the only serious artistic dancing at the time was by ballet companies. The fact that Nireńska became hidden from history poses the question whether there were more modern dancers living and performing in Britain at the time who have also been forgotten. The dance scene was surely more complex and interesting than we currently think. Certainly Nireńska is an artist whose work deserves more attention.

The full film of Kit Bag Songs, in only part of which Nireńska appears, can be seen on the Imperial War Museum’s website at

https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060021655

short list of sources for video on Pola Nirenska’s life and career.

theses

Simmons, Stephanie. (1984) Pola Nirenska: spanning fifty years in dance influences on the dancer and the choreographer. (MA thesis) The American University, Washington D.C.

Written by someone with access to Nirenska and some of her archives.

Mozingo, Karen A. (2008) Crossing the borders of German and American modernism: exile and transnationalism in the dance works of Valeska Gert, Lotte Goslar, and Pola Nirenska (PhD thesis) Ohio State University.

            Long chapter on Nirenska focussing on the holocaust works.

biography

Kostyrko, Weronika (2019) Tancerka I Zaflada: Hostoria Poli Nirenskiej Warsaw: Czerwone i czarne.

            Biography of Nirenska by a Polish Journalist with particular focus on anti-semitism.

essays

Faber, Rima (2019) ‘Pola Nirenska’s Holocaust Tetralogy’ Dance Today  36, 34-8

            Faber’s first hand account by participant of making of these pieces.

Faber, Rima (2008) ‘Rima Faber on Pola Nirenska’ Bourgeon [online] https://bourgeononline.com/2008/01/rima-faber-on-pola-nirenska/ [accessed 20-5-2022]

Overview of Nirenska’s life and career by someone who was close to her at the end of her life.

Iwańska Alicja (2014) ‘Polski taniec modern 1918-1939 (na tle reformatorskich prądów w europejskiej sztuce tanecznej)’ Kultura Enter [online] https://kulturaenter.pl/article/polski-taniec-modern-1918-39-na-tle-reformatorskich-pradow-w-europejskiej-sztuce-tanecznej/ [accessed 4-6-2022]

            Overview of modern dance in Poland 1918-39, with information about Mieczynska,

On Wigman and Nirenska

Sorell, W. (1986). Mary Wigman: Ein Vermächtnis. Wilhelmshaven, Florian Noetzel.

            Includes chapter on Wigman’s letters to Nirenska

Guilbert, Laure. (2000) Danser avec le IIIe Reich. Les danseurs modernes sous le nazisme. Brussels: Editions Complexe.

            Includes discussion of Wigman’s dismissal of all the Jewish dancers in her company on her return to Dresden in 1933 from the US tour of Der Weg.

On Liz Lerman

Rossen, Rebecca (2019) Dancing Jewish. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

            Discussion of Lerman includes analysis of her piece The Good Jew. (No mention of Nirenska).

Pola Nirenska 1910-1992 timeline

1910 born, Warsaw. Perla Nirensztajn, father Mordechaj (neck tie manufacturer), mother Ita

late 1920s

attends Catholic high school for the arts in Warsaw

attends Janina Mieczynska’s school in Warsaw – Mieczynska teaching Jaques-Dalcroze Rhythmics and Plastics

Later she told the story about obstinately shutting herself up for 3 days in her bedroom until her parents gave her … her passport? German dance school brochures? Father agreed to let her train as long as she only teaches dance and doesn’t perform. Father sold a building in Berlin, the profit was to be Pola N’s dowry but used instead to pay dance school fees.

1929-32.

attends Wigman school in Dresden.

1930

Wigman’s Totenmal at 3rd Dancers Congress in Munich – Pola N is off stage percussionist.

1932

final diploma choreography Japanese Ballade (later Eastern Ballade)

1932-3

member of Wigman’s dance company for US tour with Der Weg.

            – see Wigman’s interview about her Jewish students in The Mary Wigman Book.

1933

return to Dresden, with Hitler and NSPD now in government, Wigman dismisses all Jewish members of her company – Laure Guilbert gives their names and nationalities

PN returns to Warsaw and teaches at Mieczynska’s school

and at Theatre Academy Warsaw

choreographed for production of Aristophanes The Birds

19 May recital in Warsaw

2nd international dance competition Warsaw: PN 8th prize for choreography, silver medal for Japanese Ballade

1934

June: 3rd International Dance Congress Vienna – PN presented Cry and Japanese Ballade, and a peasant dance created for students from Mieczynska’s school.

