ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on representations of masculinity in five works from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Three of these are from Europe: the German choreographer Pina Bausch’s Frühlingsopfer (‘The Rite of Spring’, 1975), her Blaubart (‘Bluebeard’, 1977), and the British choreographer Fergus Early’s solo Are You Right There Michael, Are You Right? (1982). The other two, from the US, are Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane’s duet Rotary Action (1982), and Trisha Brown’s piece Set and Reset (1983). Each of these five pieces, in different ways, exemplified a range of responses, from male and female choreographers on both sides of the Atlantic, to issues surrounding gender, ‘race’, and sexuality. These are issues that I have been considering in the previous two chapters. By the time Paxton, Lepkoff, and fellow dancers were developing contact improvisation in the 1970s, these, and the way that cultural forms mediated them, were becoming topics of sophisticated public debate of a kind that had not existed when other works discussed in Chapter 5 were being created. Kobena Mercer has pointed out that the politics of black liberation, spelt out in the Black Panther’s ten-point programme of 1966, inspired the ten-point charter of the Women’s Liberation Movement and the Gay Liberation Front’s demands in 1969 (1994: 303). The idea of liberation also underlay the avant-garde approaches to representation which these five dance pieces employed. In giving this chapter the title ‘Masculinity and Liberation’ I do not necessarily mean that these pieces showed liberated men, but that they reflected changing attitudes towards gender and, sometimes, mediated contemporaneous discussions about a potential or need for men to change their behaviour.
