A Mutually Satisfying Pas de Deux: Feminist Dramaturgy and Dance in the Undergraduate Dance Curriculum

Clare Croft

Theatre Topics, Volume 19, Number 2, September 2009, pp. 181-191 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/tt.0.0065

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tt/summary/v019/19.2.croft.html

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A Mutually Satisfying Pas de Deux: Feminist Dramaturgy and Dance in the Undergraduate Dance Curriculum
Clare Croft
Dramaturgy has begun to a gain a place in the North American dance community and, slowly, in university dance programs. For at least a decade, dance dramaturgy has been a regular topic of conversation at annual meetings of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA), which gave a 2006 residency grant to Nichole Grantshar to work on Atlanta Ballets 2007 production of The Great Gatsby. European contemporary dance choreographers have embraced dance dramaturgy for years. Andre Lepecki, who has dramaturged work by European choreographers like Meg Stuart, teaches dance dramaturgy as part of his dramaturgy course in New York Universitys Performance Studies graduate program. Beginning in 2008, Torontos York University, a perennial leader in dance studies, began an MFA in dance, with a specialization in dramaturgy. Dance dramaturgy shares much with theatrical dramaturgy, as it too raises questions of narrative structure and representation, yet dance dramaturgs rarely deal with text. The absence of textual language in most dance might explain dance dramaturgys lag behind theatrical dramaturgy, since many theatre dramaturgs focus on analyzing and revising play text. Bodies in motion present a more amorphous site for study and bring logistical challenges, since ample studio time must be found for a choreographer, cast, and dramaturg to be together. Heidi Gilpin, scholar and dramaturg for choreographer William Forsythe, describes the dance dramaturgs job as confronting the effervescent necessities of performing the multivalent and [making dance] resonate for audiences as a new form of perception (87). The dance dramaturg asks questions about how dance creates worlds through the intersection of image, movement, space, and sound. In this essay, I argue for the dramaturg as a needed addition in dance productions within undergraduate dance departments, because she can help forge connections between dance history and theory and the studio-based work that dominates undergraduate dance curriculums. Dance dramaturgy can bring narrative coherence to more than just the next performance. As Susan Foster has noted, dance departments frequently reify a mind/body binary, considering seminar classes separate from technique classes and rehearsals. Incorporating dramaturgy into dance history and dance production underscores how, as Foster says in Dance Theory?: Theorizing is instigated whenever one asks oneself, What am I doing and why am I doing it? (20). Dancers theorize and remake dance history all day long. In most dance departments, the dancers theorizing and making dance are women. With their overwhelming majority of female students, these departments also present a rich site for considering the relationship between feminism and the body.1 Dance dramaturgy in undergraduate dance departments might allow a more explicit and constant questioning of dances embodiment and disciplining of gender and sexuality. Through the dramaturg, feminist theory can explicitly enter the rehearsal room, as dramaturgy functions, in Brizzell and Lepeckis words, as a generatively disruptive process (15). Binding history and theory classes emphasis on representational politics with rehearsal and performance creates even more space for a discussion of gender.