Later PN told the story about Wigman inviting her to spend the summer with her in Dresden but when she arrived the school adminstrators wouldn’t let Wigman see her because she was Jewish.

Polish government scholarship allows PN to study with Rosalie Chladek.

1935 

17 March (Marz) Theater in der Josefstadt matinee performance

Angiola Sartorio sees this and invites PN to come to Florence to teach in her school and dance in her company in a production of Aida at Florence Opera House.

November 26 performed at the “Scuola arte del movimento – Ginnastica moderna di Caroline e Teo Fasulo (via Po, 14, Rome)

1936

January 1936 –  returns to Vienna

(according to Simmonds – January 11, Wiener Publisum, Vienna; January 21, Volkshochschule Wien; January 30, Das Podium in Hagenbund, Vienna.

Then moves to England (via Warsaw perhaps to visit family?)

June PN performance as speciality dancer at Rose Ball at Grosvenor House

Autumn, living in Hampstead sharing a flat with Rachel Cavalho

Attends Jooss Leeder school at Dartington College, Sept-Dec.

At Dartington poses for portrait bust by Willi Soukoup

November recital at the Polish Embassy in London.

3rd December PN performance as speciality dancer at Archduke Johan Ball 1836 at Austrian Legation (Austrian Ambassador and Foreign Minister).

1937

January supporting role in Hungarian soprano Irene de Noiret’s show ‘Songs of Many Lands’ Ambassador’s Theatre London

16 February BBC Alexandra Palace TV. supporting Irene de Noiret.

Models for portrait bust by Jacob Epstein

October Palace Theatre Manchester It’s in the Bag.

November (10th 1st night?) The Saville Theatre London It’s In The Bag

1938

January It’s In The Bag closes

Jewish Chronicle (Apr 29, 1938 Page 39): an acrobatic dancer; Mr. Max Bacon; and the Misses Pola Nirenska and Flossie Freedman.

December, Private Exhibition of PN’s choreography reviewed by Wilfred Macartney in Reynolds News 4/12/38

1939

February 11th BBC Alexandra Palace TV

15th February BBC Television Play ‘The Infinite Shoe Black’ by Norman MacOwan: Nirenska as Austrian Woman

signs up for ENSA when war declared

1940

film: Hello Fame

September 7th ‘The Polish Hearth Presents’ Gala Performance at Garrick Theatre, London

November 10th, 6 Polish Artists at Kings Theatre Edinburgh

during 1940-44 dancing for troops, touring with Polish Army Choir, dancing in Galas, dancing in concerts with classical musicians 

1941

performance in Perth 26-7-41

1942

January 26th Grand Allied Matinée organised by ENSA Advisory Council for ‘Allied Forces Welfare Fund’ at His Majesty’s Theatre, London. PN representing Poland.

September, King’s Lynn War Charities Week – concert with Polish musicians and Lady Fermoy.

PN choreographs and performs with corps de ballet in Mazurka in ‘Waltz Without End’ – opens Cambridge Theatre 29th September, transfers to Lyric Theatre 8th December (181 performances)

When did PN first meet Priaulx Rainier?

1943

Pola Nirenska Dance School (advert)

1944

Kit Bag Songs (film)

1945

February 23rd CEMA concert in Petersfield (with Muthesius and Cavalho).

April 4th CEMA concert in Banbury (with Muthesius and Cavalho).

November The Lindsey (London? announcement in The Stage) Pola Nirenska recital 3 evenings

1946

A Recital of Modern Dance 1st tour

May ‘The Thracian Horses’ play at Lyric hammersmith – Nirenska as Death.

1947

A Recital of Modern Dance 2nd tour

March 27, Otel Hall, Tel Aviv

April 13, Zion Hall, Jerusalem

Also performing for British troops and visiting her brother and parents who had moved to Palestine just before the outbreak of war.

April marries John Justinian de Ledesma

1948

19 May La Scala, London solo recital in aid of Actors Orphanage

Zurich Dance Summer School – reunion with Wigman.

Zurich Schauspielhaus December 1st.

Adelphi Theatre December 12th Concert in aid of Polish Armed Forces – Pola N has top billing.

