Dancing Dicks — A Case In Point(e)

Abstract

Nearly thirty years ago an article entitled ‘Alas, Alack the representation of the ballerina’ by the British performance artist, Rose English, was published in a special women’s issue of New Dance magazine. When I first wrote this chapter in 1994, her radical (in 1980) claim that the fetishism of woman as phallus is recognisable in much ballet, particularly in the pas de deux, had not been explored by any other dance writers, so I decided to investigate it further.2 In 1996, Susan Foster’s ‘The Ballerina’s Phallic Pointe’ explored the gendered nature of ballet originating in the Romantic period claiming that the ballerina is the phallus and the danseur ‘embodies the forces that pursue, guide and manipulate it’ (1996: 3). Despite our ignorance at the time of each other’s work, Foster and I were making very similar assertions. There are, however, distinctive differences in our accounts which render them complementary. Whereas I investigate the fetishisation of the ballerina as phallus in some depth, examining conflations and distinctions between penis and phallus, fetishism, the roles of desire and fantasy, specularisation, the gaze and the climax, Foster’s essay situates some of these ideas and claims within a broader historical account of nineteenth-century Romantic ballet. My account shows how the ballerina is fetishised as phallus in a dance example — the Giselle Act 2 pas de deux — and in some critics’ writing — Theophile Gautier’s contemporary descriptions of nineteenth-century Romantic ballets and Robert Greskovic’s contemporary account of a re-contextualised pas de deux from Karole Armitage’s Watteau Duet (1985).KeywordsSexual ObjectRomantic PeriodPsychoanalytic TheorySymbolic OrderNarrative ElementThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.