Choreographies of Gender

Author(s): Susan Leigh Foster

Source: Signs, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 1-33
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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 Susan Le i h Foster

Choreographies of Gender

n 1989and againin 1990, Teresade Lauretisarguedthat the chargeof

essentialism as ascribed to certain feminist theory or theorists promul-
gated a divisive factionalism within the feminist movement that would
serve the patriarchalstatus quo far better than any antifeminist agendas.
She urged a reconsiderationof the term essentialism,one that would reenvi-
sion it not as a biologically based fixity but ratheras a political and concep-
tual stance that encompassed the knowledges, practices, and discourses
within which a given author or text is immersed. Essential differences
would therefore not derive from naturalor biological differences, but from
the historically specific conditions that imparted to theories or theorists
their values and assumptions, methodological and conceptual approaches,
and forms of address and of critical reflection (de Lauretis 1990, 244).
Although de Lauretis'sredefinition of essentialism sublates the opposition-
ality between gynocentric and poststructuralistfeminisms, or between ana-
lytical approachesinformed by identity politics or deconstruction, her pro-
posal has gone largely unheeded, especially in the ensuing focus on gender
as performance.
The project of conceptualizing gender as performance, pervasivewithin
cultural studies, has been widely debated in gender studies and feminist
theory for the past five years. Such a project, consonant with feminism's
dedication to the extrication of gendered behavior from the biological
body, foregrounds the opportunity to analyze and observe gender's osten-
sible features, its appearanceand activities, promising a more critical diag-
nosis of gender's influence and effects, while at the same time holding out
the possibility for social change. If, the argument goes, gender is "only" a
performance, albeit deeply routinized and ingrained, then the theoretical
space exists wherein such behavior could be resisted, altered, and refash-
ioned so as to alleviate the prescriptions for gendered behavior that are
experienced as oppressive by so many.
The separation between actor and performance implied by this ap-
proach to the analysis of gender supports a theorization of personhood as

[Signs:Journal of Womenin Cultureand Society1998, vol. 24, no. 1]

? 1998 by The Universityof Chicago.All rightsreserved.0097-9740/99/2401-0001$02.00
2 I Foster

fluid and protean cultural construction, capable not only of change but
also of inhabiting, perhaps even representing, multiple, distinctive cultural
arenas. Such a conception of identity radicallychallenges the essentialist
notion of an organic and inviolable connection between the biological de-
terminants of sex, race, or sexual orientation and their culturalelaboration.
This organicist conception of the link between body and identity, a found-
ing argument in so many forms of racial,gender, and sexual discrimination,
has been deconstructed by poststructuralist critiques that focus attention
on the very mechanisms of knowledge production through which the con-
nection between biological destiny and cultural possibility is made and
maintained. Yet, the tension between essential and deconstructed models
of experience endures, trenchantly and eloquently summarized here with
regard to racialidentity by dance ethnographer Anna Beatrice Scott:
Now I pride myself on being a post-essentialist black person, but
when I went to a blocoafro rehearsal in San Francisco intent upon
doing some Black Atlantic researchthis past March only to discover
that I was one of only five black people out of at least fifty partici-
pants, including the drummers and teacher, I was having a hard time
controlling my proprietary and protective instincts regarding black
culture. I stood amidst the collection of Anglo, Asian, and Latino
participants in the room, questionnaires in hand, smile on face, and
wondered to myself, "Where are the black people?" Why did it mat-
ter to me? And why was everyone staring at me, the materialization
of the adjective in blocoafro? (1997, 259)
As "post-essentialist,"Scott wants to detach skin color and other racial at-
tributes from a mandated way of life, and as black, she wants to retain
privileged access to a cultural heritage. Scott names this dilemma and even
complicates it further by receiving criticallythe gaze directed at her as an
"authentic"representativeof the blocoafro tradition. Is the gaze she receives
directed not only at her black body but also at her feminine body? What is
in her "flesh and bones" that makes her dancing "truer,"more blocoafro
than that of Anglo, Asian, or Latino bodies dancing alongside her?
De Lauretis offers an opportunity to think through these questions by
identifying essential differences as those that result from a profound and
enduring immersion in cultural and historical specificities. Yet essential
differences often inflect and complicate one another, necessitating a theori-
zation not only of their historical and cultural specificity but also of their
interconnectedness. As Yvonne Yarbro-Bejaranoand many others have ob-
served, this theorization of gendered, racial, and sexual categories must
incorporate the ongoing dynamics of their impact on one another: "No-
 S IG N S Autumn 1998 I 3

tions of simultaneousoppressions are not entirely successful in capturing

the ways these categories interact and interdefine one another, while con-
ceptualizing the intersectionof these categories may communicate an exces-
sively static, rather than a dynamic, understanding of the process" (1995,
128). The task, then, in focusing on gender, as one category of essential
difference, is to construct it in interrelation with racialand sexual configu-
rations of identity. One of the purposes of this article is to suggest that
the failure to develop de Lauretis'sconcept of essential difference and to
conceptualize gender in dynamic relation with race and sexuality stems
from the unexamined use of the term performance.
Is performancethe most appropriate term to describe the sedimented
layers and complex networks of behavioral responses that constitute mas-
culine and feminine roles? Since there are different techniques and theories
of performance- the performer can assimilate the characterof the part to
be played and allow that character'sfeelings and motivations to generate
and guide the actions, or the performer can carefully approximate behav-
iors judged to be typical of the character to be rendered--does gender
as performance also stipulate a particular approach to performing? Most
crucially,if gender is performance,what script or score is being performed?
For those of us in dance, theater, and performance studies, the recent ap-
propriation ofperformanceand its cousinperformativityas terms that would
illuminate cultural and textual studies signals a potentially fruitful interdis-
ciplinary inquiry, but one that calls for certain discipline-based knowledge
about the functions of these terms.
Rather than appeal to knowledge bases generated in the fields of theater,
dance, and performance studies for answers to these questions, arguments
for gender as performance typically acknowledge the work of speech-act
theorist J. L. Austin (1962) as a foundational approach. Austin's theory of
the performativity of language, a radicalopening out of language to social
and political dimensions, posits that under certain conditions the speaking
of a phrase might alter the status of the body performing the speaking. It
does not make any claims for speech as a form of bodily articulation (some-
thing that the phrase "speech acts" might suggest), nor does it explore
action as an accomplishment of the body. For Austin, the body, fundamen-
tally the passive executant of the subject, enunciates words in the direction
of another body-subject with which it intends to communicate. Some of
its communications, by contractual agreement within the sociolinguistic
order, perform the work of reordering the speaker'srelations to his or her
surroundings, as in the often-cited example of "I do" as the pivotal state-
ment in the marriage ceremony. The allure of Austin's focus on linguistic
performancesfor more general theories of performancepresumably resides
4 I Foster

in the proposition that the enactment of a generalized cultural script will

implicate the individual in juridicaland political networks of meaning that
exercise a determining effect on identity. But can such a framework of dis-
tinctions between performative and nonperformative linguistic utterances
be extended to the full realm of behavior within which certain gestures
might be identified as gendered?
Judith Butler, whose GenderTrouble(1990a) is often the cited source
for the notion of gender as performance, draws on Austin's theories to
emphasize the sedimented networks of social norms through which the
subject is constituted as gendered.1 Butler's conception of performativity,
not unlike de Lauretis'sessential difference, focuses on the historically spe-
cific constellation of reiterative and citational patterns, the regulatory sys-
tem, and not on any single or deliberateacts of individuals, that interpellate
the subject as a gendered subject.2But for Butler it is difficult to envision
how either performanceor performativityextends beyond the verbal realm
into nonverbal dimensions of human action. Although in early versions of
her theory of gender identity, Butler (1990b, 270) mentions bodily ges-
tures, movements, and enactments of various kinds, in BodiesThatMatter
she defines performative acts as "forms of authoritative speech: most per-
formatives, for instance, are statements that, in the uttering, also perform
a certain action and exercise a binding power" (1993, 225). In her only
reading of a nonprinted text, the film Paris Is Burning, Butler notes the
categories of charactertypes that are performed at the drag balls and their
costuming, but she never examines the eclectic movement vocabulariesand
the sequencing of those vocabularies through which social commentary
is generated. She considers the relationship between pedestrian and stage
identities without actually detailing the ranges of exaggerative and ironic
gestures used in each site. Only by assessing the articulatenessof bodies'
motions as well as speech, I would argue, can the interconnectedness of
racial, gendered, and sexual differences within and among these bodies
matter.
Performativityfor Butler not only lodges primarilyin the verbal dimen-
sions of human behavior but also exercises its power through compulsory
reiteration. In order for gender to appearas natural,as the inevitable prod-