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182 Clare Croft The urgency of feminist intervention in dance programs, and dramaturgys potential role in such an intervention, became apparent to me as I worked as a dramaturg on University of Texas at Austin MFA dance student Rachel Murrays thesis production in 2006, an evening-length narrative dance for young audiences titled Changuita Perla. The piece grew from Murrays explicitly feminist interest in a series of paintings by artist Pau Nubiola. In the paintings, Nubiola chronicles the adventures of a young male monkey named Ruben, who is accompanied by Perla, a girl monkey. Determined to tell the story of the female gure in the paintings, Murray created Changuita Perla, a coming-of-age story for girls. Since the production focused on a female character, my dramaturgical efforts centered on representations of gender. The interactions between the male theatre majors and the female dance majors in the cast intensied our feminist concerns, and dramaturgical and pedagogical questions frequently overlapped as we confronted how gender is and should be embodied. Making a feminist intervention in dance requires the dramaturg to pay attention to representations of gender, institutional practices around gender, and sexuality. In Dancing Women, Sally Banes historicizes the representation of women in dance, considering where womens roles uphold patriarchal norms and where female dancers virtuosic command of technique resists choreographed sexism (45). These sexist choreographies often arise from heteronormative structures. Michael Warner denes heteronormativity as a cultural assumption that posits heterosexuality as the elemental form of association, . . . the very model of inter-gender relations, [and] the indivisible basis of all community (xxi). Much dance, certainly narrative-driven work like Changuita Perla, is strongly heteronormative. Characters who work toward heterosexual couplings, usually in the form of marriage, are marked as normal and placed at the center of productions; characters who do not seek out the opposite sex are not normal and, usually, are evil. The dance dramaturg should ask questions about these traditional narrative structures, pointing to the ways that relying on marriage as a central plot device limits the possibilities for male and female roles in dance. As Banes describes, marriage has long been a dominant theme in Western dance. Ballet grew from court celebrations frequently organized around marriages, and then marriage became the most familiar narrative structure in ballet and, to a slightly lesser degree, early modern dance (Dancing Women 5). The predominance of the marriage plot, as Banes calls it, precludes other ways for men and women to come together choreographically. Queer theory helps the dramaturg unleash the marriage plots stranglehold on narrative dance, intervening in the repetition of public stagings of heteronormativity. For instance, Berlant and Warners argument for multiple forms of public intimacy serves the dance dramaturg focused on representations of gender and sexuality. In Sex in Public, Berlant and Warner describe heteronormativity as limiting our public expressions of sexuality, foreclosing the range of options we have (or perceive that we have) for using our bodies in public. A dance dramaturg pushing on the frame of heteronormativity helps open up a dance productions range of physicality. Men and women can (and should) inhabit space and connect with each other physically without always understanding these interactions as moving toward merging into a heterosexual couple. By bringing queer and feminist theory into the production process, dance dramaturgs open new possibilities for female characters in dance and expand the possible meanings inherent in the ways dancers touch each other. A Dance Dramaturgs Primary Tasks My most obvious job as dramaturg was asking questions that focused on the stakes of choreographic and performance choices. Because Changuita Perla emphasized a young womans story, my questions most frequently looked at these choices ramications for the female protagonist. As one of two dramaturgs for the production, I met with the choreographer in the months before rehearsals began, serving as a listening presence for her emerging ideas.2 Geoffrey Proehl describes remaining silent as one of the dramaturgs primary tasks; listening and watching are the dramaturgs way into

