The Flowing Gender: A Comment on Badiou’s “Dance as a Metaphor for Thought”

Mina Chen

What role does gender, or even the existence of human beings as gendered, play in the production and interpretation of the art of dance? In “Dance as a Metaphor for Thought,” Badiou examines gender in dance by noting that dance is composed of “the conjunction and disjunction of sexed positions” in his desire to arrive at a definition of dance that effaces the omnipresence of the sexes: Turning now to the third principle the effaced omnipresence of the sexes—we can extract it from the apparently contradictory declarations of Mallarmé. It is this contradiction that is given in the opposition that I am establishing between “omnipresence” and “effaced.” We could say that dance universally manifests that there are two sexual positions (whose names are “man” and “woman”) and that, at the same time, it abstracts or erases this duality. […] All of its movements retain their intensity within paths whose crucial gravitation unites—and then separates—the positions of “man” and “woman.” […] (Badiou 64-65).

By implying that there is some sort of human fusion occurring through the powerful melding and communication of dance movements, Badiou goes beyond Mallarmé’s claim that “every dance is ‘nothing but the mysterious and sacred interpretation’ of the kiss” (Badiou 64). Denying the existence of sex in our modern world is impossible; the material reality of sex cannot be eliminated. However, we can transcend sex and reach the unadulterated love that occurs between two beings through movement. That is what Badiou is getting at when he discusses Mallarmé’s fifth principle: “dance is a thinking without relation, the thinking that relates nothing, that puts nothing in relation” (Badiou 66).

The ‘absence of gender’ that Badiou claims is paradoxically erased in his writing, because he uses ‘she’ in his subsequent narrative to refer to the dancers he discusses and concentrates the rest of his argument on the female dancers. This may suggest a non-transgressiveness of gender issues in dance. Dance, especially traditional ballet, is inherently rigid in its gender binary. A classic example is Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. The tragic swan princess who falls in love with a prince is the subject of the classical ballet Swan Lake, and while the female body typically assumes a richer expressive demand in these performances, the prince, a male character, is actually the main focus of the plot. We can significantly see that here, and indeed in most ballets, there is a clear division of labor between male and female dancers. No matter how the classical Swan Lake is performed, the human prince always assumes the initiative in a relationship.

But the swan is essentially a very strong and aggressive kind of water bird. In other words, the classical Swan Lake’s portrayal of the female swan is based on a common misconception human beings have about the uncharted natural world. We are adding rather than subtracting by imposing human gender consciousness on the natural world rather than giving back thought and action to the pre-language world. In response, choreographer Matthew Bourne adapted the original version and created a new story about swans. He substituted male swans for females, gathered countless videos of wild swans, observed their communication with one another and with humans, and then incorporated the branches into the dance. In Bourne’s version, the swan switches from being a symbol of softness to a union of strength, freedom, independence, and individuality, thus becoming the dominant player in the relationship. This narrative could be interpreted as a refutation of some of Badiou’s ideas. That is, we stand on the basis of the gender binary of the classical ballet world to explore how humans think. It turns out that the perception and control of emotions does not actually require an understanding of the body and gender—the process itself does not even require the body, or rather, the physical differences of bodies.

The modern world suggests that gender is not the boundary of love, while the classical ballet world has strict rules for both sexes. The collision of these two has produced Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, which presents an interpretation of “dance [as] entirely composed of the conjunction and disjunction of sexed positions” (Badiou 65). As the male swan spreads his wings in the blue moonlight and arches his neck and shoulders over the prince’s body, the boundaries of gender are blurred and even disappear. It is difficult to say whether he is male or female or whether in this process he “subtracted his body from every knowledge of a body” (Badiou 66), truly completing a kind of absence of the dancer. In subtracting the human body from the dance, they complete a transformation from human to bird. The discipline of the civilized world dissipates and is replaced by a return to the natural world shared by humans and swans before the advent of language—a world where thoughts and emotions can be expressed in a straightforward manner.

Ironically, however, the strategy used in this attempt to explore the persistent problem of gender in ballet is to turn the swan into a male, not the prince into a princess. Thus the cultural status quo that the completion of the love narrative must be achieved by male approval and response is not addressed—instead, there is an avoidance of the problem. It is true that through this adaptation we see the human body subtracted, the dance closer to its natural essence, and the swan dominating the relationship. But if the strength and aggressiveness in ballet can only be accomplished by male dancers, and the fragility only by female dancers, how can dance really exist as a form of communication that breaks gender boundaries? Like Badiou’s use of “she” to refer to the dancer after completing his description, Matthew Bourne’s half-hearted attempt at an adaptation continues to underscore sex and gender differences in its creation.

Bibliography

Badiou, Alain. “Dance as a Metaphor for Thought.” Handbook of Inaesthetics, translated by Alberto Toscano. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, 56–71.