1949

January Vienna

divorces John Justinian de Ledesma

August on SS Washington to New York

September 2, 1949 migration card in New York states PN to stay with Angiola Sartorio at 315, West 57th Street (near Columbus Circle)

25 Nov. staying with Selma Broder (Letter to Rainier)

4 December rehearsing? in Better Theatre (Letter to Rainier)

27 December marriage of convenience with Jack Rathner for residency permit. Records of Rainier’s music has arrived safely (letter to Rainier)

1950

Feb 15th Boston Conservatory Audiorium

June 29th Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival

Simmons says PN took classes with Humphrey, Weidmann, Shurr, O’Donnell, Horst. Kostyrko mentions booking a course with Holm, but when Pola N twists her ankle and can’t continue, Holm refuses to refund the fee

1951

Humphrey creates Night Spell (initially titled Quartet then Illusion) for José Limón Dance Company using Priaulx Rainier’s 1939 String Quartet which PN has played to her ­– or lent the records – to Humphrey (on piece see Koner’s Solitary Song).

summer – teaches at Bar Harbor Summer Dance School in Maine. There she meets Evelyn de la Tour who invites her to come and teach in Washington DC. Humphrey encourages her to go as there were already so many well established modern dancers working in NYC.

Autumn, Pola N teaching at de la Tour’s Dance Workshop in Georgetown, Washington.

1952

Pola N stayed working for De La Tour until 1960.

According to Simmons (who interviewed PN in 1983) PN assisted Doris Humphrey during summer schools at Connecticut College (American Dance Festival?) three years running – 1950-53? 1951-54? PN bringing her own choreography for feedback from Humphrey.

1953 letter to Rainier ‘You are letting me down … is there no place in your heart…’

1955 or 56

starts choreographing on advanced students

establishes Pola Nirenska Dance Company.

1958

Vigil at Sea

1959

Four Horsemen of the Apolcalypse

PN’s last public performance as dancer

1959 or 60 Nirenska establishes her own school, help from parents of students to build studio at her house.

1960

Encounter and Goodbyes (younger daughter breaking away from older woman.

Picnic (Edwardian setting, comic)

Baptised into Roman Catholic Church

1965

marries Jan Karski 26 June at St Anne’s Church, Washington.

1968 or 69

gives up her school, moves house so no longer has a dance studio. Announces retirement from dance, takes up photography.

1970s

‘every two years I tried to kill myself’

ECT at St Elizabeth’s Hospital

1974

while Karski is visiting Poland, she has a breakdown.

1977

PN starts going to class at Dance Exchange, (a dance centre started by Liz Lerman in 1968 in a Department Store burnt out in riots after assassination of MLK)

1978

Claude Lanzmann interviews Karski in Washington for his film Shoah (final film 9 hours long completed in 1985)

1979

Invited by Jan Tievsky to work with his Glen Echo Dance Theatre. PN revives some of her pieces from the 1960s.

1981

choreographs Divided Self, shown at City Dance Festival, Washington.

Ellie Wiesel asks Karski to speak at a conference in Washington as part of activities to encourage the creation of a Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

1982

Karski invited to Israel (Pola goes with him, visits parents’ and brother’s graves?)

PN creates first two parts of holocaust Tetralogy – overall title ‘In memory of those I loved … who are no more’

1. Whatever Begins … also Ends

2. Dirge

Liz Lerman performs PN’s solo Exits (not part of tetralogy) at one of PN’s company concerts

1986

3. Shout

1989

4. Train

Premier of all four holocaust pieces scheduled for performance at Kennedy Centre, postposed when Pola N has another mental breakdown.

1990

Rima Farber and other dancers rehearse the works without PN, then show them to her, she says ‘Very Good’, and they are finally perform them at Dance Place on PN’s 80th birthday July 28th.

1992

January PN and Jan K move from their house and garden to an 11th floor apartment.

July 25th, PN dies falling off the balcony – Karski says she was standing on a stool to water the plants. Others believed it was suicide.

Revising The Male Dancer for its 3rd edition

This is the script for my video blog about rewriting my book.

I thought it would be useful to talk about rewriting parts of The Male Dancer for the new revised 3rd edition that’s recently been published. So this video is about some of the things that I’ve noticed have changed where gender and sexualities are concerned since the book first appeared, and how dance history as a discipline has developed since then.

The third edition was published on 25th February 2022. On 24th February the Russian army invaded Ukraine so that it really didn’t seem the right moment to make a video to promote my book.

Now, talking on day 51st day of the war, the future seems very uncertain.

Much of the work revising The Male Dancer was done in 2020 and 2021 during the COVID pandemic when we knew things weren’t going to stay the same as before but were, and still are, very uncertain about what’s coming.