Feminist Dramaturgy and Dance in the Undergraduate Dance Curriculum 183 the production. Proehl writes: Silent attentiveness can function as a kind of discipline: [a way of ] learning to follow along (32). Silence on the dramaturgs part is not an absence, but, as he says, a space with potential (32). In my pre-rehearsal conversations with Murray, I sat quietly, interjecting clarifying questions that centered on how her conception of Perla would transform into movement. What movement qualities would express character? Where would Perla dance alone or with a group? How would Perla share her weight with other cast members, as she negotiated her role within the community? No matter the topic, I spoke as little as possible. The dramaturgs willingness to listen to a choreographers thoughts helps create a space for ideas to develop. This space is crucial to dance dramaturgy, because, until dancers and studios become available, there is literally no space to explore a new production. Most choreographers need studio space to generate movement, and they need dancers to expand initial movement phrases. In dance, there is no text to revise until bodies set ideas into motion. However, the dramaturg can help a choreographer be as prepared as possible when the shift to the studio nally happens. Once Changuita Perlas rehearsals began, my tasks were similar to those of any production dramaturg. I attended the majority of rehearsals, offering questioning notes afterward. I sometimes worked with individual dancers on the relationship between movement and character, primarily asking questions and helping the dancers strive toward specicity. My co-dramaturg and I assisted with educational aspects of the production, including writing portions of a study guide for teachers and creating the lobby display. In no instance did I generate movement or, for the most part, shape movement. I am not and do not intend to become a choreographer. I did, however, ask lots of questions about the outcomes of employing particular movement vocabularies and choreographic structures. As dramaturg, I was able to foreground what often remains implicit within dance training: that how we move our bodies, who moves with us, and who watches us move matters. As Banes has argued, more scholars in the humanities and social sciences should study dance, because in dance we see how social values affect bodies and how bodies produce social values (Power and the Dancing Body 44). Making the relationship between bodies and power explicit and helping dancers articulate why that relationship is important contributes to dancers development as artists and allows them to argue for dances importance in the university and society at large. I nd the distinction between dramaturgy and choreography useful, because it helps me craft questions from within someone elses choreographic vision, rather than pushing my vision onto the production from the outside. The importance of the dramaturgs role as generated by the production is key within the existing literature on dance dramaturgy. Lepecki describes the relationship between dramaturg and dance as a melting process that allows the dramaturg and the body of work, including the other collaborators, to become one somatic body (qtd. in Van Imschoot 63). Myrian Van Imschoot explicates Lepeckis approach, noting that the dramaturg should never become the locus of power and knowledge, put at the disposal of a choreographer (63). Feminist theory always pushes toward disseminating power, and feminism in dance requires understanding power structures as moving across and through bodies. The dramaturgs relationship to a dances somatics may not be embodied in the same way as a dancers or choreographers, but she, like the audience, can physically engage with dance from a seat in the theatre. The dramaturgs presence in rehearsal reminds a production team of the embodied nature of spectatorship. Audience members bring their bodies, and the experiences their bodies navigate daily, into the meaning-making process of performance. As an advocate for the audience, the dramaturg helps work toward one of the most difcult goals of dance: to help people experience their bodies more fully and to recognize others experiences of their bodies.

184 Clare Croft Dance Dramaturgy as Feminist Theatre An emphasis on embodiment carries implicit feminist interests, but Changuita Perlas story had explicitly feminist concerns. Murrays detailed libretto located the entire projects focus squarely on telling a girls story. The girl was the title of the production, the lead character, and the character most often onstage. But in rehearsals, the female dancer in the role and the developing character repeatedly shifted to the margins, upstaged by louder, less important male characters, even though the entire creative team knew we had been assembled to tell a girls story. I often found myself asking: How is this about the girl?; and later, Why is it so hard to tell the story of a girl? I posed these two questions to the choreographer after many rehearsals. Before discussing our difculties with telling a girls story, let me set the stage for our work. Changuita Perla begins with rebellious Perla, an adolescent girl monkey, at home in a jungle, dancing with her fellow monkeys in her parents royal court. In a rite-of-passage ceremony, she receives the gift of rhythm in the form of a magic drum. At night, Perla takes her drum and ventures from home, meeting a boy monkey named Ruben. Poachers capture the two monkeys, planning to make them that evenings dinner. Realizing the poachers plan, the monkeys revolt, hypnotizing the poachers with the drum. Perla escapes, without Ruben or her drum. The more evil of the two poachers uses the drum to build an army of hypnotized followers, but his demanding nature leads the other poacher to run away with Ruben and the magic drum. When Perla, Ruben, and the poachers accidentally reunite, a standoff ensues. Perla makes peace, leading her new friends in a dance of reconciliation with the evil poacher. Perla daydreams of her family, so she demands that the poacher rectify the situation by taking her home. Her parents rejoice at Perlas return, and she leads the full cast in a new, funky version of the royal court dance her parents forced her to perform earlier. The theatre and dance programs form one department at the University of Texas at Austin, and students from each program comprised our cast. A female undergraduate dance BFA student danced the role of Perla, with six other female dance majors as the monkey ensemble. Six theatre students completed the cast: one woman as the island priestess; another woman as the more amiable of the two poachers; and undergraduate male actors played Ruben, the evil poacher, and the sage monkeya gure who helps Perla along her journey. In production, Changuita Perla had a colorful, almost amboyant tone. Murrays dance genealogy includes dancing in the Mark Morris Dance Group for thirteen years, studying Limn technique, and spending ample time on club dance-oors. Changuita Perlas movement vocabulary combined the emphasis on lines in Morriss work, the breathiness of Limn, and the polyrhythms of club dancing. The musical score, composed for Changuita Perla by Linda Dowdell, was largely instrumental, though a few characters sang brief songs with lyrics. Dowdell layered the music, so its polyrhythms and strong bass drove the large dance numbers. Design elements gave the performers the ability to rearrange the stage and their costuming, emphasizing the characters ability to make the worlds in which they lived. The set, designed by MFA student Yvonne Boudreaux, transformed from jungle to ship to island and back to jungle via a series of moveable wooden crates that the cast decorated with bamboo sticks and ags. The interactive set moved with the choreography: dancers rolled the crates around the stage, clamored on and off of them, and used the sticks and ags to augment their dancing. Most of the cast wore hand-painted unitards designed by MFA student Candida Nichols. Like the crates, the unitards provided a base for shifting accoutrement: monkeys transformed into island nymphs by removing their shorts and tails and donning grass skirts. Because the design students began their visual research months earlier, they worked without dramaturgical assistance. My primary collaboration was with Murray and the cast, watching the way the story of the strong girl Perla refused to unfold. As Murray coached the monkey ensemble in the details of what swinging on a vine should look like, she referred to acting like girls, with shocking results. Even the most powerful movers responded by barely traveling and taking up as little space as possible.