See, e.g., the following incidental references to Butler and to gender as performance.
Chosen randomly, they suggest the wide impact of the notion of gender as performance on
cultural studies generally: Burshatin 1992, 578; MacDonald 1993, 123; Senelick 1992, xi;
Hemmings 1993; Rabinowitz 1995, 102; Robson and Zalcock 1995, 185-86; Apter 1996,
15-34, esp. 27; Duncan 1996, 5; Kent 1996, 191.
2 For Butler's discussion of
interpellation and its relation to Althusser, see Butler 1993,
121.
 S IG N S Autumn 1998 I 5

uct of the body's sex, the acts through which it is constituted are repeated
so frequently and interminably as to foreclose any possible apprehension
of their constructedness: "Performativityis thus not a singular 'act' for it
is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it
acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the
conventions of which it is a repetition" (1993, 12). By defining gender
identity as reiterative,as a stylized repetition of social norms through time,
Butler is able to unmask the contingent status of those norms and their
coercive effects.3 Although Butler emphasizes that performativity can be
located only in multiple rather than single acts, the focus on reiteration
stresses the repetition of acts more than the relationality among them.
How are these "acts"organized so as mutually to reinforce and/or expand
on one another?How do acts not only reiteratesocial norms but also vary
them so as to establish resonances among distinct categories of normative
behavior?
In this article I pursue a methodology designed to answer these ques-
tions through a focus on the example of dance. Dance illumines the issues
at stake in an analysis of gender as performance not only because dance,
like gender, consists largely of bodily actions ratherthan effects of speech,
but also because it delineates a clear function for the performer.By examin-
ing the role of performancein dance and contrasting it with choreography,
I hope to show that choreography is a far more useful rubric for under-
standing gender. Choreography, the tradition of codes and conventions
through which meaning is constructed in dance, offers a social and his-
torical analytic framework for the study of gender, whereas performance
concentrates on the individual execution of such codes. Choreography
resonates with cultural values concerning bodily, individual, and social
identities, whereas performance focuses on the skill necessary to represent
those identities. Choreography presents a structuring of deep and endur-
ing cultural values that replicates similar sets of values elaborated in other
culturalpractices,whereas performance emphasizes the idiosyncratic inter-
pretation of those values. Like performativity,choreography consists in sets
of norms and conventions; yet unlike performativity,or at least its general
usage thus far, choreography encompasses corporeal as well as verbal artic-
ulateness. Choreography therefore serves as a useful intervention into dis-
cussions of materiality and body by focusing on the unspoken, on the
bodily gestures and movements that, along with speech, construct gen-
dered identity. Choreographyalso focuses attention on the interrelationality

3 Butler also makes this

point in "PerformativeActs and Gender Constitution: An Essay
in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory" (1990, 271).
6 I Foster

of various sets of codes and conventions through which identity is

represented.
In what follows I present an analysis of both choreography and perfor-
mance through a consideration of examples drawn from social and theatri-
cal dance traditions. My purpose is to intervene in the general discussion of
-
gender as performanceand to examine criticallykey oppositions between
essentialism and deconstruction, the corporeal and the linguistic, and the
textual and the performed-that underlie that discussion. At the same
time, I hope to demonstrate the value of dance as a conceptual framework
for sorting through these very complex issues. Focus on dance enables a
more thorough understanding of the culturalconstructedness of body and
identity and a more far-reachingset of strategiesfor effecting social change.

Theoretical moves
In order to illuminate what is entailed by the choreographic process, I
begin with the example of the lone female choreographer at work in the
dance studio. This example traces its origin to the modern dance tradition
in the United States, a tradition whose feminist underpinnings have been
well documented.4 This initiative, undertaken by white, bourgeois women
at the turn of the century, constructed a new expressive practicefocused at
the site of the individual dancing body. These artists sought to overhaul
body and soul in order to liberate individual creative impulses from the
stranglehold of societal norms and aesthetic values. Their choreographic
accomplishments, congruent with experimentalphilosophies of education
during that period, provided the rationale for the entrance of dance into
higher education.5 Construed as a way of knowing, other than and outside
of verbal knowledge, the professional world of modern dance and the uni-
versity dance program continue to privilege the individual creative process
and its realization in dancing and in the making of new dances.
In making a new dance, the choreographer often stands motionless,
staring into space, perhaps a mirror'sspace, for an indeterminate period of
time. Then she tries out a move: one arm flings on the diagonal from low
front to high back; the body flows after it, motion-filled by its momentum.
The leg, initially trailing behind as the last trace of the body's twisted turn-
ing, swings suddenly to the front, causing enough impetus to carry the
body through a second turn. Exiting from the turn's wildness, the body
folds at hip and knee joints, back gently curved, arms arching forward over

4
See Ruyter 1979; Kendall 1984; Daly 1996; and Tomko, in press.
5 See Kriegsman 1981; and also Tomko, in press.
 S IG N S Autumn 1998 I 7

the head. The choreographer stands back up and resumes her stare. Does
the turn need an additional bend of the torso or gesture from the back
foot? Should the contrast between first and second turns be heightened?
Is the body's final shape too symmetrical?Too soft? Too familiar?This
series of questions promulgates other levels of interrogation: Is the phrase
delirious enough? Does it look like half-bakedTrisha Brown? Will every-
one see that it is a variation on the earlier theme? Can the dancer do it
without wrenching her back?Should the arms scoop under (in which case
it looks too much like supplication) or should they scoop over (in which
case it looks like a five-year-old'srendition of waves crashing on the shore)?
The choreographer wrestles with these and related questions in no pre-
scribed order and, quite probably, without ever articulating the questions
or their answers verbally.She is sorting through, rejecting and constructing
physical images. Her choices make manifest her theorizing of corporeality.
The choreographerconstructs relationships of body to momentum, sta-
sis, impulse, and flow and articulatesrelationships of the body's parts one
to another. She engages the body's semiotic field-the connotations that
head, hands, pelvis, or heels carrywith them, the meanings evoked by ten-
sion, undulation, or collapse - and situates the body within the symbolic
features of the performance space - the center, side, high, and low that the
architecturalcontext designates. In so doing, she fashions a repertoire of
bodily actions that may confirm and elaborate on conventional expecta-
tions for gendered behavior, or she may contrive a repertoire that dramati-
cally contravenes such expectations. In either case, dancing dramatizes the
separation between the anatomical identity of the dancer and its possible
ways of moving. Part of dance's compelling interest derives from the kinds
of links the choreography makes between sex and gender.
This is not to say that the anatomical body of the dancer is a natural
body. That body exists along a continuum of attributes that define male or
female sexual identity. Its shoulders may be unusually broad for a woman,
its feet unusually flexible for a man. And this anatomy is not destiny. The
dancer cultivates the body through training regimens that develop its
strength, flexibility, endurance, and coordination.6 It may acquire a mas-
sive muscularityuncharacteristicof the female body or a willowy flexibility
uncharacteristicof the male body. This body, already codified in terms of
its sex but appearing as one of two sexes, then presents itself to the viewer.
Its movement will be seen as gendered, as putting into play various codes
of gendered behavior.
Thus the choreographer considers kinds of bodily stances (open or