That makes this an interesting moment to think about how things change.

The 1st edition appeared in 1995 and was mostly written in 1993 and 1994. Here then are a few thoughts about what I’ve found has changed over what is now almost 30 years.

The Male Dancer was initially published around the time that other books were appearing that pointed to new concerns about the relation between theatre dance and its social and political contexts – books like Gay Morris’s Moving Words, Jane Desmond’s Meaning in Motion, Susan Foster’s Corporealities, and Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s Digging the Africanist Presence.

At the time, Identity Politics was seen as a positive development as people created space for a constructive public conversation about identities, a conversation that was not altogether welcomed by an older generation of dance scholars.

In the 2020s in Europe and North America, being gay is largely accepted and uncontroversial. But identity politics is now too often something used as a stick to beat people with who appear to have said the wrong thing.

Culture Wars are a tool for cynical right wing populist politicians.

We now talk about toxic masculinity, but that was not yet an issue in the 1990s. Similarly the subsequent rise of the Incel phenomenon has been driven by social media. This is a whole new context for male dancers.

But one thing that has remained constant throughout this time has been the alignment of contemporary dance with progressive ideas about dance, masculinity, and homosexuality. Might some large, well-funded companies sometimes now chose to commission sexy pieces for their male dancers partly because they want to appear woke? Just a thought…

Dance history as a discipline has of course expanded a great deal since I was doing the research for the first edition of my book.

Some of what I wrote then is still in the book, but there is now a lot more scholarly research that the new edition makes use of.

For example I have drawn heavily on Hanna Järvinen’s work when rewriting the chapter on Nijinsky and also found Penny Farfan’s work useful. I don’t think there was any dance scholarship in the early 1990s on the queerness of Les Ballets Russes, and hardly anything on dance and homosexuality in general. This is no longer the case and my book may have done a little to change this. The revised third edition now includes a discussion of female masculinities.

Virtually the only writing available in the UK in the early 1990s on Alvin Ailey was a book by the dance critic Joseph Mazo. There is now a lot of rigorous and thoughtful discussion I’ve read for te book about Ailey’s work, particularly Tommy Defrantz’s writing.

Similarly, Paul Scolieri’s detailed research on Ted Shawn has let me transform my discussion of Shawn and his men dancers. I now compare Shawn’s choreography with that of his contemporary Michio Ito, someone who I’d not heard of in the early 1990s.

The book ends with a discussion of male dancers in contemporary African dance, focusing on the work of Germaine Acogny. This is another topic that was not yet on the agenda in the early 1990s.

The Male Dancer in 1995 was my first book and the revised 3rd edition will be my last as I’ve now retired. I was pleased to be able to cover a much more diverse range of artists and topics in the new edition that were inconceivable in the early 1990s. Dance scholars are now from much more diverse backgrounds than they were back in the day, and their scholarship explores a much broader and more inclusive range of topics and issues. I hope it continues to expand and develop beyond what it encompasses today. But I’m very happy for now if people still find The Male Dancer useful enough for Routledge to publish this new edition.

Thinking about dance and ageing

This video essay was developed from an intervention during a panel for the Ageless dance, Alkantara Festival in Lisbon. With me on the panel were Participants include Ana Macara, Emma Lewis, Kaite O’Reilly, Nanako Nakajima, and Susanne Foellmer.

Ageless Dance – Alkantara Festival

online announcement of the festival

I talked about the way that, in the context of the neoliberal monetisation of ageing, some contemporary dance can offer alternative ways of thinking about the processes of growing old. In doing so I talked about aspects of the work of Anna Halprin, Kazuo Ohno, Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion and others to think about dance and ageing.

What I wanted to contest are the ways in which some ideas about dance and ageing can normalise the idea that if people make the right consumer choices they can somehow put off the losses of declining old age, and pretend that it isn’t happening. I tried to highlight the inherent contradictions within this and show that some recent experimental dance practices can exploit these in order to imagine different ways of thinking and being.

Some of the books that helped me think through these issues

The quotation from Butler’s book that I found really useful is:

Assembly enacts a provisional and plural form of

coexistence that constitutes a distinct social

alternative to responsibilization. (2015, p. 16)

By ‘responsibilization’ Butler is referring to the neoliberal demand that people take responsibility for themselves as individuals independent from and unaffected by others. The kind of assembly that Butler is discussing here is one on the street or other space to assert a right to express collectively some particular political concerns that repudiate the lonely imperative to submit to the requirement to exercise the freedom of individualism. Being in a theatre audience or onstage performing, I’m suggesting, can also create, for the duration of the performative event, an assembly brought together to share and affirm particular social and political ideas and aspirations. The examples in this video essay are about these kinds of shared aspirations for more livable ways of becoming older.