Feminist Dramaturgy and Dance in the Undergraduate Dance Curriculum 185 In more than one instance, dancers literally grasped and hid behind male cast members. The worst ideas of girlhood stood before us in this scene: timid women desperately grasping for men. As dramaturg, I wondered how the women got these ideas and how they were able to immediately put them onto their bodies. Perhaps the dancers initial responses were unfortunately less than extraordinary, even routine. This very everyday-ness makes the presence of dramaturgical questioning important. Discussing what I had seen with the choreographer, we decided to deploy two tactics against the womens kneejerk reactions: avoiding the word girl, and giving each of the monkeys a personality description without an obvious gender specicationfor example, bossy or scared. With girl purged from rehearsal vocabulary, I did not notice the same sort of actions in future rehearsals. Although this marked a success of sorts, I wish we could have found a way to recuperate the term girl, rather than merely avoiding it.3 As dramaturg, I watched how the choreographic elements cohered, and I helped the choreographer intervene in the emerging representations that ran counter to her feminist vision. The dancers made more individual character choices when working with terms like bossy and scared. While the ensembles lycra unitards made the dancers sex rather obvious, their characters did not make specic appeals to gender. The dancers found more opportunity to use their assigned personalities to interact with one anothers characters than they had when asked only to be girls. They picked at one anothers fur, played hide-and-seek, and leapt from crate to oor as though surprising one another. With the shift in rehearsal language, the dancers became a community comprised of different types of people (monkeys), rather than caricatures of the weakest images of femininity. By interrogating the relationships among gesture, gender, and language, dance dramaturgy complicated the physical landscape of the performances social interactions. Dance dramaturgy provided a lens to see the politics of everyday performance leaking into rehearsal, and then helped locate tools to build other representations of women. Sometimes the casts discomfort with stereotypes, as opposed to their easy reproduction of stereotypes like those summoned by girl, became sites ripe for dramaturgy. This was the case with the relationship between Perla and Ruben, characters the choreographer initially described as experiencing a preadolescent, burgeoning romance. The imposition of percolating heterosexual desire caused the most problems in the Tied Together Waltz, the scene after the poachers capture the monkeys. In the dance, the two monkeys escape from a crate, but remain tied together by a long rope. Dancing while lashed together and simultaneously communicating young love thwarted the scenes progress. Was it supposed to be funny? Awkward? Cute? Neither performer knew what to do or how to act. The heteronormative narrativegirl and boy meet and inevitably fall in lovefelt unnatural and unnecessary to the performers and was difcult to maintain. The performers needed another narrative option, but the assumption of heterosexual romance left them none. The root of the scenes troubles became clear to me while attending a talk by queer theorist Judith Halberstam during the month of Changuita Perla rehearsals. In the talk, Notes on Failure, Halberstam discussed her work on expressions of heteronormativity in childrens lms. During an analysis of Finding Nemo, Halberstam said, with a mix of enthusiasm and disgust, Children dont care about romance; they dont need characters to get married. Suddenly I realized why the Tied Together Waltz was not working: we were promoting a set of heteronormative values to a young audience. I shared my experience with the choreographer that evening, who immediately agreed that the heterosexual subtext of the Tied Together Waltz limited the performers choices and promoted values neither of us supported. I explained to the dancers why and how we wanted to rethink their characters, then asked them to launch into the scene, this time imagining their relationship as merely playful, not romantic. The situations comedy became much clearer. Playfulness felt more appropri-

