ABSTRACT
The choreographers of reworkings have contradicted, criticised, dislocated, fragmented, updated, celebrated, refocused and otherwise reimagined the ballet on stage. Operating as unruly forms of critical discourse reworkings refer intertextually to pre-existing dances, thereby evoking a bidirectional gaze that has the potential to shift our perceptions of both the past and the present. In doing so, reworkings have enabled identities to be (re)constructed, as choreographers have read against the grain of accepted representations and dismantled received meanings to challenge perceived norms. I focus here on Swan Lake, 4 Acts (2005) by Raimund Hoghe. This is an
austere and poignant reworking of Swan Lake and, through close reading, I consider the ways in which Hoghe’s reworking queries and queers the ballet. This is a dance for Hoghe and four other performers – Ornella Balestra (the only female dancer and an accomplished ballerina), Bynjar Bandlien, Nabil Yahia-Aissa and Lorenzo de Brabandere. Structured in four main parts the work is marked by the placement of objects and rearrangements of space – a miniature theatre, a row of chairs, rows of small paper swans, a large square of ice-cubes, a ripping up of the stage flooring revealing a white layer under the black dance mat and a final layering of white sand. Contact between the performers is minimal and actions are equally small, precise and discreet – an arm ripple, a head tilt, a glance to the side, a walk across the stage. Following neither choreographic nor narrative conventions, this is a dance formed around image making and understated relationships. Marked by internal contradictions and historical disruptions, Swan Lake,
4 Acts presents images of the body, gender and sexuality that have the potential to radically reconfigure the status quo. Via his pared-down approach and de-emphasising of conventional choreographic forms, Hoghe brings attention to the materiality of his own body – a non-normative body, marked by deformity due to his spinal curvature and resultant hump of his upper back. In doing so Hoghe reconfigures what we mean by dance and what kind of bodies can dance. Further, masculinities and sexual identities are constructed anew, for, in contrast to the disembodied ideals of
ethereality and illusion embedded in conventional Swan Lakes, Hoghe locates the materiality of the body, with its history and experiences, identity and flesh fully intact. Using his own queer and disabled male body he brings to the fore the specificity of bodies, and the hierarchical value placed upon differing bodies, by locating the idiosyncratic and non-normative at the centre.