What the body can do

Artistic research in dance could be described as research into what the dancer can do. Spinoza proposed that one cannot know everything about what the body can do.

This video presentation was made for discussion at the first meeting of a short, weekly seminar in February 2021 on how philosophical ideas can inform practice-based research in dance. This was for the Vaganova Academy in St. Petersburg as part of the British Council Moscow’s UK-Russia Creative Bridge programme. The presentation outlines philosophical ideas for thinking through dance practice as research. Currently it is not yet possible to do a practice-based PhD (or Artistic Doctorate) in dance at a Russian HE Institute.

Drawing on ideas about what the body and what it can do, including writing by Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi, the presentation concludes with a discussion of a brief extract from Trisha Brown’s signature choreography Set and Reset.

Parameters of dance innovation

 

[script]

The British dance artist and researcher Emily Claid has identified a weariness that sometimes occurs within contemporary dance that she calls ‘middle mush’. This, she wrote in 2006, is ‘the fixed, thick, solid place that dancing can become when movement is predictable and watching is endless … It is the dynamic I fear most in British contemporary dance’. The cure to this malaise is innovation.
Being innovative in dance is not just something done for the sake of it. It is more than just dancers trying to be different. Innovation is part of the processes of social and political change.

The Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci explained the need for innovation in the notebooks he kept while in prison in the 1920s and 1930s, writing:

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear
but, he goes on, this nevertheless creates the possibility and necessity of creating a new culture.

Gramsci’s interregnum is surely a relation of Claid’s middle mush. Gramsci’s idea has gained currency recently because it seems to describe the current state of disillusionment with austerity, and a widespread sense of the failure of neoliberal politics and economics.

Artistic innovation – including innovation in theatre dance – is a field that has a potential to respond to shifts in social experience. Artists can pick up on feelings that some aspects of contemporary life can no longer be explained by dominant narratives. Dancers can sometimes embody tensions between the status quo and what is actually happening before these feelings can be put into words. This is a phenomenon that the Marxist scholar and literary critic Raymond Williams called a ‘structure of feeling’. This, he wrote,

is firm and definite as ‘structure’ suggests, yet it is based in the deepest and often least tangible elements of our experience. … Its means, its elements, are not propositions or techniques; they are embodied, related feelings. (1973, p. 10).

Innovative theatre dance has a potential to create a time space in which it becomes possible to express or draw attention to these embodied feelings. My aim in this video essay is to discuss three different categories of innovation that can be identified in late twentieth and twenty-first century theatre dance, sketching some of the ways in which these are rooted in social and political experience. These three are: path-finding, disruption, and claiming space for progressive alternatives.

Path-finding is discovering new ways of creating movement or choreography. One example of this is the development of Contact Improvisation by Steve Paxton and others. Another is Pina Bausch’s development of tanztheater. If I describe a piece by a choreographer as Bauschian, you probably know what I mean.

Disruption in dance often lies in saying no, in an avant-garde way, to conventions that up until then had been considered essential to the creation or performance of theatre dance. The best known example is Yvonne Rainer’s so called ‘No!’ manifesto from 1965, which begins ‘NO to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformaions and magic and make-believe’ and so on.
[no to glamour and transcendency of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved].
Rainer and her fellow dance artists in Judson Dance Theatre embraced this negativity in a way that was not nihilistic but was intended to unlock potentials for new kinds of aesthetic experience.

What I have in mind for my third category of innovation are works that demand an inclusive space within the centre ground of contemporary dance for groups or points of view that are hidden or marginalised. Examples here include works by queer artists, artists of colour, artists with disabilities, or elders still dancing beyond the age when it is expected that they should retire. I am also thinking of post-colonial dance works that intentionally dance back against dominant colonial ideologies and the expectations they produce, and works that take on European high culture by rethinking it with an African or Asian sensibility.

Dance works are often, of course, innovative in ways that touch on more than one category. For instance, the contemporary African dance technique that Germaine Acogny has developed is both path-finding and claims a space for progressive ideas. It draws on dance movements from West African vernacular and ritual dancing, codifying them into a comprehensive vocabulary and technique. By doing so, this way of dancing demands a space for African experiences, challenging assumptions that only white Western culture and society are modern while all others, particularly those in the global South, are still essentially trying to catch up.