186 Clare Croft ate for each of the characters, and the students looked more at ease in their characters bodies. They tugged at the rope, annoyed by the others resistance, and then gradually transformed the rope into a toy. Freed from the restraint of performing goofy love, Perla and Rubens relationship developed through reacting to the rope. They now appeared to do what twelve-year-olds might do if tied together, rather than suggesting a forced idea of heterosexual love imagined by adults. The new scenario opened possibilities for Perla to lead Ruben. While Changuita Perlas story required the audience to see Perla as a leader at the beginning of the show, only as she plotted her (and Rubens) escape from the poachers could her intellect fully surface. When the Tied Together Waltz featured burgeoning romance, the dancer playing Perla resorted to performing shy awkwardness, so often seen in popular culture as the womans role in heterosexual relationships. Released from the heteronormative frame, the dancer embraced other aspects of Perlas character as she gured out how to undo herself and Ruben, and then facilitated their escape. Perla could condently take the lead now, rather than shyly waiting for the others rst move. The dancer made Perlas thought process visible, displaying her characters intelligence. The serendipity of Halberstams talk occurring during our rehearsal process may seem too convenient, yet openness to serendipity is a key role in new-work dramaturgy, particularly within a largely physical art. Unlike the work that a dramaturg and playwright can do together on a text prior to rehearsals, a dramaturg and choreographer have no common object to study until rehearsals begin. The pressures of time, particularly the limits placed on how often the entire cast could be in the studio together, necessitated an openness to anything and everything that could contribute to the works development. As Bruce Barton has observed about dramaturgy within physical theatre, our rehearsal process was an opportunistic form of theatrical creation which, to a sometimes alarming degree, relie[d] upon an engagement with coincidence and the unpredictable through a heightened sensitivity to possibility and a rigorous ability to exploit its gifts (105). Because I could bring my ongoing scholarly engagement with theory and history into the studio, my presence as dramaturg increased the number of ideas we could explore in rehearsal. Closed Mouths, Open Bodies Coupling the theoretical and the embodied allows for a more complete understanding of how discourse frames and directs the embodiment of gender and sexuality. Although in the Halberstam example, theory from outside the rehearsal process became useful as we engaged with embodied practice, embodiment is also a form of theorization. Susan Foster, among other dance theorists, writes against limiting notions of embodiment, which perceive physical choices as less than deliberate modes of expression. For Foster, the body is written upon, but it also writes (Choreographing History 1516). Foster describes bodily action as causal, rather than just the effect of desire or thought. Dancers can use their skilled bodies to physically implement change. They can perform their identities and the identities of onstage characters in ways other than what they see everyday, telling multiple and possibly transgressive stories about how bodies take up gender roles. In Changuita Perla rehearsals, all but two of the women were dance majors, and all the men were theatre majors. All the men had acting and vocal training, and most of the women had modern dance and ballet training. Rehearsals foregrounded the theories of verbal versus nonverbal expression implicit within the different techniques the students had studied. The male actors spoke constantly without hesitation, and the female dancers gravitated toward nonverbal expression. Acting and dance training collided with each other, threatening to give the more verbal men power over their more often silent female counterparts. Technical differences constantly split along gender lines in rehearsal. The female dancers quickly submitted to male dominance, consciously or subconsciously. In dance-technique classes