6
I have elaborated on this argument in Foster 1992.
8 I Foster

closed), bodily shapes (erect or curved), engagements with the sur-

rounding space (direct or diffuse), timing of movements (slow or quick,
continuous or abrupt), qualities of motion (restrained,sustained, undulat-
ing, bursting), and sequencing of body parts (random or sequential) char-
acteristic of each gender's motion.7 She stipulates a quality of focus for
the dancer, projecting attentiveness to the connections between internal
sensation and external motion, projecting awarenessof external space and
making contact with other dancers, or calling attention to the body's enun-
ciations in space. She likewise designates a kind of motivation for the
movement in which dancers can appear to be propelled by an imaginary
force located out in space or to initiate movement from within their own
bodies. She reckons with established codes of contact between female and
male bodies: where the body of one sex can touch the body of the other
sex, what kinds of shapes bodies of the two sexes can make together, who
can give weight and who bear it, who initiates movement and who follows,
who is passive and who active, who is to be looked at and who is doing
the looking. She forges phrases of movement that construct groupings of
dancerswith gendered connotations - chaotic, convoluted, pristine, or ge-
ometric. When she does this for multiple bodies, she elaborates a theory
not only of gendered corporeal identity but also of relations among gen-
dered bodies.
Male and female bodies, bodies of different color and racial attributes
may or may not evidence vocabularies or styles of movement associated
with their sexual or racial identities. These bodies gesture toward, touch,
or support one another. They follow in one another's pathways, reiterate
or vary one another'smoves. They evidence a range of emotional responses
toward one another, all the while oblivious to or interactivewith the audi-
ence. They may distribute themselves so as to frame a soloist or to present
multiple competing events. They may cite other dances or dance traditions
as part of their danced argument. In the sustained development of their
activities, they will appearto narrateevents, to tell a kind of story, perhaps
with characters,motivations, and responses to one another, or perhaps to
speak of the weight, momentum, and agility of which bodies are capable.
They may enunciate values and relationships characteristicof a particular
7 The kinds of movement qualities, spacing, and timings I describe here are meant to be
suggestive of categories of movement analysis ratherthan as systematic or exhaustive lists of
gendered characteristics.They take inspiration from but do not claim the kind of comprehen-
siveness argued for by the early twentieth-century movement theorist Rudolph Laban. A
description of his system for analyzing gendered movement can be found in Bartinieff 1980,
58-59 and 92-93. An alternative and very thoughtful systematization of gender in relation
to movement styles is provided in Young 1990.
 S IG N S Autumn 1998 I 9

ethnic identification, or they may present a series of affective states. Accu-

mulating these choices concerning the behavior of bodies, the choreogra-
phy builds up an image of community, one that articulatesboth individual
and collective identities.
Throughout the creative process of articulatingthese identities, the cho-
reographerengages a tradition of representationalconventions, knowledge
of which is shared to a greater or lesser extent by both dance makers and
dance viewers. To achieve the meaning she envisions, the choreographer
selects from among these conventions, implementing, innovating, and
even challenging aspects of the tradition. Viewers will, in turn, analyze the
choreographic implementation of conventions in order to derive their own
interpretationof the dance. However intuitive or inspired the creative pro-
cess may seem, the choreographer is nonetheless laboring at the craft of
dance making. However distinctive or gifted her dances may seem, she is
working as one of a group of practitioners sharing a body of knowledge
about how dances mean what they do. However immediate the dance's
message may appear to viewers, their understanding of the dance will be
based on their ability to decode the choreographic coding of meaning.
Thus, the choreography may contribute innovations that will subtly alter
the contents of its representational tradition, but these innovations can
acquire their full meaning only through their situatedness within that
tradition.
Dancers who enter the studio to translate choreography into perfor-
mance begin by learning the movement, its timing, and its disposition for
the body in space, as meticulously as is required by the aesthetic demands
of the situation. Yet they also modify the movement so as to develop a
personal relationship with it. In order to "make it their own," they may
alter movement to adapt to their bodily capacities so that they, and by
extension the movement itself, achieve greater clarityin performance.They
may imbue the movement with personal meanings in addition to those
described by the choreographerso as to attain a greater fervency.They may
elaborate a persona- an integrative conception of the body-subject who
would move in the way specified in the choreography- and then use this
concept to further refine stylistic features of their performance. They may
also calculatethe effect of their performanceon viewers and calibrateeffort,
intensity, and focus so as to "reach"the audience in a manner consonant
with the choreography'stheoretical goals. They may even colmect to a his-
tory of performers or a traditional style of performance that informs their
current project. Throughout the process of learning and presenting a
dance, performers manifest these and other competencies, the product of
years of arduous training.
10 I Foster

Occasionally, dancers are asked to move beyond the bounds of their

training as performers and to assume roles as cochoreographers of the
dance. They may be asked to generate movement based on specific stric-
tures or guidelines, to solve problems of sequencing, or even to engage
critically,comment on, or select from among the representationalstrategies
that the choreography deploys and that they embody in performance. The
fact that dancers may assist in these choreographic projects, however, does
not alterthe distinctiveness of the two roles. Insofar as they are performers,
they will be concerned primarilywith these kinds of questions: How shall
I phrase this section? Should I hold back here in order to provide more
contrast with the intensity of that moment? Does my timing appear man-
nered? Can I be more focused? How can I look occupied with one action
while actually waiting for the arrivalof another body with whom I must
appear to have a spontaneous interaction?What additional strength, flexi-
bility, or endurance do I need to enhance the execution of the movement?
How the performer answers these questions will affect the overall im-
pact of the choreography and may subtly alter its intent. Certainly,there is
a sense in which the performance of any given dance stands as the most
accurate presentation of its choreography (stands as the choreography)
insofar as any given viewer has access to it. Still, throughout the viewing
of a dance, one can perceive the guiding score for the action as distinct
from the execution of that score. One can see the residue of strategic
choices concerning representation as distinct from the bringing to liveness
of those choices. And in this distinctiveness, the contrasting functions of
choreography and performance are apparent: dance making theorizes
physicality,whereas dancing presents that theory of physicality.

Embodying the social

The premise of a new dance being made illustrates most graphically the
kinds of decisions through which choreography comes into being. But the
distinction between choreography and performance that I wish to elabo-
rate works equally well within the context of "authorless"choreographies
ranging from square dances to fox-trots, and it extends far beyond conven-
tional notions of dancing to include a wide varietyof structuredmovement
practicessuch as paradesor political demonstrations, religious rites or aca-
demic lectures. For any of these structured movement practices, a set of
protocols (what I have called a tradition) exists that will be referenced by
the choreography and then vivified by the specific performance. For square
dances, such protocols would advise on proximities and qualities of touch
between bodies; trajectoriesfor bodies traveling through space; patterns
 S IG N S Autumn 1998 I 11

or steps; relations among movement, music, and caller. For an academic

lecture, there exist protocols for lecturer and listeners regarding their loca-
tion, the appropriate kind and amount of bodily postures and gestures.
Choreographies for individual square dances differ widely in kind and
number of steps and the complicated sequencing of those steps. Lectures
are choreographed in accordance with the formality of the occasion and
their disciplinary affiliation. Many square dances have no identifiable cho-
reographer, and, like the guidelines for the lecture, they have been passed
through generations of performers who may make incremental choreo-
graphic changes to them. No matter how dynamic the dancing, how char-
ismatic the lecturing, the choreographic specifications underlying these
performances remain the same.8
By distinguishing between choreography and performance, the process
of generating corporeal significance can be made more apparent. It is this
process that connects dance to other cultural practices and larger systems
of cultural values. Consider, for example, the striking divergence in move-
ment vocabulariesfor male and female roles in European ballet that began
to develop at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the concomitant
implementation of pointe work for the female ballerina.Although promul-
gated through the skills of individual dancers such as Marie Taglioni and
Fanny Ellsler, the sudden emergence of dancing on pointe can be traced to
no single choreographer.Its widespread use by female soloists of midcen-
tury constructed a radically new vision of both feminine and masculine
roles in which female dancers embodied an illusive fragility and male danc-
ers supported, admired, and yearned after them. The choreography for
these gendered roles made manifest a version of the Rousseauian social
contract with its division of duties between masculine public and feminine
private spheres. It staged a new vision of masculine and feminine identities
as unique and complementary parts of an organic social whole ratherthan
as ordered elements of a social hierarchy.9
Throughout the eighteenth century, male and female dancers shared a
single vocabulary of positions and steps. They performed the same travel-
ing phrases, beats, turns, and jumps, with stylistic differences that signified
their roles: male dancers jumped higher, multiplied the numbers of beats
and turns, and exhibited a more forceful grace than female dancers, who

