ABSTRACT
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s Mark Morris created a number of dances that focused on issues of gender. This decade-long investigation culminated in two major works, Dido and Aeneas in 1989 and The Hard Nut, an updated version of Nutcracker, choreographed in 1991. In the first, Morris performed the central female roles of Dido and the Sorceress, using his own body as a site of gender instability to examine sexual desire. In the second, he turned to his company to create a proliferation of gender identities. Morris’s treatment of gender in these two works, particularly his multiplication of identities and his use of parody and hyperbole as critical tools, suggested parallels with Judith Butler’s gender theory. This theory, which she describes in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and expands in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993) provides an illuminating instrument through which to view Morris’s treatment of gender in Dido and Aeneas and The Hard Nut. Conversely, Morris’s dances offer, at least in part, the kind of theatricalized critique of gender Butler envisions, while at the same time enlarging her concept through dance.
