Reading and Writing (the Problem)

Argh!  A couple of years ago, I felt called upon to really investigate problems my practice threw up (and I mean that phrase).  So I started to write; to articulate my thoughts in written form.  Now, as I undertake this PhD, I read and write regularly.  And the more I know and learn, the more I am embarrassed about anything I have ever written!  Can I believe my own front?!  I've found some lovely articulations of the problems and thoughts I wish to work through, so I shall quote them here.  With great thanks to their author, Craig Owens, whose words here could be re-interpreted into a manifesto.  Perhaps I can get into dialogue with them later.  Or, I need to confront the problem and take up the challenge of the last sentence.

Among those prohibited from Western representation, whose representations are denied all legitimacy, are women.  Excluded from representation by its very structure, they return within it as a figure for—a representation of—the unrepresentable (Nature, Truth, the Sublime etc).  This prohibition bears primarily on woman as the subject, and rarely as the object of representation, for there is certainly no shortage of images of women. [ … ] In order to speak, to represent herself, a woman assumes a masculine position; perhaps this is why femininity is frequently associated with masquerade, with false representation, with simulation and seduction.¹

What can be said about the visual arts in a patriarchal order that privileges vision over the other senses?  Can we not expect them to be a domain of masculine privilege—as their histories indeed prove them to be—a means perhaps, of mastering through representation the “threat” posed by the female?  In recent years there has emerged a visual arts practice informed by feminist theory and addressed, more or less explicitly, to the issue of representation and sexuality. [ … ] [W]omen have begun the long-overdue process of deconstructing femininity.  Few have produced new, “positive” images of a revised femininity; to do so would simply supply and thereby prolong the life of the existing representational apparatus.²

1. Craig Owens (1992) Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press pp 166-190, p.170.

2. Ibid p.180.

My Song (With Thanks to Laura Mulvey and Kander and Ebb / All That Jazz)

1.

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance,                                                                                               

pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.                                     

The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure, which is sty~~~led accordingly. 

In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at

and

displayed,

2.

with their appearance coded for strong visual impact                                                                         

so~that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at~~~-ness.                                                            

Woman displayed as sexual object is leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin ups to strip-tea~~~se,

from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to

and signifies

male desire. 

3.

Mainstream film neatly combined spectacle and narrative.                                                            

(Note~however, how in the musical song-and-dance numbers interrupt the flow                        

of the diegesis.) The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film,

yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a

story-

line.

Gilda's Song: Put the Blame on Mame

1.

When they had the earthquake in San Francisco

Back in nineteen-six

They said old Mother Nature

Was up to her old tricks

That’s the story that went around

But here’s the real lowdown

Put the blame on Mame, boys

Put the blame on Mame

One night she started to shim and shake

That brought on the Frisco quake

So you can put the blame on Mame, boys

Put the blame on Mame

2.

They once had a shootin’ up in the Klondike

When they got Dan McGrew

Folks were putting the blame on

The lady known as Lou

That’s the story that went around

But here’s the real lowdown

Put the blame on Mame, boys

Put the blame on Mame

Mame did a dance called the hootchie-coo

That’s the thing that slew McGrew

Put the blame on Mame, boys

Put the blame on Mame

Judy Confronts the Audience

Go on, laugh, get your money’s worth. No one’s going to hurt you. I know you want me to tear my clothes off so you can look your fifty cents’ worth. Fifty cents for the privilege of staring at a girl the way your wives won’t let you. What do you suppose we think of you up here with your silly smirks your mothers would be ashamed of? We know it’d the thing of the moment for the dress suits to come and laugh at us too. We’d laugh right back at the lot of you, only we’re paid to let you sit there and roll your eyes and make your screamingly clever remarks. What’s it for? So you can go home when the show’s over, strut before your wives and sweethearts and play at being the stronger sex for a minute? I’m sure they see through you. I’m sure they see through you just like we do!^[1]

---

[1] Judy’s direct address to the audience in Dorothy Arzner’s (1940) Dance, Girl, Dance [film], RKO Radio Pictures. 

Watching the Vegas Showgirl

Whilst in Vegas I watched the following shows; Crazy Girls, X-Burlesque and Vegas The Show!  The first two were small scale revues.  Crazy Girls (http://www.lasvegas-nv.com/crazy-girls.htm) featured a variety of female dancers, some with excellent training and performance-personality, whilst others who seemed to specialise in their boob job.  I was unfortunate enough to get a front-row seat, which meant that I felt like my gaze was on view to the audience, and the dancers, I became self-conscious.  Wonderful dancing meant I could get over myself, but a large foam penis-prop used to sit on in one number made me so unbelively embarrased and made the whole show tacky, rather than knowingly tacky in a guilty pleasure way. However, the show was fun overall.  


