https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YFqViGOXYGbD5mtV2C3htkuid2FUmolT/view?usp=sharing
The Happiness of Love: A Critique of Queer Joy in Dance
My remix project aims to show a story of queer romance through dance. In classical
ballet, every dance is gendered. Each section is either all women, all men, or a man and a
woman. There is no space for queer people. Recently, there has been a push for the
representation of queer people, both in new works about them and for a space in classical works.
However, even the works by queer people about queer people are biased. They are dramatized,
sexualized, and often depressing. As The Queer Joy Project explains, “often stories of the
LGBTQ+ experience center on coming out, tragedy, physical injury, or the trauma of being
forced to comply with heteronormativity. Even now, with more diverse stories in media, happy
endings are few and far between.” There is a very obvious lack of soft love stories, of queer joy.
I critiqued certain works that stood out to me as upsetting by juxtaposing them with the
romantic performance that I created. These works only show the sadness that queer people
experience instead of the happiness that comes with romance. Clips of Christopher Rudd’s
“Touché”, Adriana Pierce’s “I Am Enough”, and Alejandro Gonzalvez and Adriana Pierce’s
“Portrait d’une Femme” play in black and white, interspersed with clips of myself and my
partner dancing in full color. The critique isn’t explicit but implied in the completely different
tones of the overlaid clips. Where the other dancers flinch away from each other, we lean into
each other. Where they run from the camera, we are only looking at each other. I took these
works that I felt were missing the element of queer joy and put them next to something that was
specifically about queer joy to make the absence of romance more apparent.
Remixing is adding your own ideology, personality, experiences, and creativity to an
existing work. Critique helps us create an original remix because we can evaluate what we think
is missing from the work, and then recreate it with the addition of those missing elements. All
remixes start with critique, whether implicit or explicit. A remix comes from changing
something you dislike about a work, even if you may not realize that you dislike it.
While anyone can critique any work for any reason, our personal identities let us provide
a new perspective on something. Most critique begins by examining something using an
intervening discourse. An intervening discourse, or critical lens, is an outside theory used to
interpret the text. It allows you to look at the text through specific eyes. Some common examples
are critical race theory, feminist theory, Marxist theory, and queer theory. Using a critical lens to
analyze a cultural object means introducing a new ideology that wasn’t explicitly present to
interpret the ideas that are present. It provides a new way to engage with that object.
There are only a certain number of lenses through which to look at and critique
something, but the use of personal identity as an additional lens makes that critique original.
Even if two people are analyzing something using an ideology that has already been applied to it,
they will each have a new perspective on both the subject and the ideology because of their
unique identity. If one were to use a discourse that somehow relates to their personal
experiences, they can use their experience as another lens to analyze through. If the discourse
does not apply to them, they can only use someone else’s thoughts on it. No one has the same
experiences or identity, so they can’t interpret things in the same way. If you use your personality
to do anything, it will be original because it comes from you, and you cannot be replicated or a
replication.
To start my project, I looked at dance through both the lens of queer theory and my
personal identity as a queer woman. Looking at classical ballet using queer theory is relatively
simple: there are no queer characters, romances, or stories. I looked into newer pieces of
choreography that specifically feature queer stories. Much of the analysis using my identity
happened during this stage because many of the dances were focused on gay men. Not seeing
myself in these works, I dug further to find dances between two women. I did find such dances,
but while I found examples of my identity, I didn’t find examples of my experiences. “I Am
Enough” seemed to be about the hardship that comes with a queer relationship instead of the
relationship itself. The women were reaching for each other through ropes, and their bodies were
contorted in a sense of anguish. In “Portrait d’une Femme”, the relationship was focused on sex
instead of love. The camera was often centered on the women’s bodies, even panning over their
torsos as they lay on the ground. I longed to see a simple love story without trauma or
hypersexuality. So, I created one.
My remix functions to critique the representation of queer romance in ballet because it
shows what each work is missing. Viewers can see the difference in tone between my work and
the work of others, and it makes the audience think more critically about the critiqued works.
They may not have noticed the sexual nature of “Portrait d’une Femme”, or truly identified the
symbolism of the ropes in “I Am Enough”, but next to a saccharine love story it becomes
glaringly obvious. These stories only show one side of queer relationships, and I remixed them to
be more inclusive, in the process applying my learning from the whole semester. I can
understand the difference between plagiarism and remix, knowing that I did not plagiarize
because I added pieces of myself to the works and did not try to pass them off as my own. By
adding pieces of myself, I understand how personal identity plays a role in critique. Finally,
because personal identity is so important in critique, I know that my critique is original because
my identity is original.
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