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| The cover of the book "The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture" |
Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular CultureNow I will review another of the book's articles -- "Dirty Dancing and Its Stage Jukebox Dansical Adaptation: The Dancing Male in a Teenage Female Fantasy of Desire and Sensuality", written by George Rodosthenous.
Is Dirty Dancing a Musical?
Straightness and Dirtiness in Dirty Dancing
Generic Hybridity in Dirty Dancing
Dirty Dancing as a Teenage Rite-of-Passage Film
Dirty Dancing as Reagan-era Cinema and "Reaganite Entertainment"
Anachronistic Music in Dirty Dancing
Dressing and Undressing in Dirty Dancing: Consumption, Gender, and Visual Culture in the 1980s
Dirty Dancing: Feminism, Postfeminism and Neo-Feminism
"(I've Had) The Time of My Life": Romantic Nostalgia and the Early 1960s
"There Are a Lot of Things About Me That Aren't What You Thought": The Politics of Dirty Dancing
"It's a Feeling; A Heartbeat": Nostalgia, Music, and Affect in Dirty Dancing
White Enough
Vestron Video and Dirty Dancing
From Screen to Stage: Dirty Dancing Live
This review will complete my reviews of all the book's articles.
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| George Rodostenous |
George Rodosthenous is a lecturer in music theater at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries of the University of Leeds. He is the artistic director of the theater company Altitude North and also works as a freelance composer for the theater.======
His research interests are the body in performance, directing, refining improvisational techniques and compositional practices for performance, devising pieces with live musical soundscapes as interdisciplinary process, the rector as coach, updating Greek tragedy, and the British musical.
He is currently working on the book Theatre as Voyeurism: the Pleasure(s) of Watching.
Rodosthenous writes only about the stage play and mentions several moments that are not in the movie. Of course, his discussion of the stage play applies largely to the movie too. In my review here, I will sometimes call Dirty Dancing a "work" in order to encompass both the stage play and the movie.
Rodosthenous's article develops the concept that women enjoy watching the work because they perceive Johnny Castle to be extraordinarily beautiful and sexy when he dances. Watching him evokes memories of their own sexual desires and experiences. The article's first paragraph concludes:
Dirty Dancing empowered women and allowed them to go on journeys of self-discovery maturity, and liberation. According to [film essayist] Lyn Gardner, the film “gave a generation of young women permission to get in touch with their own bodies and sexual desire.”Of course, Patrick Swayze and the stage-play actors are extraordinarily beautiful and sexy men even when they are just moving normally. However, the work arouses the female audience further when and because he dances.
In dance history, the beautiful dancers normally have been the female dancers. When male dancers are present too, they mostly frame the beautiful female dancers.
[Dance essayist Christine] Mennesson writes that “during the nineteenth century, professional artistic dancing was prohibited for men, who were relegated to the rank of porteur (a man who lifts and carries the ballerina) to glorify female dancers.” .... Since the dance masters designed and invented the dance technique, female ballerinas were still controlled by the masters. The latter used women to show the craft and attract an audience. The women were their muses and were also used as “bodies on display” ....Watching Johnny dance -- and dancing with him -- awakens Baby sexually.
Since the 1990s, we have seen [a] shift in perceptions, engagements, and expectations from the male dancer .... the male ballet dancer has been re-invented in the theatre canon. .... These works erotised and homo-erotised the male body, giving it a new political status.
Strong muscular dancers with their strong physical presence are compared and equated to athletes, and this is now generally regarded is a more acceptable behavior and casting decision. The male lead in Dirty Dancing has recontextualized the male dancer and has provided new role model for younger generations ....
This presents an important shift in public perceptions regarding male dancers; even as recently as the 1980s, the male dancer was not entirely taken seriously as a respectable occupation for men. ....
In Dirty Dancing ... the lead young girl finds dancing to be something noble, attractive, and glamorous, while she instantly admires the male dancing body.
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Rodosthenous classifies the work into a genre that he calls the dansical. Furthermore, he classifies it into a sub-genre that he calls the jukebox dansical. In my own words, this sub-genre encompasses works in which the characters dance to nostalgic popular songs. I like that classification, and I wonder what other works might fit into that sub-genre.
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Rodosthenous points out that musicals -- here he does not specify dansicals -- often include dream scenes in which the sleeping character dreams of dancing. Rodosthenous does not name any examples, but I myself thought of Fiddler on the Roof and Carousel and Oklahoma.
The article's discussion of dancing dream scenes is gratuitous, because there is no such scene in Dirty Dancing. The movie (and the stage play?) does, however, a dream that Johnny describes to Baby.
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| Johnny telling Baby about his dream |
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Rodosthenous discusses subconscious bisexual arousal in the scene where Penny guides Baby's dancing.
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| Johnny watching Penny and Baby dance together |
The scene is constructed gently to serve its romantic narrative, and unlike in most ménages a trois, the first meeting of the three is not painful but has a welcoming feel to it. The female instructor ensures ... that the technical aspect of the choreography is transferred from body to body, while the male instructor stresses the importance of focusing the energy on the dancing partner’s eyes.Since, according to Rodosthenous, the work celebrates women's admiration of beautiful men dancing, it's remarkable that the work's only single-sex dance is this dance of two women. Wouldn't the female audience enjoy watching Johnny dance with another man?
