Ballet and Gender Girly Boys

Ballet and Gender

Girly Boys

For at least the past century and a half, the performance of ballet has also been a performance of gender and sexuality. That this should be true is hardly surprising: Ballet presents dancers in a minimum of clothing, and what they do wear is stretched tightly across their bodies. Ballet shows off the human form, putatively in the service of art: Those leotards and tights are worn to show off the dancers' lines, etc.

However, the costumes of dancers are also worn to show off the ways in which dancers' bodies adhere to an ideal human form in a way that the bodies of those in the audience can never match. The relationship of dancers to their own bodies is different from the relationship of the rest of us to our bodies, and this difference necessarily breeds suspicion and often dislike. When men's bodies are treated with suspicion, the default understanding of this suspiciousness is that they are queer.

We (the general societal "we") do not like to be reminder of the ways in which we fail to match the ideal, which often turns into a condemnation of those perfect bodies on the stage. This dismissal or even condemnation of the balletic body is far more stringent in terms of the male body for a number of reasons, some of what are examined here (Kendrick, 1987).

The body line for all of these reasons is, however, relatively simple: Women's bodies are culturally supposed to be looked at, and so the fact that ballet puts them on display is nothing unusual. Indeed, the ways in which female dancers' bodies are displayed on the stage is arguably only marginally different than the ways in which they are always being displayed whenever women are in a public space controlled by men (Ramsay, 1995, p. 37).

Male bodies (in the recent tradition of the West) are not meant to be the subject of the audience's gaze. Once male dancers put themselves in that position, everything about their gender presentation and their personal sexuality comes into question. A few men have been able to break away from the suspicion almost universally directed at male dancers, thus posing the fascinating question of why a few male dancers such as Vaslav Nijinsky have been able to do so.

As this essay examines, at least for Nijinsky, he managed to transcend the common representation of gender in ballet not by confronting it but by essentially giving into it and even celebrating it. That he was able to do so was based on two different conditions. The first was his own artistry and strength: He was a charismatic performer. The second is that he was performing at an historical moment when so many aspects of society, including perhaps especially gender, were vulnerable to challenge.

There has traditionally been an almost necessarily jealousy in the ballet audience that finds its outlet in a dismissal of those dancers' bodies, especially in the case of male dancers (Kopelson, 1997). Why male dancers should come under greater scrutiny and greater criticism than those of women is complex and is not the focus of this paper, but a brief explanation is necessary here. Women have often been allowed a greater flexibility in terms of the presentation of their sexuality than men, so that same-sex relationships among women are generally seen as either friendship, as harmless and temporary flirtation, or as a way of titillating and satisfying male curiosity about girl-on-girl.

Moreover, the female bodies that appear in ballet are so slender that they are likely to evoke images of girls rather than women, especially in the fact that they rarely have the breasts associated with a mature woman. This youthfulness does not, of course, mean that they do not serve as sexually attractive objects for some people, but it does limit the range of their appeal, pushing the purported audience of the appreciation of the male dancer's body toward the edges of "normal" and culturally approved sexual identity and sexual behavior.

Male ballet dancers, on the other hand, are clearly adults, and clearly violate the norms of how adult men are supposed to look and behave. This was truer in the 19th century than in the 20th, at least for some segments of society. Male dancers are still the subject of ridicule and general homophobia in many parts of society now, although somewhat less so than in the 19th century when male dancers were routinely mocked in travesty shows, Nijinsky in both his public and private personae seemed unafraid of being marked as deviant, and it was this personal (at least seeming) refusal to take seriously the judgment of other people that allowed him effectively to escape that judgment (Kopelson, 1997, 119). By being able to do so -- by actually doing so -- he also changed the role of ballet in society and the role of classical male dancers in society. This change was certainly not an enormous one, but in the context of gender relations and the role of high art in society during his lifetime, it was startling (Ramsay, 1995).

Audiences in Nijinsky's era rejected the legitimacy of masculinity in ballet; that is, they reject the possibility that true masculinity could ever be evident in the bodies of male dancers. Travesty performances, in which gender was treated with as much scorn and derision as race was in black-face performances (which come somewhat later than the travesty performances, but only just) were a society-wide affirmation that only certain gender expressions were acceptable and that the ones performed on the stage of classical dance would be considered acceptable to the audience at large (Garafola, 1999).

At the juncture between the 19th and the 20th centuries, modern dance began to challenge the gendered roles of ballet not by pushing back against them but by giving into them (Kopelson, 1997, 37). Nijinsky was the epitome of such a switch in gender presentation by classical dancers. While before male dancers had tended to be hidden behind tulle-fluffed ballerinas, playing roles that were the stereotypes of virility but which clearly were read as a thin and unsuccessful disguise of homosexuality, Nijinsky mixed modern elements with classical ones to create a man who needed no woman to express his sexuality (Garafola, 1999).

In both literal and metaphorical ways, Nijinsky became the focus of the spotlight when he was onstage, and he used this position to confront his audiences not only with a changing definition of what ballet can be but also what a man could be. When Nijinsky appeared on stage in a ballet such as L'apres-midi d'un faune, for example, he is never paired in a traditional balletic way with a woman. He did not need a woman choreographically, and this translated into the suggestion at least that he did not need a woman in any other area of his life at all (Garafola, 1989, p. 116).