Feminist Dramaturgy and Dance in the Undergraduate Dance Curriculum 187 students rarely speak, and that propensity to silence transferred into rehearsal. When the female dancers encountered the male actors in rehearsals, the mens presence was louder and more verbal. The actors were quicker to speak in response to notes, whereas the dancers often physically worked out corrections. In parts of the production that required vocalization the men were always louder, even after Shawyer began voice-projection exercises with the dancers. Rehearsal protocol carried over into performance. Although the dancing women appeared onstage more often and the lead character was female, the men attracted more attention because they made more noise. The womens ability to move without making any sound meant that when a man moved, the audiences eyes shot directly to him. Rubens rst entrance exemplied this problem. Ruben leaps onto an upstage crate to watch Perla dance centerstage in a spotlight. Despite Perlas spatial centrality and the light focused on her, Ruben dominated the scene, because the male actor made louder noises than the female dancer. As a dancer, Perla knew how to roll through her feet to soften her footsteps, whereas the male actor bounded onto the crate with a loud, at-footed thud. Later, his grunting overwhelmed her high-pitched squeaking. His deeper voice and knowledge of how to project made Perla appear weak and less important in the scene. While my dance background allowed me to understand the mans sound as an example of his lack of skill, I was still looking at him, not at the female dancer. Training inuenced the womens subservient behavior in rehearsal. Because the womens dance training allowed them to understand the choreographers corrections without asking as many questions, they could work on their own, silently guring out how to manage the physical demands of the choreography, whereas the men thought they had to speak and receive the directors attention. The more physically procient the dancer, the less noise she made onstage or in rehearsal; therefore the men dominated the sonic landscape of rehearsal and performance. This phenomenon seems to t within the rubric of what Michel Foucault has described as the formation of the docile bodya body created through a two-pronged system of coercion that establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and increased domination (138). The better, more focused female dancers slipped more easily to the periphery, succumbing to the mens domination. This quandary presented several questions for the choreographer and me. How can dramaturgy create a conversation that makes apparent the possibilities that stem from Fosters valuing of embodiment? How can dramaturgs help directors and choreographers coach performers to be sensitive to embodied skills, rather than just focusing on their delivery of text? We used rehearsal time to teach the men how to better to control their bodies, and talked often, particularly to the actor playing Ruben, about what it meant to be a supporting character. He needed to learn how to perform without pulling attention away from other cast members. Learning to avoid upstaging another performer is a trait worthy of attention also. Dramaturgy led us to note conicting relationships between rehearsals and technique classes. First, in rehearsal, students who respond verbally to a directors or choreographers comments often receive more attention, but for the good of the production and pedagogical fairness, students developing their roles in less verbal ways should receive attention too. By paying attention only to the most verbal students, those of us in the dance community send a mixed message to the many female students in dance: train silently in class all day, but otherwise, silence will not be rewarded. Second, in departments shared by theatre and dance programs, those with less background in movementfocused aesthetics should be given the opportunity to embrace the ways that learning can be done through the body, not just through speech. As the female dancers continued to explore the layers in Murrays choreography, some told me they were frustrated that the male actors did not recognize the pieces complicated movement vocabulary. The actors had to be led to see just how many layers existed within the choreography, a step in the teaching process that could be skipped with the dancers. Delving into dance through the body, rather than through language, helped everyone notice their bodies abilities (and lack thereof ), as well as notice how other people use their bodies.

