Dial D For...Dance (Week 2)
On bumping, on grinding, on bodies
Dial D For…is a weekly newsletter by fiction writer, D. Arthur. Each week, I will do a deep dive (two Ds!!!) into a topic that begins with the letter...you guessed it…D. I will also provide some recs of things to watch/do/eat. Welcome!
Week 2: Dance
I hate clubs, but I miss dancing. I have no rhythm, no coordination, but I love a wedding dance floor where I lap my steps for the month and shake my hair and get sweaty. I like a twirl and a dip and a cheesy dad move.
In middle school, we would all pile into someone’s mom’s minivan and get dropped off at the one Catholic school that held open dances. Everyone bumped and grinded for the first time, a juvenile vocabulary for dry humping on the dance floor. I remember snapping glow necklace, watching the dull liquid turn bright yellow or green. One time, someone bit into it and the liquid stained their mouth, their teeth glowed green. That Catholic school closed a handful of years ago. Now it’s an apartment building. I wonder what it’s like to fall asleep in a renovated loft surrounded by the ghosts of a thousand first boners.
My cousin (Hi Danielle!) is a great dancer and danced seriously for all of our childhoods. I, with less grace, would watch her and her friends perform choreographed dances at Danielle’s annual birthday pool party. One year, I did spend a few weeks with her as a Jr. Jill, the youth cheer camp offshoot of the Buffalo Bills’ now defunct cheerleading squad. I awkwardly danced along while my cousin and her experienced friends tumbled and twirled. One of my 2020 goals is to finally do a split, and I am…far from completing that goal. At 28, I have never done a cartwheel. Even though I lack my cousin’s dancing skills and grace, we still found one aspect of dance as a common ground: the movie Center Stage. We watched it over and over again, drawn to the snarky characters, the sexy undertones. In hindsight, how could I not have a crush on Zoë Saldana?
Professional dancers are known for their lithe bodies, this horrible tension between pure athleticism and the fact that their bodies…cannot…be athletic. This seems to tangle up in ideas of femininity. Ballet feels like the domain of straight women with slick chignons being lifted in the air by the strong arms of a cis twink. What does dance history look like in terms of queer women?
As someone who is in a lot of ways still coming out, I am a voracious reader of queer history. Sure, I don’t know a lot about the history of ballet in general, but I definitely don’t know much about lesbian ballerinas. When you google “lesbian ballet,” six of the ten results on the first page are porn. This happens a lot. I google “something + lesbian” and instead of finding tender queer history, the screen fills up with links to pornhub, xvideos, xhamster. It’s kind of funny if I don’t think about it hard enough for it to make me sad.
I found this article from 2019 in Dance Magazine about queer dancers, including Kiara Felder, a ballerina formerly with the Atlanta Ballet, now with a group in Montreal. Kiara, a queer Black woman, talks about lack of representation but ultimately finding an inclusive environment. Unfortunately, she does highlight the fact that she had to find a lesbian community outside of the dance company (specifically at A Camp, shout out Autostraddle). She also talks about how people are surprised to meet a lesbian ballerina because they have ideas of lesbians as a certain kind of butch woman. She dispels that stereotype as a dancer who leans into femininity. Yes, it is important to make space for different gender presentation in the lesbian community, we love femmes, but I also want to see space for butch ballerinas.
It’s also worth noting that Kiara’s experience as a queer dancer is also informed by her experience as a Black dancer. More recently, in 2020, Kiara spoke to ARTSAtl about systemic racism in the ballet world. There could be a whole newsletter about the whiteness of ballet, the appropriation of Black dance, the purity around how white dancing and Black dancing are perceived, going all the way back to the ideas of Black dancing as a specific type of entertainment or minstrelsy. I am not the right person to write that newsletter, but I recognize that it cannot be overlooked.
In my searching, I did find Ballez. In their own words: “Ballez is lesbians doing ballet. AND Ballez is not just lesbians, it’s all the queers that ballet has left out.” This company has elite dancers representing a broader swath of sexuality and gender. Their mission and the make up of their company also seems angled toward dismantling the white hetero patriarchy’s influence on dance. Founded by genderqueer lesbian choreographer Katy Pyle, this group does shows, teaches classes, and more. Ballez seems committed to reinventing and reconstructing ideas of ballet by performing traditional ballet’s through an activist lens. Their mission recognizes the fact that queerness is not inherently new to ballet, they are just working to bring it to the forefront through reimagined classic works. I half-jokingly half-seriously like to point to things that I think are inherently queer (men’s and women’s hockey, Taylor Swift songs, Beanie Babies, etc), but it seems like dance is one of those inherently queer things.
I am intrigued by Ballez, and I am excited by the diversity of race, gender, and sexuality on their company page, but there is still a certain aesthetic to the group. Where are the fat dancing dykes? When I look into fat dance companies, I find a focus on fitness or on body positivity. Why can’t we have fat queer bodies dancing as a form of art? And if we can have that, if it exists out there, why is it so hard for me to find?
Reading about Kiara and Ballez, it was heartening to see a move toward new space for diverse queer dancers, but it hurts to think about all of the lesbian dancers throughout history that must have existed without being able to vocally and physically express their queer identity through dance. I believe in the hidden queer history of dance, and with more time and energy I hope to unravel it.
In my fiction, when I want to write scenes of joy, I often write scenes with dancing—a spin on a wedding dance floor, drunk bodies moving to music in the guts of a 24-hour diner, shoes sticking and unsticking to the floor of a grimy bar. In my real life, I find joy in these gatherings as well. As an event producer, party planner, the friend with a lot of air but also a lot of Capricorn in her chart, I am fueled by the joy that comes from bringing together the people I love, bringing together the bodies of those I love. I have struggled with my personal life and in turn, my writing, in the wake of a world without parties. What does joy look like when we can’t gather and share the same air? How do bodies exist together when they are apart? I am still searching for the answers to these questions for myself and for my work.
Can you believe that we used to feel safe getting so close to other people that their sweat would rub off on us and we would laugh and keep moving? I want to laugh. I want to keep moving.
Sometimes, I want to hinge my neck around like I’m being exorcised, want to hear the little pops and cracks of stiff bones along to the music, any music. Sometimes, when I feel sad, I will make my partner, Grey, twirl me around the apartment. I will pick up the dog or the cat and jostle them and they might not like it, but I will call it dancing.
Watch This
Suspiria (2018) - Feels very queer, and encompasses the body horror of ballet in a dark and slow burn sort of way.
Read This
My friend Alysandra Dutton wrote, Firebirds, a stunning story about young ballet dancers, friendship, desperation, and trauma. I like to say it has the short story vibe of “White Houses” by Vanessa Carlton.
Do This
Check out Ballez and maybe take one of their online classes if you, like me, are feeling a desire to move.
Shameless Self-Promo
If you don’t already, follow me on twitter & instagram. You can find more of my writing on my website. If you like what you read here, you can download my micro-chapbook Cybering which came out from Ghost City Press earlier this Summer, free or pay-what-you-want.
Until next week,
D
Are you a queer dancer who wants to talk to me about your experience? I would love to connect! Is there a “D” you want to see in future newsletters? Send along your favorite “D” words to help inspire upcoming weeks.