Reworking the Ballet: Counter Narratives and Alternative Bodies

by Midgelow; Vida L.

• ISBN13: 9780415976039
• ISBN10: 0415976030
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2007-12-19
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Challenging and unsettling their predecessors, modern choreographers such as Matthew Bourne, Mark Morris and Masaki Iwana have courted controversy and notoriety by reimagining the most canonical of Classical and Romantic ballets. In this book, Vida Midgelow illustrates the ways in which these contemporary reworkings destroy and recreate their source material, turning ballet from a classical performance to a vital exploration of gender, sexuality and cultural difference. Reworking the Ballet: Counter Narratives and Alternative Bodies articulates the ways that audiences and critics can experience these new versions, viewing them from both practical and theoretical perspectives, including: eroticism and the politics of touch performing gender cross-casting and cross-dressing reworkings and intertextuality cultural exchange andhybridity.

Author Biography

Vida L. Midgelow is a reader in Performance Studies and Dance at the University of Northampton, specialising in European dance practices, choreographic methodologies and the radical reworking of the classics.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Approaching Reworkings of the Ballet in Theory and Practice

Reworking the ballet: (en)countering the canon

Reworking the ballet

Defining the terms of the discourse

Reviewing five

Giselles

Counter discourses and the canon

Reconsidering the past: reworkings as postmodern historiography

Reworkings as Intertextual Practices

Towards a definition of reworkings

Canonical crossings: narratives and forms revisioned

Strategies of dissonance - moments of sameness

Inverting bodies: reformulating the dance vocabulary

Re-telling tales: new contexts, new narratives

Gender bending: Cross-casting and Cross-dressing

Feathered pantaloons and homoeroticism

Hyperbole and eccentricity

The heterosexual matrix and beyond

Strategies of dispersal: Intertextuality and the carnivalesque

Re-figuring the body and the politics of identity

Female bodies and the erotic: Performativity, becoming and the phallus

Encounters between reworkings and feminism

Lac de Signes (1983) and The Ballerina's Phallic Pointe (1994)

Looking-at-to-be-looked-at-ness: performance and spectacle

Trans-contextualizing bodies: postmodern parody and hybridity

Parodic comedy and the performativity of gender

The phallus, the penis, the dildo and the ballerina

O (a set of footnotes to Swan Lake) (2002)

Open texts - enacting becomings

Hybrid body - plural bodies - my body

Breaking the gaze - inscribing a haptic presence

Eroticism and the politics of touch

Princely revisions: Stillness, excess and queerness

Masculinities, the male dancer and reworkings

The Hypochondriac Bird (1998)

Swan Lake, 4 Acts (2005)

In the gaps and absences

Excess: De Frutos and homoeroticism

Stillness and (dis)ability: Hoghe and the ontology of dance

(Auto)corpography and (beyond) queer theory

Intercultural encounters: Flesh, hybridity and the exotic

Reworkings as intercultural discourse

Shakti and Swan Lake (1998)

Masaki Iwana and The Legend of Giselle (Jizeru-den) (1994)

Cultural (ex)change and hybridity

Orientalism and the exotic

Enter the Silver Swan: excess and the erotic

Fleshly metamorphosis and becomings in butoh

Commodification, appropriation and the global market

Conclusion: Transgressive Desires

Reworkings as canonical counter-discourse

The double gesture: beyond the binary of otherness

Diversity and difference: (re)inscribing the body

Pleasure and power: the (re)eroticised body

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