Salome Factor

In the Spring issue of the American Scholar, William Deresiewicz discusses the sexualization of dance during the twelve years he write dance criticism for various publications: “For one thing, dancers have been wearing less and less. Sometimes they don’t wear anythng at all, though this nudity or semi-nudity almost never serves a discernible artistic purpose. Their magnificently stretched and muscled bodies, which they’ve developed as instruments of expression, are increasingly exhibited as mere objects of titillation – not in the direct manner of a Playboy spread but through choreography that submerges individuality and highlights eroticism and the superficial flash of glamour . . . . Indeed, sex has become the increasing focus of choreographic interest: sex not as the physical expression of complex emotions but as a one-night-stand kind of erotic aggression that’s presented as edgy and chic.”

Deresiewicz finds this distressing in large part because it reverses the direction of modern dance, which was an effort to present the human body, and especially the female body, as a subject, an instrument of expression, rather than merely as an object for examination. Isadora Duncan, he notes, considered “ballet’s pointe shoes, tightly fitting bodices, and rigidly erect posture” as “the equivalent of the Victorian corset that confined and controlled women’s bodies.” In place of that depersonalizing form of dance, Duncan “substituted bare feet, loose robes, and a fluid, pliant, improvisational aesthetic, creating new ideas about how the female body could move and how it could express itself through movement.” Likewise, Martha Graham, whom Deresiewicz identifies as a matriarch of dance from the 1930s to the 1960s, developed a form of dance based on principles of contraction and release, which was meant to embody the 1930’s “life-or-death sense of moral struggle and commitment. It is passionate, romantic, and heroic. It is humanist as well as feminist.” He adds, “at a time when painting and sculpture were forsaking the human figure, when theater was becoming a scene of slavery and degradation, of the human being as beast or automaton or sheer refuse, Graham was defying the drift of culture by asserting the body’s indomitable nobility, its absolute status as the source of all life, strength, value, and freedom.”

Contemporary dance reverses this first by capitulating to the wider “culture of the image,” and second by retreating from the conviction that the body is a means of personal expression to the notion that the body is an object. He ends with a lament, “What a shame it would be if the one art most capable of standing against our current degradation of the body fell victim to it instead.”