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.
ramsayburt 