CHOREOGRAPHERS in the U.S. have repeatedly drawn men and metaphors from the world of sports to give their work a sense of authenticity on the concert dance stage. What’s more, the presence of male athletes and athleticism has worked to counter long-held anxieties about the supposed effeminacy of male dancers. To illustrate what I think is a heretofore unexamined use of male athletes in dance, I wish to discuss four dances: Nijinsky’s Jeux (1913); Ted Shawn’s Olympiad from 1936; Gene Kelly’s 1958 TV dance documentary called Dancing: A Man’s Game; and Twyla Tharp’s 1980 work, Dancing is a Man’s Sport, Too.
In 1913, Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed a dance called Jeux, which translates from the French as “games” or “play.” Nijinsky, the Russian dancer and choreographer perhaps best known for his Afternoon of a Faun and Le Sacre du Printemps, abandoned Jeux after only eight performances.
Nijinsky is reported to have said: “The close study I have made of polo, golf, tennis, has convinced me that these sports are not only a healthy form of relaxation, but that they are equally creators of plastic beauty” (Garafola, 1989). In Jeux, Nijinsky used sports as a metaphor for the interaction among the three performers, Nijinsky himself and two female dancers. Dressed in stylized tennis clothes of the time, occasionally armed with tennis rackets, the three dancers paired up in each possible combination while moving with angularity, fragmented gestures, and stillness. The dance begins and ends with a tennis ball bouncing across the stage.
While I have not seen the meticulous reconstruction of Jeux danced by the Joffrey Ballet, I have read with interest reports that Nijinsky became obsessed with tennis, going to courts near the rehearsal space to study not only the movement but the best way to hold the racket. The show’s short performance life is reflected in the disparaging tone used by reviewers, whose main objection was Nijinsky’s apparent lack of understanding of the game of tennis. A review published in France in May 1913 begins, “Summer sports. A number of readers have enquired about the rules of Russian tennis,” and goes on to assert that Nijinsky’s movement vocabulary was not accurate as a quotation of the sport of tennis, whether Russian or French. Other critics agreed that the geometry of tennis was not replicated in the action on the dance stage.
Whether Nijinsky failed to convince critics that he had successfully transferred the movement vocabulary of sport into choreography is beside the point. What is pertinent here is that some of Nijinsky’s successors went even further, putting not just the sport but also the athlete himself onto the concert dance stage.
In 1933, Ted Shawn left his professional dancing partner and wife Ruth St. Denis to build an identity for the American male dancer [see Norton Owen’s article in this issue]. Although Shawn and St. Denis had toured successfully for years as Denishawn and had dance schools in New York and Los Angeles, Shawn was dissatisfied with audience response to male dancers. He wanted there to be an air of respectability associated with men on the U.S. concert dance stage. Part of Shawn’s project, writes dance historian and gay theorist David Gere, was to state unequivocally that “dance was not for sissies” while severing the connection between “male dancers and compromised masculinity” (Gere, 2000). Shawn had been working on this project for years, writing in his 1926 book, The American Ballet: “The false idea clings that dancing is an effeminate expression for men. This can be corrected only with the correcting of the whole fundamental conception in regard to the importance of the art of dancing in general.”
Shawn was not the first male dancer to be called “sissy” for dancing, nor is it a uniquely American stereotype. Dance scholar John Jordan has compellingly argued that the labeling of the male dancer as effeminate can be traced back to the 18th century. By looking at essays published in the British newspaper The Spectator and in etchings by William Hogarth, Jordan identified a general mocking and labeling of male dancing masters as effeminate. Dance writer Ramsay Burt in The Male Dancer argues that men in the 19th century were uncomfortable viewing male dancers on the stage. But wherever one marks the beginning of the stereotype, it was in full force in the 1930’s when Shawn founded what was to become a popular touring company called Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers, housed at the site of the present-day dance festival Jacob’s Pillow in western Massachusetts.
Before starting to tour, Shawn had first to find men to dance. He located men to train as dancers at nearby Springfield College, a well-known institution for physical education. In the summer of 1936, three years after founding the company and training the dancers, Shawn used the experience of his athletes-turned-dancers for a new work titled Olympiad. The 1936 Olympics in Berlin loomed large in popular culture, with African-American track star Jesse Owens setting records and Hitler refusing to acknowledge them. This was the context in which Shawn had the idea for his work. Barton Mumaw, a leading member of the Men Dancers and Shawn’s long-time life partner, later wrote about Olympiad in his memoir. As Mumaw describes it, Shawn asked each of the men to contribute sections to the work. The men, Mumaw reports, drew on their experiences as athletes at Springfield College, with sections devoted to basketball, boxing, and fencing, among other sports.
This was the first time that Shawn had solicited creative input from his dancers. I would argue that it was not their development as artists that led Shawn to give them artistic license. Rather, it was their past experience as athletes and their physical familiarity with the “real” movement vocabulary of sports that Shawn wanted to bring to the stage. Originally called Sports Dances, Olympiad was enormously popular with audiences. Shawn wrote about it in a letter to Lucien Price: “The boys, this being their first big job, nearly tore themselves to pieces working and rehearsing—and it is all extremely vigorous—today there is a collection of bruises, blisters, and charley-horses such as never before” (as quoted in Mumaw). The language that Shawn uses to describe the efforts of these dancers is anything but sissified.