X-Burlesque was a lack-lustre amateur job, nothing burlesque about it (http://shop.vegas.com/shows/showtimes2.jsp?show=1007#show_review).  Totally unworthy of the word burlesque.  The dancers were standard, with little charisma, and the numbers felt they owed much to the R'n' B video genre - if only they could be competently danced.  Pretty darned awful.


Vegas The Show! (http://www.vegastheshow.com/) proved even Vegas can have moments of self-reflexivity, and this large-scale musical looked back on the past glories of the town and quite incredibly, paid tribute to Sammy Davis Jr who had to fight incredible overt racism in order to enter through the front door at a venue in which he was top-billing.  A wonderful old-style revue to put a spring in my step.

Special Collections Archive UNLV

Went to University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) special collection to meet the women who started the oral history archive there, and read some of their transcripts http://www.library.unlv.edu/speccol/) .  The testimonies of the various Las Vegas showgirls were amazing, and addressed such wide issues from technique, upbringing, travel and visa arrangements, racism in Vegas etc.  They make for amazing reads and I managed to photocopy some of the best.  This made me wonder about using appropriated interviews too.  I’m not sure I have to be the interviewer, I’m just really interested in the voice of the showgirl.  It still doesn’t quite answer the question of what I will do with the interview material, but it got me thinking about it.

Watching the Parisien Showgirl

I saw the show at the Lido (http://www.lido.fr/us/cabaret-paris.html) and had great fun.  It was so camp its indescribable.  They feature showboys in their show as well as showgirls, and I have to say they just made me cringe (I’m cringing so much I cannot bring myself to type a description of their worst costume).  A featured act was a male acrobat who performed on two long bits of material.  He was incredibly strong and flexible and his costume was a small pair of white shorts.  I was interested to think about this.  Through the use of his body, he displayed both a masculinity (strength) and femininity (fluidity in his movements and flexibility), this routed his performance outside of camp, somehow and located him in some sort of more serious object-of-desire place, in a way that the showgirls operate.  The showboys, on the other hand, are total camp, in a way that sort of negates their skill and makes them look like a Butlins act.  They are not any sort of object of desire, they are, as far as I could tell, a tacky joke.  Of course, I have no access to the spectrum of responses that a gay male spectator might have, and who knows, perhaps they function as an object of desire for them.  My point is, for me, showboys, no.  (From other performance instances I can say, male showgirls, yes).

Watching Crazy Horse (http://www.lecrazyhorseparis.com/) I lost my visual innocence.  The cabaret featured a troupe of female dancers, who performed butt-naked except for a very small strip of what looked like black gaffer tape, strategically placed. Although there was an audience roughly evenly split between men and women, I felt transgressive watching it, as though the whole spectacle was directed towards a male spectator and not me.  It was by far the most knowing caberet-revue I have seen.  It reputedly crosses over with burlesque as earlier this year Dita Von Teese was their featured artist.  However, I think this says more about Dita’s hetero-normative position within burlesque that she can cross over into more overt stripping contexts, rather than Crazy Horse’s closeness to burlesque. 

I felt that the show did a number of things in terms of styling and choreography that took the whole thing far closer to a gentlemen's club dance context.  For example, the lighting and choreography dissected the bodies so that we saw perhaps, only legs performing.  I found the amount that we did not see the faces of the performers quite shocking.  There was no opportunity for the performers to ‘send-up’ the performance with their faces in darkness or out of view.  I found this the hardest aspect to handle.  I also felt that the repetitive use of the arched-back position that pushes the bum out moved the performances away from mainstream theatrical dance technique (which is often clearly visible in burlesque performances and particularly at the Lido) and more towards of gentleman’s club stripping.  I realised watching the Crazy Horse that I actually need to watch strip shows featuring lap and pole dancing so that I can write about the gaps and overlaps between the different styles of performing I’m interested in.  The show also featured some numbers that felt really disturbing and uncomfortable, for example a solo performance with a dancer who commenced her number tied up in ropes, and then used the ropes as props to perform on.  It’s S&M references felt shallow and quite frankly, anti-women.

The featured act was a male tap duo, which came as a blessed relief.  Fully clothed, the two were fully spot-lit, used their faces, audience interaction, humour and a number of different tap dancing ‘quotes’ to create an entertaining number.  And then we had to return to the strobe-lit naked women.  It was like our one moment of fun.  The seriousness of the naked women was alienating, I longed to see some smiling faces!