8 Jane
Gallop's marvelous lectures in the mid-1980s in which she lay on a table and "served
herself up" to the audience make clear the kinds of choreographic expectations that lectures
typically enforce.
9 The following summary of changes in gender roles across the eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries compresses the argument I make in Foster 1996. Please consult that history
for a much fuller account of these changes.
12 I Foster

performed smallerversions of these steps with a softer and more fluid style.
By the early nineteenth century, the choreography celebrated distinct vo-
cabulariesfor male and female dancers- dainty and complex footwork and
extended balances for women, and high leaps, jumps with beats, and mul-
tiple pirouettes for men. And it elaborated new conventions of partnering
that incorporated new codes for touching, for support, and for the achieve-
ment of pleasing configurations. Up until the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury, pas de deux had placed great emphasis on male and female dancers
performing alongside one another or traveling separatelydesignated path-
ways in mirrored opposition. By the mid-nineteenth century, partnering
included sections of sustained, slowly evolving shapes in which male and
female dancers constructed intricate designs, always with the male dancer
guiding and supporting the female dancer as she balanced delicately and
suspensefully in fully extended shapes.
In tandem with this shift from hierarchicallyto organically related gen-
der roles, practicesranging from fashion to postural pedagogy to anatomi-
cal study undertook analogous redefinitions of gender roles. In fashion,
masculine garb, as colorful and ornamented as women's wear during the
eighteenth century, transformed into sober and modest designs that em-
phasized the judicious disposition of men and the frivolous inclinations of
women. The corset, used as assistancein maintaining an erect posture, was
abandoned by both sexes in favor of programs of exercise that would en-
able the body to establish its own verticality, but was then reintroduced
for women, not as postural aid but as enhancement to the body's gendered
appearance.10The corset shrank the waist and expanded the pelvis. Simi-
larly,anatomical illustrations that had previously used the male skeleton as
a reference for both sexes, adjusting only the size of the female bones, be-
gan to depict female skeletons from female examples. However, they often
exaggerated the width of the pelvis and reduced the size of the head so as
to provide bone-deep verification of women's role as childbearer."1
These kinds of changes in ballet, fashion, and anatomical study contrib-
uted to the massive overhaul of gender roles that established the separate
spheres ideology of the nineteenth century. Yet it is only through an atten-
tion to choreographic structure that ballet'sideological work becomes ap-
parent. If ballet were analyzed in terms of the performance skills it re-
quired, a complementary yet distinct set of issues would emerge. In order
to perform well, female ballerinasnecessarily cultivated new strengths for

10For a full description of the kinds of changes in postural pedagogy and the changing
role of the corset, see Vigarello 1977, 1978.
11See Jordanova 1989.
 S IG N S Autumn 1998 I 13

rising onto and balancing on pointe. They mastered patterns of flow that
would enhance their ephemerality and dextrous coordinations that would
make them both intricate and fleeting. Male dancers likewise learned the
placement of weight and the coordination necessaryto assist another body
in these precarious and complex tasks. Both sexes learned to exploit the
focus necessaryto direct the viewers' gaze toward the ballerina.While these
skills exemplify the gender-specific varieties of bodily discipline to which
dancers were subject, they do not convey the full construction of gendered
identity articulatedin the nineteenth-century pas de deux, nor do they in-
dicate the extent to which ballet helped to consolidate the widespread
change in gender roles. Only by focusing on choreographic changes can
one see ballet's connectedness to other cultural practices accomplishing
similar redefinitions of gender. Only by analyzing those changes that reor-
ganized male and female vocabularies and the coordination of male and
female interaction can one see ballet not as a mere reflection of social
changes but as one of the endeavors that produce such changes.
An alternativerelation between dancing bodies and the social body was
articulatedon the black urban U.S. street-as-stageof the late 1970s. Fight-
ing to survive at the very margins of society, break-dancers,primarilymale,
choreographed black social protest and urban renewal during a time of
acceleratingclass differentiation and the decimation of inner-cityneighbor-
hoods and resources.12Their choreography responded directly to the si-
multaneous crises of depleted housing, lack of meaningful jobs, rising po-
lice brutality,and increasing commodity fetishism and to the technological
explosion of devices for reproducing sonic and visual images.13 Presenting
their choreography on the street corner, they offered a critique of bour-
geois, largely white, privileges associated with attending the theater, with
the theater construed as an elite commemoration of life's highest values.
At the same time, they consecrated the street as a site for potential rejuve-
nation of a disenfranchised and deeply alienated populace.
Break dance cultivated the jointedness of body and the flow of motion
across those joints sequentially but so as to feature each joint as much
as the movement across it. Into this synthesis of rupture and flow, dancers
incorporatedastonishing virtuoso spins on the head or shoulders, splits, and
back and forward flips; freeze poses that stilled the body in a caricatured

12 As critic for the Village

Voice,Sally Banes brought break-dancers'accomplishments to
the attention of a wider and whiter audience as early as 1981. See Banes 1981.
13 Tricia Rose's book on
rap and hip-hop traditions presents an eloquent analysis of the
role of technology in rap music and also identifies powerful resonances among dance, visual
art, and music versions of hip hop that I do not address here. For a fuller understanding of
the dancing in relation to other arts and technology, see Rose 1994.
14 I Foster

version of a well-known social type or social gesture; and citations of other

dancers'characteristicmovements and of other dance traditions. These ci-
tations functioned as dialogues, as playful and competitive mastery of
other dancers' material, and as expressions of solidarity with earlierAfro-
American and African dance traditions. In their borrowings from forms
such as karate and Capoiera, they also placed break dancing on the world
stage of popular culture. In consecutive solos or sometimes duets and
larger groups, dancers crafted these dialogues with breathtaking speed of
movement and agility in transitions. The competitive stakes of each perfor-
mance allowed dancers to enhance their status and increase their prestige
within a masculine-dominated arena.
The power and eloquence of the dance resulted from bodies negotiating
precarious,dangerous tensions between anatomy and gravitycoupled with
the critical and witty commentary on other bodies and dance forms. Ac-
cording to Tricia Rose, it was these choreographic features of break danc-
ing that connected the dance to its political environs and imbued it with
resistance and affirmation:

What is the significance of flow, layering, and rupture as demon-

strated on the body and in hip hop's lyrical, musical, and visual
works? Interpreting these concepts theoretically, one can argue that
they create and sustain rhythmic motion, continuity, and circular-
ity via flow; accumulate, reinforce, and embellish this continuity
through layering; and manage threats to these narrativesby building
in ruptures that highlight the continuity as it momentarily challenges
it. These effects at the level of style and aesthetics suggest affirmative
ways in which profound social dislocation and rupture can be man-
aged and perhaps contested in the cultural arena. Let us imagine
these hip hop principles as a blueprint for social resistance and
affirmation:create sustaining narratives,accumulate them, layer,em-
bellish, and transform them. However, be also preparedfor rupture,
find pleasure in it, in fact,plan on social rupture.When these ruptures
occur, use them in creative ways that will prepareyou for a future in
which survivalwill demand a sudden shift in ground tactics.'4
Rose's call to consider the dancing "theoretically"makes evident its critical
capacity, in that it shows the ruptures, and its empowering potential, in
that it shows the body negotiating those ruptures and taking pleasure in

14 Rose
1994, 39. Rose treats breakdancing, a dance form that emerged in the late 1970s,
as part of the more general aesthetic she calls hip hop.
 S IG N S Autumn 1998 I 15

that effort. Survivaldepends on the kinds of individual agility and commu-

nal solidarity that the dance expresses.
Break dancing's demonstration of survival tactics was all the more per-
suasive because the dancers were improvising the choreography in perfor-
mance. Like jazz, break dancing required the choreographer-performerto
draw on previously choreographed and rehearsedphrases and to sequence
these along with newly invented material in ways that yielded unpremedi-
tated results. Within the white tradition of modern dance, improvisation
frequently implies a lessening of conscious intent so as to allow uncon-
scious impulses to emerge.15 Consonant with the Afro-American tradition
of jazz, improvised dancing such as tap or break dancing does not partake
in the conscious/unconscious binary. Instead, improvisers can craft their
composition at the same time that they allow opportunities for the unan-
ticipated to emerge.'6 By improvising, the dancers were literally placing
their bodies in the social rupture that Rose describes and dedicating them-
selves to the creation and resolution of hazardous corporeal dilemmas. The
choreographic form mandated a distinguished individual performance,
where individual initiative and exploration could verify masculine bravado.
At the same time, dancers signaled communal affiliations and aggressive
competition through the danced dialogues they chose to incorporate. Al-
though dancers occupied the dual roles of choreographer and performer,
the responsibilities and evaluative standards of each role can be distin-
guished. Choreography was evaluated by dancers and viewers in terms of
the range and vividness of citations; the innovative sequencing; the respon-
siveness to music, crowd, and context; and the deftness with which the
body was extricatedfrom unanticipated situations. Performanceevaluation
was based on the charisma, cool, funkiness, virtuosity, and audacity that
dancers exhibited while thinking on their feet.
"Discovered"by the art establishment and the media in the early 1980s,
break dancing experienced a meteoric rise in visibility and a consequent
shift in the kind of social critique it could choreograph.'7 No longer a
street-cornerperformance, break dancing was staged in galleries, in popu-
lar films such as Flashdance,and on television, and its commercial viability
was eventually recognized by the music video industry. Less an occasion