188 Clare Croft Dramaturgy helped make us aware of the nuances of how the students performed gender, and in turn, made the students more aware of those performances. The roots of gender performance ran deep, enforced by not just everyday societal norms, but the training systems in which the students worked in their classes. As a production team interested in a creating a feminist dance production, we had to consider and, at times, change the ways the students embodied gender in rehearsal also. Class, rehearsal, and performance all worked together to build the students representations of gender. Shifting understandings of how the body creates representations within the social sphere puts a particular demand on dance in the university. Dancers already know they are body smart, but many other disciplines do not understand dancers range of corporeal expression. Given the gender demographics of most dance programs, this leads to a devaluation of many young women. Dramaturgy provides a way to invite others into dance and its requisite appreciation of the body. While my own dance background is helpful in dramaturgy, it is not necessary. Understanding and questioning dance does not require having grown up owning pointe shoes; if that were true, dance audiences would be much smaller. The dramaturgs role in a dance production could be lled by someone outside of dance, facilitating cross-disciplinary collaboration. A person with a theatrical, philosophical, musical, literary, or historical background could well bring new and exciting possibilities to dance through dramaturgy. Anyone from these elds could provide feedback on how the individual elements of a production come together (or not) from her perspective and appreciate the nuances of nonverbal expression. Dramaturgy in Dance History, Dance History in Dramaturgy Dancers, inclined to kinesthetic learning and moving rather than speaking, frequently consider their classes beyond the studio as irrelevant to what they see as their main focus: dancing. In the semester that we created Changuita Perla, many of the casts dancers, including the dancer performing Perla, took one of the departments dance-history courses, which focused on the twentieth century and was taught by Ann Daly. I worked as the courses teaching assistant, leading a few days throughout the semester, including a lesson on how the identity of the apper arose from the choices women made about how to use their bodies as they ew through the Charleston on 1920s dance oors. This topic fell in the midst of Changuita Perla rehearsals. The students who were in the class and in Changuita Perla taught me about the connections between dramaturgy and dance history as they folded our class on the Charleston into our evening rehearsal. In my lecture, I noted that I believe the appers embraced the Charleston, in part, because it allowed women to enjoy dancing alone, amid a community formed by individuals instead of couples. To investigate this premise in class, I followed a pathway from representation to movement analysis and back to representation in our Charleston class. I began with a brief history of the dance and its association with the apper. We looked at cartoons from the period that featured social dance situations. The students described the appers they saw, offering adjectives like wild and free. When we shifted to movement description, they noted the raised, swinging arms and the angularity of the hips in the cartoons we studied.4 Finally, I asked how the dancing appers interacted with the other gures in the cartoons. A few perceived slyness in the appers eyes, reading that as awareness of a male presence; others noted that the appers did not face the male dancers, hence describing the women as independent. We then put the cartoons aside and stood, but I asked the students to remember the descriptions of the appers as we danced. Moving through the Charlestons steps and possible spatial patterns shifted the students into different relationships with one another and their bodies. I taught the entire group the basics of the Charleston. Once they appeared condent with the vocabulary, I told them to gure out how to move the steps, either by changing their facingessentially spinning in place while dancingor by traveling around the room. Chaos ensued, but even the most visibly tired gained energy as they

