Funny Girls, and Some Serious Ones

Abstract

Funny Girls, and Some Serious Ones Rogoff Jay (bio) As race and gender play increasingly political roles in the arts, ballet’s traditional masculine pursuit of the idealized woman can make it look retrograde. Today’s ballet choreographers, however, play with the courtly, classical, and romantic images that have dominated classical dance for two centuries, most particularly in the pas de deux. For his visceral, ingratiating 2017 sneaker ballet, The Times Are Racing, the New York City Ballet’s Justin Peck experimented with gender-neutral casting. He turned a guys’ tap/hip-hop competition for himself and Robert Fairchild into a heterosexual dance-off between Peck and Ashly Isaacs, a dynamic young daredevil who explodes thrillingly into a man’s world. Then, more star- tlingly, he replaced ballerina Tiler Peck (no relation to Justin) with Taylor Stanley in the languorous pas de deux with Daniel Applebaum, turning it into a homoerotic expression of romantic fulfillment and malaise. For her ballet Not Our Fate, which debuted a few months after Peck’s work, NYCB principal Lauren Lovette choreographed a male-male romantic pas for two of the company’s African American men, Stanley and Preston Chamblee. Young choreographers like Lovette and Peck have thus begun confronting the tensions between the balletic tradition they love and the urgent iden- tity pressures of our complicated times. The National Museum of Dance, in my home town of Saratoga Springs, New York, currently has on show Gender Neutral, which sketches ballet’s long history of gender-bending for purposes both high and low and exam- ines the travesty tradition, as well as nontraditional approaches to gender in dance. Balletic travesty originated in the court of Louis XIV, where men, in high solemnity, danced goddesses as well as gods. In 19th-century Paris, the economic power of the male subscribers induced the Opera Ballet to cast women as male romantic leads in both comic and tragic works, roles that exposed the legs and emphasized the figures of the abonnées’ favorites in ways ankle-length tutus could not. These travesty roles aroused the audience, but not to laughter, for the convention was as ingrained as that of boy-actors playing women on Shakespeare’s stage. Meanwhile, a differ- ent travesty tradition developed, of men dancing female character roles, some serious, like Carabosse, the wicked fairy in The Sleeping Beauty, and others riotous, like the Widow Simone, the heroine’s mother in La Fille Mal Gardée, and, in the 20th century, the stepsisters in Cinderella. The grotesque hilarity of male bodies corseted into female roles for which they are dreadfully unsuited partly underlies the history of our greatest travesty ballet troupe, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. The Trocks, who have been making hash of the classical repertory since 1974, stopped for a one-night stand last April at the Egg in Albany. Even if you know nothing about ballet, the Trocks present a delightful spectacle because they mock the gender roles that fossilized under two centuries of balletic sediment, roles that themselves parody historical gender ste- reotypes in the culture at large, and which may well survive solely in classical dance. If you know even a little about ballet, the jokes become funnier, because they expose the essential absurdity of ballet’s artifice and conventions. The Trocks josh the tradition of Russian émigré troupes of the 1930s and ’40s, who rechristened their dancers with Russian names—Alice Marks of London’s East End became Alicia Markova, for example. Each of the Trocks undertakes both female and male roles, and the dancers bear bogus names like Nadia Doumiafeyva and Mikhail Mypansarov. The Trocks’ Swan Lake, a laugh-out-loud triumph, balances slapstick and expertise to produce, in place of drearily conventional Ballet Humor, deeply funny travesty. Every joke skewers either classical ballet in general, the excesses of Swan Lake in particular, or both. The sorcerer, Von Rothbart (Robert Carter as diminutive, fussy Yuri Smirnov), pulling a single stuffed swan slowly across the stage on a long leash, finally loses patience and yanks it into the wings. Odette, the Swan Queen (Philip Martin-Nielson as Nadia Doumiafeyva), and Prince Siegfried (Duane Gosa as Vladimir Legupski) perpetrate a...