15 See Novack 1990 for a discussion of improvisation in relation to contact improvisation.

16
For a lucid analysis of Afro-American traditions of musical improvisation, see Lewis
1996.
17 Banes tracked the
development of breakdancing across this crucial period of its assimi-
lation into mainstream culture, noting perceptively the changes in choreographic style
brought about by increased visibility. See Banes 1994, 121-58.
16 I Foster

for impromptu critical dialogue on the stage of life, break dancing none-
theless maintained the powerful integrity of its negotiations among space,
rhythm, gravity, and its intertextual references to other dance forms,
thereby providing compelling visions of a reflexive physicality that con-
trasted with other mainstreamforms of dancing, such as ballet or aerobics.
Although initially marginalized by the male-centered street cultures that
supported break dancing, women dancers and singers, always contributors
to the ongoing experimentation with the form, began to share center stage
with male artists when rap music moved into commercial arenas such as
MTV
By using some of the same choreographic strategies developed in earlier
break dance--diverse vocabularies of movement, abrupt shifts in refer-
ences, and precarious relationship to gravity--female artists elaborated a
separate set of concerns revolving around their own sexual identity and
pleasure and their perspective on urban violence and decay. The conti-
nuities in dance style that they cultivated and the thematic concern with
the inner city's decimation signaled their solidarity with the masculine-
identified form, their sympathy with the plight of young Afro-American
men, and their distance from anti-black-maleagendas.'8At the same time,
women artists choreographed a critique of sexism within the Afro-
American community in which they demonstrated virtuoso control over
their own bodies and pleasures. As exemplified in videos by the group
TLC, choreography and camerawork coordinate to create a complex inter-
action between performer and viewer.19In works such as Creep,Red Night
Special,and Waterfalls,the dancers repeatedlyinvite the cameraand, implic-
itly, the viewer toward them, gesturing the body's sensuality and desire.
Masterfully, they rebuff, refocus, and reorient the gaze so as to control
access to intimacy. Standing firm, they mock the objectification of the fe-
male body. Slipping deftly out from under the gaze's scrutiny, they illumi-
nate pathways of desire whose directionality and accessibility they have
crafted. By choreographing such a complex relationship to the gaze, these
women artists embody the tense dynamism of their identities as Afro-
American and feminist, as members of an oppressed and marginalized so-
cial group, and as leaders in an international avant-gardepopular aesthetic.
As these examples illustrate, choreography,whether created by individ-
ual or collective agencies, improvised or designated in advance, stands
apart from any performance of it as the overarching score or plan that evi-
dences a theory of embodiment. This plan or framework of decisions that

18
See Rose 1994, 178.
19The three members of the
group TLC are T-Boz, Left-eye, and Chilli.
 S IG N S Autumn 1998 I 17

implements a set of representational strategies is what endures as that

which is augmented, enriched, or repressed in any given performance. It
is that which changes slowly over the multiple performances. This kind of
distinction between choreography and performance is not equivalent to
that between langue and parole. Choreography is not a permanent, struc-
tural capacityfor representation, but rathera slowly changing constellation
of representational conventions. Both choreography and performance
change over time; both select from and move into action certain semantic
systems, and as such they derive their meaning from a specific historical
and cultural moment. In the case of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
ballet, choreographic specifications for gender roles incarnatethe separate-
sphere redefinition of public and private spaces; in the case of break danc-
ing, female choreographers elaborate a highly nuanced identity for them-
selves as Afro-Americans and as women through their crafting of bodies
and cameras. In both cases, choreography, more than any performance, is
what resonates with other systems of representation that together consti-
tute the cultural moment within which all bodies circulate.

Dance studies as feminism's other

This notion of choreography differs markedlyfrom standardtreatments of
dance as the elusive, ever-changing "mother of the arts."The initiative
within dance studies to approach dance as a historically specific cultural
practiceratherthan an ineffable celebration of a universalhuman condition
has taken place alongside and with the aid of feminist studies. Over the past
twenty years, dance scholars have used the kinds of interpretive strategies
implemented in feminist theory to distance sex from gender as a way to
denaturalize the dancing body and historicize dance as a practice and pro-
fession. I review briefly some of the main points of intersection between
feminist and dance studies in order to clarify further the kinds of claims I
want to make for choreography.
The pertinence of feminism to dance studies has long been apparent.
The professions of both dance and dance scholarship are made up almost
entirely of women. Dance, the object of study, is feminized within our
society. The dancing body is aligned with and central among a whole host
of entities similarlydefined as feminine: it is most often construed as natu-
ral, authentic, spontaneous, fervent, chaotic, and evanescent. Whether pri-
mordial or decorous, it is always insubstantial.At the same time, gendered
divisions of labor exist within the discipline such that producers and artistic
directors are most often male and dancers are most often female. Similarly,
traditions of dance such as ballet, with its abstract, hierarchicalstructures,
18 I Foster

are conceptualized as more masculine than the feeling-filled, intuitive mod-

ern dance, a tradition founded and perpetuated largely by women. Lacking
adequate forms of documentation, dance has received little historical rec-
ognition. The enigmatic slipperiness of the dancing body has been seen by
most historians and aestheticians as incapable of the categorization and
analysisthat would endow it with the status of a serious art or a meaningful
form of sociality.20Where earliergenerations of dance scholars emphasized
just this ephemerality and unspeakable power, scholars in the 1970s and
1980s began to adapt several kinds of methodologies to support their ar-
gument for a greater visibility and legitimacy for dance in academic re-
search. Although the full range of arguments against institutionalized pa-
triarchalvalues is pertinent to the subject of dance, I briefly outline two
areas of concern to both dance and feminist studies: the critique of logo-
centrism and the critique of the objectified and sexualized status of women.
Using the expanded notion of text elaborated in semiotics and in Derri-
dean notions of writing, dance scholarship has hypothesized for dance the
status and capacities of a language-like system. It has recast dance as a cul-
tural practicewhose discursive function might be seen as distinct from yet
comparable to language; it has reclassified dance as a system of signs.21
Rather than insist on the alterityof dance as exemplified in the premises of
an ecriturefeminine,dance scholarship has fleshed out the correspondences
between dance and conventional elements of language.22These research
strategies carried with them an implicit critique of dance as less sophisti-
cated or conceptually demanding than the written text, and they tacitly
challenged the hierarchicalrelationshipsof mind and body, intellectual and
physical, writing and dancing. They also provided a new kind of justifica-
tion for the project of writing about dance: if dance could be conceptual-
ized as structured around certain language-like capacities, then the verbal
analysisof this nonverbal form would constitute more an act of translation
than one of corruption.23
As part of this initiative to assert the similarities between language and
dance, the "othering"of the nonverbal came under intense scrutiny.Terms
previously applied to dance, such as preverbalor preliterate,the opposition
of thinking to doing, and the divide between theory and practice, could

20
For a discussion of the absence of dance in the history of aesthetics, see Sparshott 1988.
21
See Foster 1986; Adshead 1988; Novack 1990; Ness 1992; Franko 1993; and Martin
1996.
22
See Kaeppler 1972; and Williams 1977.
1 am not claiming that the translation is free of corruption, but merely that the project
23

of translation attempts to move text from one discursive system to another, whereas prior
conceptions of dance presumed the impossibility of this move.
 S IG N S Autumn 1998 I 19

now be challenged. The rich production of experience occurring daily in

the dance studio provided a crucial resource for understanding not only
the poststructuralist claims concerning the instability of the text and the
cultural constructedness of the body but also the structuring of knowledge
that dichotomies such as verbal and nonverbal produce. Unlike art history
and musicology, which have moved away from the creative production of
art and music, dance studies remains closely allied with the teaching of
dancing and dance making, and in that alliance neither writer nor dancer
can claim to be theorist or practitioner.
If dance studies profited from the efforts to decenter the preeminence
of the word, it likewise gained from the critique of women as sexualized
objects. Yvonne Rainer's manifestos from the early 1970s document the
growing unease with the dancing body as object of a sexualizing gaze, and
her choreography, along with that of colleagues Tricia Brown, Lucinda
Childs, and many others, added compelling urgency to the defiant efforts
of twentieth-century modern dance choreographers to deflect the mascu-
line eroticizing gaze.24With the elaboration of gaze theory in film studies,
dance scholarship began to identify corresponding constructions of desire
in theatricaldance, even if it did not adopt the largerpsychoanalyticframe-
work of such theory because of the general orientation in psychoanalysis
toward body as the site of the unknowable.25
Although an extensive literature has developed in feminist studies ad-
dressing the sexual status of the female body, the body continues to be
used as a metaphor for the sexual or the erotic as if it could achieve no other
cultural significance than as the site or sign of sexuality.26Alternatively,the
body is analyzed as the subject of medical or scientific discourses that
have inscribed it. In either of these approaches, the body endures as the
mute container for, or recipient of, other signifying practices. Similarly,as
Janet Wolff has observed, dance has served as the unexamined metaphor
for a utopian potential within feminist agendas of sexual liberation.27
Dance serves as a metaphor for freedom, transgressivepossibilities, or the