Feminist Dramaturgy and Dance in the Undergraduate Dance Curriculum 189 bounced around the space and one another. Talking about dancing the Charleston in a large group with music, many said they had not noticed the other dancers while they were dancing, though none said they had trouble navigating their way through the group. We ended class by briey returning to how a woman in the 1920s might have felt doing the Charleston, and the students generally agreed that the dance and its steps, done without a partner yet in the presence of a community, seemed like a social moment that emphasized freedom. That night, when our Changuita Perla rehearsal hit a lull, I asked the dancers to try a rather ragged unison section while remembering the energy they had seen in the pictures and felt in the Charleston that morning. Some of the students who were in dance history demonstrated their favorite Charleston movements for the rest of the cast. In the next run, the unison section improved. When the monkey ensemble returned to the larger group, they performed with more precision and attack. We never talked about the Charleston in rehearsal again; I never pushed any further on the link between the female characters in Changuita Perla and the freedom the Charleston offered women. But a connection between production dramaturgy and our dance-history classroom happened on its own, explicitly tying together theory, history, and practice. Instead of the dancers bodies absorbing and replicating the negative images of women from popular culture that had appeared in relationship to the word girl, the students used their dance training, including dance history, and their articulate bodies to invoke strong women who own stage space and make decisions about where to go and how to move. Dance studies ourishes when dance dramaturgy meets dance history, because it creates more space for discussions about representation. Dance historian Linda Tomko argues for using dance history as a forum for four lines of inquiry: the scrutiny of bodies, compositional strategies, representations forged, and modes of support (101). The rst two quickly arise for dance students, because their technique and choreography classes offer detailed study of the body and choreographic structure. But these classes rarely include time for intricate analysis of the representational implications of performance and choreographic choices. In contrast, the dance-history classroom and dramaturgy begin with representation, and then move on to ask how particular movements or spatial and temporal congurations create them. The students connected the Charlestons embodied representations, discovered in dance history, to the representations of the girls in Changuita Perla that they created in rehearsal, experiencing what dance anthropologist Jill Sweet calls transformation. Sweet describes moments like these in dance as temporary psychological and physical changes that can occur when a performer alters his or her appearance, postures, and gestures from the ordinary, utilitarian, and mundane to the extraordinary, powerful, and imaginary (138). The women who danced in Changuita Perla and also studied dance history by physically inhabiting strong female bodies through the Charleston, then translated that strength and exuberance into their performance as adolescent girls. Dance dramaturgy helps access the realms of affective and physical experience that cross the false boundaries generally set up between parts of dance programs considered to be practicaltechnique class and rehearsaland those classes that frequently get discussed as merely complementarydance history and theory. In future dance-history courses, I plan to build dramaturgical exercises into the syllabus, encouraging students to consider how dramaturgy can give them perspective on dance history, but also how dance history can come to bear on their choreographic and performing practices. Healing these splits among the components in the dance curriculum hopefully makes students sense greater coherence among the requirements of the major, but also demonstrates the value of dance history and theory to production-focused departments. The faculty member teaching nonstudio classes matters to the larger life of the department and contributes to production, even if that contribution never comes in the form of choreography. As dance studies in the university and

190 Clare Croft dramaturgy in dance continue to grow in North America, dramaturgy offers a way to consider how dance historians and theorists matter to dance.

Clare Croft is a PhD candidate in the Performance as Public Practice program at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is completing her dissertation on U.S. State Department sponsorship of international dance tours as a form of cultural diplomacy. She works as a dance dramaturg and a dance writer. Her dance features and reviews have appeared in the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, and Austin American-Statesman.

Notes
I would like to thank Jill Dolan, Stacy Wolf, Kelly Howe, and Angela Ahlgren for their feedback on earlier versions of this article. 1. For more reading on feminism and dance, see Ann Dalys essays The Balanchine Woman: Of Hummingbirds and Channel Swimmers and Dance History and Feminist Theory: Reconsidering Isadora Duncan and the Male Gaze, as well as Susan Leigh Fosters The Ballerinas Phallic Pointe. 2. My co-dramaturg was Susanne Shawyer, whose guidance throughout the production was extremely useful to me. 3. The recuperation of the term girl has been done extensively by those writing in the eld of girl studies. For more about girl studies, see Jenny Garber and Angela McRobbies essay Girls and Subcultures, and Mary Kearnys book Girls Make Media. 4. The angularity noted is in part due to the type of body celebrated by the apper: extremely skinny and long, a body type that I am leary of similarly celebrating in the dance-history classroom given the fraught relationships many dancers have with their bodies, particularly those who have spent time in the classical-ballet world. So, while the Charleston-dancing apper offers a jumping-off point for a conversation about independent women, that conversation must also include a discussion of the problems of elevating one body type over another.

Works Cited
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