Last Thursday, I attended the final Dress Rehearsal of Canción del Cuerpo [Song of the Body], the Dance Repertory Theatre's Spring Concert at the University of Texas at Austin. The concert featured UT dancers and members of El Colegio Del Cuerpo de Cartagena de Indias, "Colombia's first Contemporary Dance choreographic formation center, a dance school for disadvantaged children, and a professional dance company" (source). The concert included pieces featuring the two groups separately and combined, and was a culmination of an extended creation process including an exchange where UT students visited and worked in Cartagena, Colombia, and members of El Colegio Del Cuerpo visited our campus and worked here.
The first piece featuring the El Colegio Del Cuerpo members was the 4th "song" of the evening. The curtain had closed following the previous piece, and it opened several minutes later to reveal four men standing full front to the audience, and about a dozen wooden frames filled with red rose petals arranged in a grid on the floor of the stage. The men were wearing short, low-waisted black spandex shorts and long, full, sleeveless robes which were open, revealing the fronts of their bodies.
And then, the young woman sitting in front of me said - rather loudly - "Wow - I want to go to Colombia!"
Wow, indeed.
Now, I will not say that I was not impressed by these dancer's bodies - they had obviously been working and training intensely for a long time. It is also out of the ordinary (at least in university dance pieces) to see so many male bodies on stage at once - indeed, so many male bodies of color - and with so much bare skin. The distribution, in my experience at several universities, is typically very white and very female, with female bodies baring more skin than the male bodies.
However, it is one thing to recognize the dancer's body (which is, undeniably present), and quite another to announce one's desire to, well, colonize someone's country in your conquest for sexual gratification. So many things raced through my head: how could this privileged, white woman attending a university - and with enough money to get blond highlights in her hair and go to a tanning salon - make such a comment? And to announce it so unapologetically? I only hoped that her words did not carry to the stage, were artists were about to commence a carefully crafted performance.
And again, I concede that a woman expressing desire for a man could be seen as an interesting claiming of erotic agency. But she did not say, "Wow - they are hot!" What she did do was make a statement which equated these men with the entirety of their country, which made Colombia into a place of sexual conquest and tourism, which fetishized these artists into objects for sexual pleasure and effaced the work of their training and preparation for the concert, which perpetuated the placement of the erotic within an "Othered" Latinidad, which assumed herself as a desirable companion for all Colombian men, and which reified her place of privilege, specifically as a young, (what society deems an) attractive, white, affluent American.
With this one comment, the work of everyone involved in the concert seemed to be discarded. Indeed, the stated project of the performance and of El Colegio Del Cuerpo is very different than that which this woman experienced (or, at least, that which she expressed). Elissa Marshall, one of the UT students involved in the exchange wrote on the Department of Theatre & Dance's blog that, "It [the project] has made me realize the privilege I have been born into and has made me more motivated to help those in need. To whom much is given, much is expected and I truly understand that right now." Challenging assumptions and subject positions are some of the main benefits of educational and cultural exchanges (i.e. studying abroad); unfortunately, and not surprisingly, the woman sitting in front of me did not gain the same perspective through the performance.
Álvaro Restrepo is the co-director of El Colegio Del Cuerpo de Cartagena de Indias and was a guest choreographer for the concert. In the promotional materials for the concert, it was written that "[t]hrough his work with Afrodescendent communities, Restrepo’s dedication to his art becomes a vehicle for exploring human rights, race and social justice."
It is interesting that this is written of Restrepo, who choreographed the 4th song with the members of El Colegio Del Cuerpo. This quote is addressing the project of the company, which is to provide an alternative to the crushing unemployment and poverty of Cartagena. When put in conversation with the 4th song, however, I found this quote puzzling. During the piece, there was an extensive section where a female dancer entered the stage and did a section interacting with a frame, seemingly trapped by it and trying to break free. She then moved from one male dancer to another, connoting sexual interactions; while the interactions began in a mutual space, they moved - and dwelled - in a place of coercion, of force, of rape. Her body was thrown from male to male where she was groped and exposed.
The female dancer entered (if memory serves) two more times, very separate from and often secondary to the actions of the males. Once, she wore a long red dress and held an open red Chinese-style umbrella [this is perhaps not the best wording, but I am having trouble finding a better term] in front of her torso and head, walking very slowly along the periphery of the stage. The next time, she entered with the same umbrella, now closed, and walked to the center of the stage where she extended it upward and opened it, releasing a shower of white petals to the floor.
So, the piece began with a large section of the four male dancers performing, then the only female dancer in the piece entered as a victim of the frame, was made into a sexual object to be taken and passed around, and then she left, returning the focus to the four males. In the second half of the piece, she was used to create what seemed to be Orientalist spectacle, while the male dancers performed the main "text" of the performance.
I do not doubt that there are meanings and narratives which I am missing for the 4th "song." And, indeed, I am reading this performance conceived and performed by Colombian artists within my context as a white, U.S. American, feminist, activist PhD student/pedagogue/theatre practitioner. However, I cannot ignore the fact that the only female in the piece was first trapped by frames, then stripped of her agency and rights to her own body, and then used as a means of spectacle to accessorize male dancers. Whose human rights does this support? What social justice is achieved here? And what messages are being sent about race when men of color are portrayed as sexual aggressors, when a woman of color is a sexual object, and Orientalist imagery is used to decorate a stage?
Unfortunately, the marking of male bodies of color as different continued into the costume design for the final piece, which included dancers from UT and from El Colegio Del Cuerpo. This piece featured white female UT students in sleek, graceful, jewel-toned leotards with matching chiffon skirts, and Colombian males of color in earth-toned, balloon-y, fabric shorts made of bulky, rough fabric. [This was how I perceived the distribution of dancers in this piece; as it was a dress rehearsal, I did not receive a program, and could not verify this information.] While the females had lightly jeweled and trimmed accents to their costumes which were later removed, the males' removable pieces were bulky, geometric, simplistic belts. All of these choices seem to perpetuate a problematic binary between men of color as primitive and rough, and white women as civilized and fragile.
An article about the concert and exchange project quoted Álvaro Restrepo as saying, "[i]n the dance studio, you are valued for who you are and not what you have." I wish that this ideal had been applied to the characteristics of dancer's bodies when choices about choreography and costuming were made.
Note: I assume no knowledge of these individuals' sex or gender; all references should be taken as referring to the normative representations of cisgenderness commonly presented in concert dance.
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