The three undulating bodies are moving in harmony to the music, and this unifying proximity and physicality allow the audience’s imagination to be “aroused.” ... For the heterosexual male audience, this love triangle could perhaps be an erotic fantasy come true.
For the heterosexual female audience, the triangle might work on the level of another kind of fantasy, the fantasy that the freedom of dancing provides and its romantic associations: inviting a new, young “uninitiated” understudy to join the ritual of performance. This rite of passage, this unavoidable reality, is sensualized and glamorized here. Dancing becomes a catalyst for Baby’s repressed emotions and the facilitator for her liberation.
After all, isn't Johnny bi-sexual? Sure he is!
One reality, however, is that watching two men dance together is more disturbing than arousing -- even for a female audience. Men are much more hostile, aggressive and violent than women. Johnny is civil only toward Baby's father Jake, an "alpha male". Johnny is hostile, aggressive and sometimes violent toward all the other male characters.
In my article about the song "Hungry Eyes", I discussed the concepts of the male gaze and the female gaze in movies. Movies dwell commonly on the male gaze; the camera and the male characters admire female beauty. Dirty Dancing is a less common movie that dwells more on the female gaze; the camera and the female characters admire male beauty.
In this particular Dirty Dancing scene, however, Baby and Penny gaze at each other, and Johnny gazes at Baby and Penny, but neither Baby nor Penny gaze at Johnny. This scene is all about gazing -- about "Hungry Eyes" -- but there is no female gazing at all.
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Dirty Dancing features couples dancing, which contrasts the male and the female. The male is larger and stronger, and he leads. The female audience enjoys watching the male partner fluctuate between dominance and cooperation in relation to his female partner.
Duets signify social relations. The actual practice of partnering and lifting is one which requires a high degree of skill and co-operation between the male and the female dancer ... Some signify hierarchies of dominance and subordination, others suggest more egalitarian relations. … The male dancer’s active roles can compensate for, or repress, the way in which he is the erotic object of either a spectator’s or another dancer’s gaze.In my own words, the dancing in the work largely symbolizes the social relationship between Johnny and Baby. He is the masterful male teacher, and she is his compliant female student. She does not resent that relationship at all, and she even enjoys it. However, she wants the relationship to develop into a more cooperative relationship in which she is essentially equal and sometimes even leads.
It would be useful to discuss the stage semiotics at work both in the film and the stage version to portray Johnny’s dominance and representation of masculinity. Johnny’s vest allows for the muscled arms ... to be constantly on display. The arms demonstrate strength and masculine energy ....
The dangerous intimacy of the duet, instead of creating discomfort in the “aroused” audience, creates a kind of liberation, a romantic apotheosis of repressed feeling. When Johnny says, “Again, concentrate,” the audience, together with the overwhelmed Baby, are placed back into the dance studio and reminded of the work that needs to be done.
[Essayist] Mary Louise Adams claims that dancing for men is an “arena of physical exertion and toughness. Male dancers, it seems, need to advertise their bodily hardness.” The protagonist’s six-pack functions as a living proof of the fact that he is, indeed, an athletic dancer — a constant reminder that dancing is like sport.
And in this kind of discipline, practice makes perfect. The consequent rehearsals change locations (moving to an outside space and leading to the well-known lake scene) and involve increasingly fewer pieces of clothing, making each touch on the bare flesh possible to misinterpret as a sensual touch. ... The dance rehearsal/lesson is now being transformed into erotic foreplay.
The tension between female's compliant role and her cooperative role in relation to the male is sexually arousing for her, subconsciously and sometimes even consciously. This relationship is symbolized in the couple's dance. (Again, these two paragraphs are my own words.)
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Rodosthenous discusses differences between the work's ballroom dancing and "dirty dancing".
Throughout Dirty Dancing, two kinds of dancing are juxtaposed: on the one hand, there is traditional ballroom dancing, which is a rather conventional form with very smiley male partners, camp choreography, and effeminate moves, and which sometimes verges on a mannered, grotesque feel. Ballroom dancing allows heterosexual men to lead with effeminate moves and alternate between masculine and feminine states of physicality. During the ballroom sequences, the men are mostly porteurs for the women. .... The men seem to be indifferent and cold, while their dancing feels like a pre-learned sequence, nearly robotic and soulless. ....Rodosthenous obviously likes to write about dance performance, and his article includes other such passages.
In the staff quarters, however, the dancing to the mambo music is rough, dynamic, and the men are using their hips in an aggressive, predatory manner. There are no smiles here; it feels more professional, serious — an exhibition of strength and accuracy. It is an opportunity for the virile young men to prove that they are bursting with (sexual) energy. ....
There is no ambiguity in the dancing in the staff quarters. The moves are explicit, suggestive, and violent. The choreography allows for plenty of gyrations amongst the male and female dancers. The act of dancing, the close proximity of the bodies and the libidinous rhythms are the main drivers here. The hands of the men touch every part of their female partners’ bodies; there are no forbidden areas. ....
Dance is treated like a sex simulation. The male dancer finally fulfills his purpose in the teenage fantasy dansical. He becomes Baby’s romantic partner. The removal of their clothes, the touch, and the whole erotic ritual are not dissimilar from softcore porn renditions of similar narratives. ....
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I did not find Rodosthenous's article on the Internet. As far as I know, the article is available to read only in the book.
This review completes my reviews of all the articles in the book.
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