24
See Rainer1974.
25
See Daly 1987, 1996; Albright 1990; Desmond 1991; Adair 1992; and Manning
1993. For an incisive review of the dance literaturethat applies gaze theory, see Thomas 1996.
26
Butler occasionally elides body with sexuality in such a way as to call into question
her exact conception of corporeality. E.g., she claims, "The loss of control that in the infant
characterizesundeveloped motor control persists within the adult as that excessive domain of
sexuality that is stilled and deferred through the invocation of the 'ego-ideal' as a center of
control" (1993, 261-62).
27 See Wolff 1995. Wolff cites several
examples of the uncritical use of dance in feminist
arguments, and she calls for the kind of focus on choreography that I am presenting here.
20 I Foster

realization of sexual pleasure, yet the actual dance practices that would
yield these results are never discussed. Both dance and dance studies, how-
ever, stand as proof of the body's capacity to generate, represent, and par-
ticipate in much more than sexual desire. The absence of dance as a topic
in feminist studies and of the lived body as more than sexual, more than a
sign for sex, is a lacuna in feminist researchthat this article is designed, in
part, to address.
In its application of poststructuralist perspectives, dance studies, like
feminist studies, has engaged in the balancing act between assimilation
into general semiotic and cultural theory and maintenance of a distinctive
identity.28On the one hand, dance scholars have aspired to legitimate
dance through demonstration of the applicabilityof poststructuralistpara-
digms to dance and through their facility at using such paradigms. On the
other hand, the strategy of claiming for dance the status and complexity of
a text obscures aspects of dance that are deeply resistantto written descrip-
tion. And will such a project receive recognition from a community whose
power resides in the maintenance of boundaries that exclude dance except
as a convenient metaphor for spontaneity, frivolity, and the inexpressible?
Derrida's often-cited interview with Christie McDonald, "Choreogra-
phies," would seem to answer in the negative.29The idea of the dance
makes its appearance in both the title and McDonald's opening move,
where she quotes Emma Goldman: "If I can't dance, I don't want to be
part of your revolution." Derrida, ever willing to probe the parametersof
meaning set by a metaphor, makes severalreferencesto dance that fall into
two categories: the first characterizingthe interview process itself, the sec-
ond in conjunction with the feminist movement. Derrida hopes that the
discussion with McDonald will approximatea dance in that "it should hap-
pen only once, neither grow heavy nor ever plunge too deep; above all, it
should not lag or trail behind its time" (Derrida and McDonald 1995,
141-42). In keeping with the spirit of the dance, Derrida continues, his
interview should "not leave time to come back to what is behind us, nor
to look attentively" (142). Although dance initially musters only these
shallow attributes, incapable as it is of "growing heavy or plunging deep"
or "looking attentively,"Derrida soon imbues it with the capacity to "sur-

28
The difficulties of using deconstruction and poststructuralist theories in such a way
that they obliterate difference because they are fundamentally indifferent to it are eloquently
discussed in Schor 1989.
29 In her
chapter, interestingly titled "Dreaming, Dancing, and the Changing Locations
of Feminist Criticism, 1988" Nancy K. Miller (1991) has alreadyundertaken a critical analy-
sis of Derrida'stext, and my revisitation of his interview can be seen as a complement to her
remarksas well as an attempt to recuperatethe notion of choreography.
 S IG N S Autumn 1998 I 21

prise." Thus, with a modest radicality,the dance can "escape those resi-
dences under surveillance; the dance changes place and above all changes
places"(145). This capacity of dance to jump spryly or wriggle out of the
hands of immobilizing disciplinarypractices offers an image of the kind of
disruptive, heterodox strategies that Derrida deems necessaryto subvert all
monological discourses. Here, the dance is neither "powerless nor fragile,"
and it serves as a signifier for the kind of agile, contingent action that Der-
rida estimates is necessary for the ongoing struggle of feminist politics.
Having positioned himself as a critic who admires this kind of choreog-
raphy,Derrida dismisses the dance for the bulk of the discussion, returning
to it, at McDonald's prompting, at the end of the interview. Whereas ear-
lier, dance characterizedthe ad hoc tactics of resistance to hegemonizing
practices, here choreography summons up the utopian structuring of a
place beyond sexual difference. The dance, whose existence depends on the
exchange of the two sexes according to various rhythms, also signals the
possibility of escaping from that exchange. The "incalculablechoreogra-
phies" of which humans are capable, those that "carry,divide, and multiply
the body of each individual,"could move us to a place where sexual and
gendered markersno longer make a difference: "Then too, I ask you, what
kind of a dance would there be, or would there be one at all, if the sexes
were not exchanged according to rhythms that vary considerably? In a
quite rigorous sense, the exchangealone could not suffice either, however,
because the desire to escape the combinatory itself, to invent incalculable
choreographies, would remain" (154). Derrida stages a delirious fantasy in
which the problem of sexual difference evaporates (fleeting as dance itself).
But in this dream he uses dance both to secure the inevitability of sexual
exchange, fundamentally heterosexual, and to signal the desire to escape
beyond such exchange, possibly polysexual.
Although dance's epiphanic evanescence seems initially to encompass
this contradiction, once its dazzle begins to fade, two choreographic fea-
tures of Derrida's argument emerge. The first centers on his failure to dis-
cuss what kinds of choreography might catapult us from heterosexual to
polysexual. This transformation, a kind of singular jump or leap, has no
choreographic substance. It merely happens in the blink of an eye, as
quickly as the dance changes places. These two places, essential heterosexu-
ality and deconstructed polysexuality, reproduce the essentialist/antiessen-
tialist debate that de Lauretis is contesting. Although Derrida mentions
the laborious, daily struggle of feminism, he does not consider the choreo-
graphic elements of that struggle, because it is only the dance's "madness"
that allows it to change places (145). Consequently, feminist politics can
only oscillate between the essentials of biological, sexual identity and the
22 I Foster

mad leaps that might position women momentarily in a different place.

And feminist analysiscan only attend to the overwhelming complexities of
deconstructing a given historical specificity,with little energy left over for
devising strategies of mobilization.
This nonchoreographic conception of dance and its effect on the sub-
jects of feminism and sexuality constitute the second major feature of Der-
rida's interview, and his superficialtreatment of dance provokes a number
of questions: Is it the feminine subject of feminist studies that inspires the
metaphor of dance? Is this a subject that deserves only a gliding glance?
Must the terrifying trio of dance, the feminine, and the sexual repeat end-
lessly its mad, transient, and unanalyzable performance? Are the three
members of this trio destined only to reify and reduce one another rather
than expand their individual and mutual identities?
In her book Tangoand thePoliticalEconomyofPassion(1995), Marta Sa-
vigliano choreographs an alternativeto the opposition between essentialist
identity and deconstruction, one in which dance serves as both subject and
interpretive framework for dance's relationship to cultural theory. To the
trio dance-feminine-sexuality, she adds the critical perspectives of post-
colonial politics, global economics, racialand class-based markersof iden-
tity, and the autoexotic return of tango to the emerging nation of Argen-
tina following its glamorous appearanceon the first-world stage of early
twentieth-century Europe. Savigliano stages early tangos among the op-
pressed black populations of the Rio de la Plata, where the dance's eroti-
cism scandalized the dancers' masters at the same time that it pronounced
their distinctive identity. She analyzesits characteristicembrace as a sign of
the ongoing yet impossible attempt to suture racialand class divides in an
ethnically diverse, urban and ruralcolony. The complexity of these divides
is registered in the relation of dance to music and lyrics, in the division of
labor between upper body and lower body, and in the complicated gender
roles elaborated for male and female dancers.Throughout the dance, part-
ners' torsos align and move in unison and their faces remain impassive, yet
their hips, legs, and feet enact intricate scenarios of seduction and con-
quest, aggression and resistance. The male dancer, although ostensibly in
control, is compromised in his authority and status by his class origins; the
female dancer, while she follows his lead, leads with her bravado fatality.
The choreography for his role develops his persona as a "cruel,even violent
ruffian, but he is sensual, loving, and coquettish, although exploitative and
courageous, even when economically and emotionally dependent" (Savi-
gliano 1996, 206). Her choreography makes manifest "an astute and mer-
ciless broad, ambitious and potentially treacherous but submissive and
condemned" (206). In elaborating these kinds of gendered roles for the
 S IG N S Autumn 1998 I 23

dancers, Savigliano deploys precisely the notion of identity argued for by

de Lauretis.Not natural,yet enduring, the attributesof these dancing bod-
ies and their affinities with certain economic and political circumstances
fashion identities whose claims to authority are based not on biological
but on historical experience.
As part of her analysisof tango, Savigliano also conducts an anatomy of
the dance scholar's dilemma, compounding it with the perspective of the
third-world woman of color: how to borrow what is useful from first-
world, male, poststructuralisttheory and at the same time avoid coloniza-
tion by that theory, thereby preserving an integrity and uniqueness for
third-world, feminized dance. Savigliano's solution places the two dis-
courses, one written, the other danced, in a fatal embrace and asks them to
tango. This "dance,"unable to be viewed voyeuristically, is gratifying to
read because it focuses on the tango, providing a wealth of historical and
cultural information about it, but it also shows the tango as capable of
suggesting a new model for research across boundaries of gender, nation,
and race. It thereby empowers dance as both a subject and a theoretical
strategy of general use within cultural theory. Its variety of choreographic
moves, unlike Derrida'ssingle leap, offers substantive strategies for analyz-
ing and choreographing responses to gender oppression.