Olympiad was documented on silent black-and-white film in the 1930’s. Although a variety of dancers choreographed the different sections, there is a sense of wholeness to the piece. Each section is easily identified by the sport that served as its inspiration. Although not strictly pantomimic, the movements are not abstracted, as they were twenty years earlier in Nijinsky’s Jeux. Neither do the sports stand as metaphors for anything as grand as “modern man.” Rather, if anything, they serve as an equation: athletes plus dance subtracts effeminacy from the standard stereotype, leaving as the net sum an aura of authentic masculinity.
Some twenty years later, Gene Kelly would similarly draw on the implied masculinity of athletes when writing and producing a documentary for Omnibus, an NBC program with quite a serious and positive reputation. Kelly, unlike Shawn and Nijinsky, had harbored aspirations of becoming an athlete as a young man in Pittsburgh. In high school, Kelly played football and hockey and did gymnastics. In Alvin Yudkoff’s biography Gene Kelly, he recounts an anecdote from early in Kelly’s life that foregrounds exactly the stereotype that Shawn sought to eradicate two decades earlier. One day a ten-year-old Kelly was walking to dance class with his two brothers and two sisters. “The Kellys heard ‘sissies’ and ‘fags’ and worse taunts surrounded by curses. Gene clenched his fists. … He was ready. They formed a line facing the Kellys, and now, unbelievably, they were placing hands on hips and wiggling their asses, tongues extended for some reason. ‘Pussy, pussy.’ Gene was only ten years old, but he guessed a crude and challenging evocation of femininity when faced with it.” This experience contributed to Kelly’s lifelong struggle to combat the association between dance and effeminacy. He was often referred to as an athletic dancer, especially when compared with the elegant Fred Astaire, which may be what enabled him to negotiate the production of the TV special Dancing—A Man’s Game in 1958.
In the show, Kelly intentionally links sports and dance from the opening shot. The soundstage looks like a gym, although it is theatricalized. We see a basketball player dribbling a ball through gymnastic equipment; we see a heavy bag hanging from the ceiling right next to a ballet dancer at the barre. Kelly walks among a group of men, identifying them by name and sport as he goes through the room. Johnny Unitas is there, Bob Cousy, Mickey Mantle, and Sugar Ray Robinson. (All these athletes were at the height of their popularity at this time, and their place in the popular imagination assured the success of the documentary.) After panning the gym, the camera focuses in on each athlete in turn. Each performs a stock action from his sport—for example, Mantle mimes hitting a home run. Then Kelly performs a stylized version of the same action. As Kelly throws an imaginary ball with the momentum leading him into a turn, fakes a jump shot that turns into a leap, and swings a phantom golf club, he says again and again, “It’s the same thing.” Yudkoff’s take: “Gene directed stop-motion vignettes featuring … stadium heroes … and luminaries of the sports pages to underscore his theme: athletics is competitive and dance is creative, but both are rooted in the same balletic movements.”
A work choreographed by Twyla Tharp, perhaps best known for the Broadway show Movin’ Out, is a final case in point. Tharp, in 1980, offered another variation on the theme of combining athletes and dancers, sports and dance, pairing New York City Ballet dancer Peter Martins with football player Lynn Swann in a piece called Dance is a Man’s Sport, Too. Martins was at the height of his fame and acclaim as a principal with the New York City Ballet, and Lynn Swann was a renowned professional football player with the Pittsburgh Steelers. In the piece, choreographed specifically for television, Martins and Swann compete in a series of athletic and dance endeavors, with the physical challenges emphasized through filmic techniques. In this way, Tharp placed a dancer and an athlete in a bit of friendly competition, showing them leaping and turning within the vocabulary of their specific movement practice. At the opening of the short dance, Tharp herself performs with the two men, abstractly proposing the possibility of heterosexuality being tied to the masculinity of the two performers.
The anxiety that surrounds male dancers and effeminacy is not new. Choreographers in the U.S. have worked to counter this association by dipping into the unassailably masculine practices of sports. One might assume that as the 20th century unfolded there would have been less need for artists to continue promoting the acceptability of men dancing. But such does not appear to be the case based on these examples, which traverse a 65-year period. Even the names of their works—Kelly’s Dancing: A Man’s Game and Tharp’s Dancing is a Man’s Sport, Too—suggest that the choreographers propose to masculinize dance performance. A new question arises in response to this line of inquiry. If the concert dance stage is now a place for the masculine and for the man, does this imply that it’s no longer a place for the effeminate, the feminine, and the woman? It’s a question that certainly demands further study.
References
Barker, Barbara. “Nijinsky’s Jeux.” The Drama Review: TDR, 26.1 (Spring 1982).
Garafola, Lynn. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Oxford University Press, 1989.
Gere, David. “Foreword,” in Barton Mumaw, Dancer (see below).
Shawn, Ted. The American Ballet. Henry Holt & Co., 1926.
Sherman, Jane and Barton Mumaw. Barton Mumaw, Dancer: From Denishawn to Jacob’s Pillow and Beyond. Wesleyan U. Press, 2000.
Yudkoff, Alvin. Gene Kelly: A Life of Dance and Dreams. Watson Guptill Publications, 2001.
Maura Keefe teaches choreography and dance history and theory at SUNY Brockport. During the summer, she’s a scholar-in-residence at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.
