Fame or Famine

I’m working today on digitizing a dance performance by Douglas Rosenberg, a scholar and artist in the field of dance for the camera (Great Dance has done some interviews with him, if you’d like to know more about the guy).

The thing is, the performance that I’m digitizing was originally conceived with the dancers wearing long floor-length white skirts and nothing else. The bodies were going to be lit by a projected slide of text – take a look at the splash page at DVPG.net to see what I mean.

I know this is how it was intended, because I was the assistant to Doug when he conceived of the idea, and through several performances (though not on his world tour, dammit…gotta learn to make myself more indispensable). It wasn’t designed that way for any puerile or remotely sexual reason – no, it was designed if anything to portray a vulnerability (as the piece was originally about a devastating car accident) and a purity of the moment.

Well, in this particular performance, the performers all wore bras. White bras. And while you’d think that it wouldn’t make so much difference…I find that instead of concealing, it draws attention to the fact that they are intentionally covering themselves in that one particular way. It says “You can see this skin, but not that skin, because that skin is dirty!”

I can only think that it has something to do with the fact that this particular performance was in Utah, but it makes me wonder if it was the gallery curators or the performers themselves (local dancers) who insisted? I’ve seen it happen before where many will be comfortable with their bodies in the nude, but there’s one dancer or performer who decides that their comfort outweighs the vision of the piece, and as a result everyone wears some sort of fig-leaf.

And I think it’s a shame that as a culture we can’t get past this idea that nudity implies sexuality, or that sexuality is something that needs to be hidden or found to be “shameful”. I’ve heard some argue that “oh, it’s not shameful, it’s just sacred!” to which I snort cynically (taken me years of practice-snorting, but I’ve managed it). The women in Sharia-ruled countries wear burkas for the same sort of reasoning – and what it comes down to is the connection in the mind. Whether it’s “I can see a nipple! It must be porn!” or “I can’t possibly show my breast, they might think I’m a slut!” it’s a ridiculous leap, conditioned by a culture that can demonize Janet Jackson while at the same time extolling a cigar-wielding Bob Dole as a model for “family values.”

It just makes me tired, because I happen to think that sensuality and sexuality does belong in art, and deserves aesthetic exploration – but there’s so much considered “improper” that it’s almost impossible.

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