In the rest of this video, I briefly explore some of the interconnections between these three kinds of innovation by briefly reviewing the context around Trajal Harrell’s well known piece 20 Looks or Paris Is Burning at Judson Church.

This work, first performed in 2009, takes as its starting point the thought experiment “What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing ball scene in Harlem had come downtown to perform alongside the early postmoderns at Judson Church?”.
 The twenty looks are the twenty titled sections of the piece.

LOOK 1 West Coast Preppy School Boy
LOOK 2 East Coast Preppy School Boy
LOOK 3 Old School Post-Modern
LOOK 4 American Casual Sport
LOOK 5 Sporty Contemporary
LOOK 6 Sporty Contemporary with a Twist
 and so on
[LOOK 7 New School Hokey Pokey
LOOK 8 Serving Old School Runway
LOOK 9 Serving
LOOK 10 Serving Superhero
LOOK 11 _________________
LOOK 12 Legendary
LOOK 13 Legendary Face
LOOK 14 Icon
LOOK 15 Eau de Jean Michel
LOOK 16 Basquiat Realness
LOOK 17 Runway Performance with Face and Effects
LOOK 18 Moderne
LOOK 19 Legendary with a Twist
LOOK 20 Alt-Moderne feeling the French Lieutenant’s Woman ]

Directly or indirectly, these titles nod in the direction of the different categories and concepts presented in Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris is Burning. She filmed this in and around the Black and Latino, gay and transsexual drag balls in Harlem run by Paris Dupree.

The vogue dancer who features most prominently in Livingstone’s film is Willi Ninja, whose career took off so that by the end of the film he had appeared in Madonna’s music video Vogue and gone on an international tour with her. Dorian Corey, an elder drag queen whose on-camera interviews offer a highly informative, wry commentary on the balls, remembers a time when Black and Latino drag queens used to go down town to compete in drag balls run by white impresarios. However good they were, they never won any prizes and felt unwelcome, so they started their own drag balls up in Harlem.

While there would therefore have been drag balls in Harlem in 1963, it doesn’t really matter whether or not people were already voguing around that time. Harrell’s clever proposition is to choreograph some movement sequences, that are based on the kinds of competitive categories at Paris Dupree’s drag balls, but which he has transformed into the kind of pedestrian, minimalist choreography for which Judson Dance Theatre became known.

I’ve already mentioned Yvonne Rainer’s ‘No!’ manifesto. Her minimalism arose from a critique of balletic virtuosity. A grande jété, she wrote, needs to be invested ‘with all the necessary nuances of energy distribution that will produce the look of climax together with a still, suspended extension in the middle of the movement’. Her choreography, however, needs ‘a control that seems geared to the actual time it takes the actual weight of the body to go through the prescribed motions’.

Most of the 20 Looks in Harrell’s piece consist of tasks danced in the actual time they need without hiding the body’s actual weight and effort. Some of the Looks, however, like the ‘Runway’ walking, are done in a knowing way that transgresses Rainer’s stipulations ‘no to camp’ and ‘no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer’. But part of what is exciting about Harrell’s piece is the way it claims the conceptually sophisticated space of minimalist dance for the kinds of Black and Latino performers that walked the balls.

Returning to my three categories of innovation, I suggest that Paris Dupree was a socially progressive innovator claiming space for alternative identities and experiences. Willi Ninja was a pathfinder, Yvonne Rainer a disruptor, and Trajal Harrel a disruptor and a socially progressive innovator.

There is a quotation from the British socialist politician Tony Benn about political progress that can also be applied to innovation in dance: ‘First’ he said ‘they ignore you, then they say you’re mad, then dangerous, then there’s a pause and then you can’t find anyone who disagrees with you’. The scene in Paris is Burning when Willi Ninja talks about his recent success reveals the moment when voguing was no longer mad or dangerous but was becoming monetisable.

My point is to try not to ignore or condemn the first signs of a development in dance that is troubling because it breaks with the middle mush of what is conventionally acceptable. Instead, where dance artists seem to be mining signs of still unarticulated shifts and changes, we need to do what we can to help and support the new that is trying to be born.

Contemporary European dance and the Commons

I made this video for my keynote panel paper for Plenary I, Reservoirs of Movement: Common Flows and Circulation at Dance Studies Association Annual Conference ‘Dancing in Common’ at Northwestern University, 8th-11th August 2019