Blurring genres
As early as 1980, anthropologist Clifford Geertz remarkedon the growing
tendency within the social sciences to borrow metaphors from outside
their disciplines in order to derive new interpretive frameworks for the
study of human behavior.30Geertz identified three major new meta-
phors - the stage and its dramas, the game and its players, and the text and
its intertextualities-that were constructing new sites of research. Geertz
senses the shaking of epistemic foundations that such borrowing causes
and anticipates the extensive debates that will result from the shifting of
paradigms. What Geertz does not address is the kind of disciplinary

30 See Geertz 1980. Geertzwas one of the firstto note the disciplinaryborrowingand
blurringthatwas enablingnew theorizationsof cultureto occur.Yet,in "DeepPlay:Notes
on a BalineseCockfight"(1973), Geertzdemonstratespreciselyhow this untutoredbor-
rowingcanreinscribethe veryvaluesone is tryingto gainperspectiveon. Geertzandhis wife
rushheadlongwiththe crowdgatheredto watchthe cockfightandawayfromthe policeraid.
Theirrun down the streetis unpremeditated and responds"ata gut level"with immediacy
and authenticityto the kinestheticexplosivenessof the group.As a result,they aretakenin
and madehonorarynatives.The foundingmomentof theirassimilationinto the group is
basedon a visceral,corporealempathythatlies beneathculturaldifference.
24 I Foster

chagrin felt by scholars in theater studies or physical education as key as-

pects of a topic they have long contemplated are taken up in other fields,
often more prestigious than their own.31 Such a borrowing, the second
from theater arts, is currently in progress with the use of the term perfor-
mance, and its intoxicating results have proliferated throughout cultural
and gender studies. Again, in order to refine the notion of the choreo-
graphic, I want to review some of the uses of the term performancein the-
ater and theater studies and examine their attendant meanings.
The term performancehas garnered much of its critical cachet from two
important initiatives within theater studies. The first, developing in tan-
dem with poststructuralist analyses of the text, recognized the power of
any given production to alter the meaning of the play's script through the
interpretive decisions made about staging, setting, and action. Traditional
theater studies focused on the written text of the play, treating it as a stable
origin of meaning, often at the expense of analyzing the impact of live
bodies engaged in actions that might augment or contradict spoken text
in ways that profoundly influence the production's meaning.32The shift
within theater studies to a study of the enactment or performance of a
given script served as an antidote to exclusively text-based analyses, and it
also responded to the growing apprehension of the exclusionary politics
of text-based analyses. Performanceboth broadened the subject of analysis
and challenged the privilege of access to the text.
The second initiative responds directly to the radicalopening up of the-
atricalperformancein the 1960s and 1970s to include unconventional pre-
sentations such as those of Alan Kaprow, the Living Theater, and many
other groups whose improvised bricolage of various mediums undermined
the centrality of the script as the principal organizing force of the perfor-
mance. Such performances, often one-time events, incorporated task-
oriented and other pedestrian-basedbehavior so as to challenge prevailing
values concerning the kinds of activities that are appropriatefor theatrical
presentation. The use of the termperformance,a necessarycriticalinterven-
tion into the hegemony of text-based studies, thus championed the capac-
ity of bodies to signify through action at the same time that it validated
experimental strategies of extending theatrical value to the widest range
of behavior.
Subsequent experimentation at the margins of art and theater, loosely
labeled performanceart and performance,extended the interrogation of
boundaries between art and life and continued to subvert hierarchies of

31
Dolan 1993 elaborates the political consequences of such borrowing.
32
For a lucid account of the role of the text in theater studies, see Worthen 1995.
 S IG N S Autumn 1998 I 25

text and action. Performances generated out of a disciplinary orientation

in art challenged the complicity of the art object in museum and gallery
schema of economic profitability.Their attempts to dematerialize the art
object emphasized the process of art making as opposed to the resulting
object that is availablefor collection and display.33Performancesgenerated
out of training in theater crossed boundaries to cabaret, storytelling, and
activist demonstration. Conceptualized as an alternative to mainstream
theater productions, this eclectic arrayof events currentlyescapes any cohe-
sive structuralfeatures and can be defined as such by the alternativevenue
in which the performance takes place, by the autobiographical and highly
personal nature of the material presented, or by the heterodox mixture of
speech, action, sound, and citation that the performance consolidates.
As elaborated in artistic and scholarly practices, performance challenges
the stability of the script and invites consideration of non-script-oriented
events whose importance was previously denied. The very term invokes a
critique of author and text as original and motivating identities. Perfor-
mance also draws together an eclectic arrayof events whose juxtaposition
promises to yield important insights into culturalexpression and individual
and social identities. Thus, performance has been used to conduct a cri-
tique of logocentric values from two directions: phenomenological investi-
gations of performance as a disappearanceact and psychoanalytic interro-
gations of the reconstruction of performance as memory have recharted
the territory between event as experience and event as object of study.34
Ethnographic encounters with heterodox and hybrid varieties of perfor-
mance have challenged the hierarchicaland exclusionarystructuresthat had
ordained distinctions between popular and elite or universal and ethnically
specific. Because of the critical need to examine the role of such structures
in the production of knowledge, both psychoanalytic and ethnographic
approaches have emphasized deontologization and inclusion over analysis
of the social and political significance of events under investigation. They
have focused more on how such events unravel the epistemic coherence of
earlier conceptions of theater than on the new conventions of representa-
tion that these performances establish.
Both psychoanalytic and ethnographic approachesto performance anal-
ysis have also tended to revolve around the individual in the act of per-
forming and the individuated experience of performance, rather than to
engage with systems of representation that viewer and performer share.

33 See
Lippard 1973 for an account of these experiments.
34
Peggy Phelan has developed one of the most sophisticated and complex delineations of
this territory in Unmarked(1994).
26 I Foster

Psychoanalytic frameworks, in their focus on the lack, loss, or absence of

performance, run the risk of indulging in the ephemerality of the perfor-
mance without providing an opportunity to scrutinize the systems of rep-
resentation invoked by the performance. The need to reconstruct the per-
formance in individual memory matters more than its momentary ability
to redefine, individually and collectively,the identities of those who partici-
pated as performers and viewers. Ethnographic frameworks, in their at-
tempt to negotiate the difference between ethnographer and ethnographic
site, examine the individual'sencounter with difference, sometimes at the
expense of summoning up the sociality of that difference. The investigator,
as soloist, stands in for the role of any viewer in response to the perfor-
mance, channeling that response toward individuated forms of reaction
and away from collective rubrics that produce and sustain meaning, away
from an examination of the structures of power inherent in the ethno-
graphic encounter. Performance,as a genre of theatricalpresentation, com-
plements this emphasis on individual identity because of the sheer number
of solo artistswhose autobiographicalmusings cultivate the resonances be-
tween individual style and cultural motif.
Before the advent of performance and performance studies, the dra-
matic text was typically conceived as signifier for the system of shared val-
ues that gave a theatricalproduction its meaning. Its use of language (not
the theatricalconventions implemented in its staging) was seen as evidence
of a socially sharedmeaning system. Performancestudies' efforts to rupture
the hierarchies of permanent text and ephemeral action implicit in this
canonical conception of text have been crucial to our understandings of
theater and of the social as theater. However, the function of this new con-
ception of "text"- as an unstable, nonoriginary, historically specific or-
chestration of performed sociality-has yet to be theorized.35That is to
say, what still needs to be examined is performance'schoreography.

