ABSTRACT
A tall, attractive woman with blonde hair, dressed up for a party, was standing, nervously waiting, on stage. Out, from the wing, came an even taller, handsome man who, like the woman, looked sheepish. With an embarrassed laugh, the perfect couple started to kiss, then, shortly, exited together. As they left, three identically dressed pairs of dancers came on stage, one after the other from the same side, in a long, horizontal line: a male-female, male-male, and female-female couple. Like the first pair, all started kissing, but this time in a unison, choreographed sequence. Their actions and gestures had been carefully recreated. The dancers began by making eye contact. Each tilted their head the opposite way to their partner, then, slowly, brought their mouths together while their arms enfolded one another. Each couple was performing exactly the same movements at the same time. Each turned in space while mouth to mouth, and each caressed the same part of their partner’s shoulders in perfect unison. The style appeared naturalistic; they seemed to be acting out just how they might actually behave with their chosen partner in private. But, the fact that their actions were mirrored across the stage put this behaviour, as it were, in inverted commas. This section, from the British choreographer Lea Anderson’s 1992 piece Birthday, performatively proposed that heterosexuality is not a universal norm. The situation in which a passive female is the recipient of male advances was shown to be only one of a range of options that were all, in this piece at least, equally valid and equivalent to one another.
