The Muse of Virtuosity: Desmond Richardson, Race, and Choreographic Falsetto

Abstract

This article interrogates the status ofvirtuosityin dance through the co-constitutive paradigms of race, gender, and class, accounting for both the term's emergence in journalistic arts discourse and how “queer of color” critique refines its meaning in and for contemporary performance culture (Roderick Ferguson). Virtuosity operates at the supposed border between popular and “high” art, and “Soul” and the mechanical, defining the location of the virtuoso's potential transgression. Discourses of virtuosity in performance are linked to connotations of excess, and examining formal and sociocultural aspects of virtuosic dance reveals under-recognized heterogeneity generated by vernacular influences on high art. Founded in 1994 by Desmond Richardson (as muse) and Dwight Rhoden (as choreographer), Complexions Contemporary Ballet exemplifies how much of “Africanist” choreography resists performing “ontopolitical critique” through stillness, privileging speed, stylistic hybridity, and technical intricacy (Brenda Dixon Gottschild, André Lepecki). I propose and develop the termchoreographic falsetto, likening Richardson's virtuosity to that of black “Post-Soul” singers such as Prince, on the one hand, and nineteenth-century virtuoso musicians and composers such as Liszt, on the other (Francesca Royster). Richardson performs queer black masculinity by exploiting hyperbolic technical skills typically reserved for women, expanding upon choreographic aesthetics initiated by George Balanchine, William Forsythe, Alvin Ailey, and Ulysses Dove. Calling upon Theodor Adorno and Max Weber's theories of virtuosity and charisma in music and religion (in addition to Ferguson, Royster, Gottschild, Lepecki, Thomas DeFrantz, Nathaniel Mackey, Joseph Roach, Susan Bernstein, and Gabriele Brandstetter), I account for a historically and cross-culturally prevalent (if relatively forgotten) aspect of virtuosity, namely its position at the meeting point of gender, religion, capitalism, and individualism.