Choreographing gender
The emphasis on the individual as elaborated thus far in performance and
performance studies influences in subtle yet crucialways the role that per-

JosephRoach'soutstandingwork on circum-Atlantic
35
performanceexemplifiesthe ra-
dicaloverhaulingof historythat the focus on performancecan yield. Roachexaminesthe
circulationof influencesamongEurope,Africa,and the New Worldso as to illuminatethe
workingsof racialprejudiceandcolonizationin a wide varietyof performance contexts.Per-
formanceallowshim to assessthe impactof non-text-based eventsand traditionsso as to
show mutualinfluencesamongthe threeregions.However,Roach'snotion of surrogation,
a wayof theorizingthe perpetuationof scoresovertime,focuseson the fillingof the roleby
 S IG N S Autumn 1998 I 27

formance plays in the claim for gender as performance. Performance em-

phasizes the transformativemoment when the individual instantiates pre-
scribed, prearrangedpatterns of movement, speech, or display. Gender as
performance focuses on the unmasking of these "natural"patterns as cul-
ture, or on the compulsory execution of these patterns. Analysis of the
score or script to be executed matters less than the individual's adaptation
of those scripts. This suppression of the script for the performance leads
to models of social change based primarily on individual insubordination
or transgression. Any body, discontented with the regimen of behaviors
assigned to it, can alter its participationin the regimen but can hardly effect
serious change in the content of the regimen itself. Furthermore, the focus
on individual execution or enactment can deflect inquiry away from the
historical and culturalspecificities of the performance. Gender is being per-
formed, but what is gender that it is being performed?
If performance as assimilated into cultural studies sometimes pursues
the individual at the expense of the social, it also encapsulates an unexam-
ined appropriation of the physical (read feminine) by the textual (read
masculine). Both the corporeal and the feminine, as I have tried to show,
share attributesof instability,ephemerality,and unknowability,whereas the
textual, even in its deconstructed versions, maintains a solidity and ra-
tionality that aligns with the masculine. The vast majority of studies im-
plementing the notion of performance have focused on written repre-
sentations of gender rather than the orchestrated actions of moving yet
nonspeaking bodies. They neglect the body and at the same time use body
to inflect textuality with a new vitality. This enlivenment of language
through a demonstration of its performative capabilities continues to rely
on traditional notions of the text's solidity as contrasted with the less stable
moment of its performance.36The choreographic dimensions of the per-
formative act - the text's capacity to body forth a theoretical and political
orientation - remain buried in the text, property of the linguistic order and
its engagement with the social. Since the claim for gender as performance
develops out of Austin's linguistic studies ratherthan theater research,this
lack of attention to repertoires of behavior other than those of the text
should come as no surprise. However, the perpetuation of verbal and non-
verbal oppositionality implicit in the performative text limits the analysis
of gender and may even perpetuate traditional gender inequalities.

the new body, more than on the choreographic moves stipulated by the score that those
bodies then make. See Roach 1996.
36
Sue-Ellen Case (1995) has pointed to the prejudicesentailed in the focus on the textual
in studies of performativity.
28 I Foster

Choreography challenges the dichotomization of verbal and nonverbal

cultural practices by asserting the thought-filledness of movement and the
theoretical potential of bodily action. It names the necessarily collective
practice of engagement with enduring yet historically specific conventions
of representation and emphasizes the connections that such conventions
have to social and political structurings of power.37New conceptualiza-
tions of the script, developed in the wake of poststructuralistcritiques of
author and text, likewise summon up this theorization of human action,
yet the legacy of the dramatic text continues to infuse the script with a
kind of permanence, whereas the notion of choreography as a theoretical
premise underscores the changeability of events and their environs.38Cho-
reography also disrupts the traditional divisions of labor between ver-
bal and nonverbal acts by fusing the experiential and "feminine" cultiva-
tion of bodily presence to the intellectual and "masculine" analysis of
representation.
To approach gender as choreography also suggests a potential bridge
between academic and activist spheres of engagement with gender opera-
tions. It is precisely through a choreographic assessment of bodies, their
behavior, and their location that collective interventions such as "TakeBack
the Night," "Confront the Rapist at the Worksite,""Same-Sex Kiss-Ins,"
or "GuerrillaGirls at the Whitney Museum" acquire their perspicacityand
charisma.39These theorized responses to choreographies of gender and
power illustrate an ongoing engagement with systems of representation
and an ability to restrategize as power alters the form of its appearance.
Because of their canny analysis of body politics, these responses also move
activist and scholarly realms of feminism toward one another. These kinds
of "dances,"and not the sudden Derridean leap to a different place, are
what might carryus from the heterosexual toward the polysexual or, more
important, across the divides that separate different feminist agendas.40
With Derrida'sleaping dancer,criticaldifferences between raciallyand sex-

37Katie King argues in support of this notion of choreography as theory when she de-
scribes "the whole of the many forms theorizing takes: acting, thinking, speaking, conversa-
tion, action grounded in theory, action producing theory, action suggesting theory, drafts,
letters, unpublished manuscripts, stories in writing and not, poems said and written, art
events like shows, readings, enactments, zap actions such as ACT UP does" (1990, 89).
38 This notion of
choreography shares much with Elizabeth Grosz's notion of signature.
See Grosz 1995, 21-23.
39 For a lucid account of the cultural work
performed by Queer Nation's kiss-ins in shop-
ping malls, see Berlant and Freeman 1993.
40Miller 1991 warns that the utopian vision of polysexuality can mask crucial struggles
among different feminist groups. I agree and see the potential for choreography to negotiate
some of those differences.
 S IG N S Autumn 1998 I 29

ually inflected gender differences blur as deconstruction catapults all con-

stituencies into utopian impartiality.This presumption of the similarity of
all differences risks the same kind of transcendental gesture that decon-
struction was mobilized to dismantle. Nor does Derrida's dance provide
the opportunity to theorize the dynamic interrelations among sexual, ra-
cial, and national configurations of identity.
Body, as Susan Bordo has observed, should serve as a metaphor for
the subject's locatability, for the finitude of experience rather than for its
evanescence or universality: "For the appreciation of difference requires
the acknowledgement of some point beyond which the dancer cannot go.
If she were able to go everywhere, there would be no difference, nothing
that eludes. Denial of the unity and stability of identity is one thing. The
epistemological fantasy of becomingmultiplicity--the dream of limitless
multiple embodiments, allowing one to dance from place to place and self
to self- is another. What sort of body is it that is free to change its shape
and location at will, that can become anyone and travel anywhere?"(1993,
228-29). Neither in performance nor in choreography is the body "free"
to change its shape and location, although, as I have argued here, the per-
forming body, especially as that extension of the textual body that simply
moves the text into action, might well appear as unlimited. In fact, perfor-
mance places important and obvious strictureson the body's whereabouts,
since a body can perform only in a given time and place. Yet, it is the
choreography this body performs that articulates its connectedness to a
specific surround.
Located yet connected, the choreographed body not only suggests an
alternativeto theory versus practice, it also undermines the oppositionality
between essential and deconstructed versions of gendered identity. To ana-
lyze gender as choreography is to acknowledge as systems of representa-
tion the deeply embedded, slowly changing rules that guide our actions
and that make those actions meaningful. Not biologically fixed but rather
historically specific, these rules are redolent with social, political, eco-
nomic, and aesthetic values. They impart to any body a specificitythat must
be acknowledged, yet they also connect that body to other cultural orches-
trations of identity. To choreograph a change in these rules is to grapple
with the intensely routinized patterns they have produced, but also with
the rules themselves, their configuration and dynamism, and the alliances
they create with other structurings of power. Such a change may be regis-
tered by a single body, but its choreographic call to action will reflect a
theorization of social as well as individual bodies.
In this choreographic response to the choreographies of gender, bod-
ies are both active and reactive, generative and responsive, writing and
30 I Foster

written. Their actions are not an unmediated authentic expression, nor are
they only the summation of all the discursive practices that contain and
objectify them. Choreography relies on the inculcated capabilities, im-
pulses, and preferences that years of practice produce, but it also leaves
open the possibility for the unprecedented. Bodies change the world
through their persistent adherence to routinized action, but also by con-
gregating precipitously, stumbling, ducking, or striking a balance; by
stretching or imposturing; by standing defiantly or running deviantly; or
by grasping others' hands. These thought-filled actions defy strategies of
containment and move us toward new theorizations of corporeal existence
and resistance. Could this be the dancing that Emma Goldman had in
mind?

DepartmentofDance
Universityof California,Riverside

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