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Abstract
In this article, I consider how ecosexuality as a contemporary, emergent critical framework prompts readings of Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring that complement and trouble the centralization of normative gender relations and human exceptionalism. Working with the prominent choreographic features instantiated within the dance, I consider how categories such as female and male, nonhuman and human, are both constituted and destabilized. Drawing from queer, feminist, new materialist, and psychoanalytic theories, I suggest that Bausch’s Rite of Spring provides ways of thinking sexuality ecologically, oriented toward the intensification of life beyond the survival of the human.
Notes
* This opening description and descriptions of the dance throughout this article are based on viewings of Pina Bausch, Le sacre du printemps: Igor Stravinsky, choréographie Pina Bausch (Paris: L’Arche and Tanztheater Wuppertal, 2012), DVD.
† This approach to dance as a site from which to consider the world beyond the dance has been described by M. Candace Feck as inverse contextualization. M. Candace Feck, “Inverse Contextualization: Writing about Dance from the Inside Out,” presented at the 28th Annual SDHS Conference, “Dancing from the Center,” Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, June 11, 2005. This practice is also informed by Susan Leigh Foster’s articulation of “reading dancing” in Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
‡ For more about Sprinkle and Stephens’s work, refer to their online archives at http://sexecology.org and https://earthlab.ucsc.edu. See also Michael J. Morris, “Orientations as Materializations: The Love Art Laboratory’s Eco-Sexual Blue Wedding to the Sea,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, ed. Nadine George-Graves (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
§ For more about Pony Express and their project Ecosexual Bathhouse, refer to http://helloponyexpress.com, and see Olivia Parkes, “You Can Literally Have Sex with the Environment in This ‘Ecosexual Bathhouse,’” Broadly, May 6, 2016, https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/d7anjq/you-can-literally-have-sex-with-the-environment-in-this-ecosexual-bathhouse.
** For a discussion of these resonances, see Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, “Ecosexuality,” in Gender: Nature, ed. Iris van der Tuin (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Gengage Learning, 2016), 313–30.
* In a reading that centralizes gender, it is necessary to note that such a reading is based upon what transgender pioneer Kate Bornstein describes as “gender attribution,” the ways in which “we look at somebody and say, ‘that’s a man,’ or ‘that’s a woman.’” Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 26. Gender attribution is the process by which we encounter bodies in social space, aggregate visual and physical cues according to gender norms, and organize the bodies that we see into available gender categories based on the synthesis of these cues. Gender attribution on its own does not account for the gender identities of the persons being viewed. In this particular context, I do not know the gender identities of the performers in the videos to which I refer for my analysis. When I describe women and men onstage or female and male performers, I am describing the ways in which these particular bodies have been styled and presented in alignment with binary gender norms, in order to articulate the ways in which this dance reproduces and troubles such norms. In doing so, I recognize that I am also reproducing—and hopefully troubling—these norms as well.
* This continuity between gendered choreographies on the concert-dance stage and choreographies of gender in daily life is a primary concern in Susan Leigh Foster, “Choreographies of Gender,” Signs, vol. 24, no.1 (Autumn, 1998): 1–3; and Jane Desmond, ed., Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On & Off the Stage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).
* The descriptions of Rite of Spring in this section are supplemented with viewings of Wim Wenders's 2011 documentary film Pina, which incorporates many more close-ups and detail shots. Pina, directed by Wim Winders's (Hamburg: Warner Home Video Germany, 2011).
* While I am not referencing Laban Movement Analysis and Rudolf von Laban’s effort qualities directly, Laban’s work certainly informs my viewing and perception of this continuum of dynamic tendencies.
† For additional theorizations of the agency of materiality, see Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); and Rebecca Schneider, “New Materialisms and Performance Studies,” TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 49, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 7–17.
* For a thorough discussion of the relationship between reproduction, population, climate change, and the threat of extinction, see Donna J. Haraway, “Making Kin: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene,” in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
* Similarly, Elizabeth Grosz has expounded a feminist rereading of Darwin that distinguishes the biological imperatives of natural selection and sexual selection in relation to survival. Specifically, Grosz demonstrates that in Darwin’s articulation of evolution, sexual selection is not directly concerned with survival and, indeed, sometimes produces effects that may even be disadvantageous for survival. See Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
1 Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 140.
2 Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1998), 63.
3 Ibid., 65.
4 Ibid., 68.
5 Royd Climenhaga, ed., The Pina Bausch Sourcebook: The Making of Tanztheater (London: Routledge, 2013), 1.
6 Norbert Servos, Pina Bausch: Dance Theatre, trans. Stephen Morris (Munich: K. Kieser Verlag, 2008), 37.
7 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 45.
8 Ibid., 31.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., 190.
11 Ibid., 9–10.
12 Susan Stryker, “(De)subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 9 (italics original).
13 Angenette Spalink, “Choreographing Dirt: Performances Of/Against the Nature/Culture Divide” (Ph.D. diss., Bowling Green State University, 2014), ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2014. 3671610.
14 Claire Colebrook, “Cary Wolfe and Claire Colebrook | Dialogue | The Anthropocene Project. An Opening,” posted by HKW Anthropocene, published January 23, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLTCzth8H1M (accessed October 17, 2014).
15 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 152–53 (italics original).
16 Ibid., 176.
17 Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 2.
18 Ibid., 5.
19 Ibid., 28.
20 Ibid., 32.
21 Ibid., 39.
22 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Authorized Translation from the Second German Edition, trans. C. J. M. Hubback (Mansfield Center, CT: Martino Publishing, 2010), 41–79.
23 Ibid., 78–79 (footnote).
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., 71.
26 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 106.
27 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 3.
28 Ibid., 46–47 (italics original).
29 Claire Colebrook, “Difference, Time, and Organic Extension,” in Sex After Life: Essay on Extinction, vol. 2 (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2014), 129.
30 Ibid., 129–30.
31 Ibid., 134.
32 Ibid., 136.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Michael J. Morris
MICHAEL J. MORRIS is a choreographer, performer, dramaturg, writer, and visiting assistant professor at Denison University where they teach in the Department of Dance, Environmental Studies, Queer Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies. Their writing appears in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, Choreographic Practices, TDR: The Drama Review, Dance Chronicle, and the European Journal of Ecopsychology. They have presented their research at local, national, and international conferences, including those of the Dance Studies Association; the Congress on Research in Dance and the Society of Dance History Scholars; Performance Studies International; Queer Places, Practices & Lives; Meanings and Makings of Queer Dance; Staging Sustainability: Arts, Community, Culture, Environment; Environmentalism Outside the Box: An Ecosex Symposium; the Ecosex Symposium II; Transforming Care Conference: Midwest Conference on LGBTQ Health Equity and HIV/AIDS; and the 2017 TransOhio Transgender and Ally Symposium. They hold a Ph.D. in dance studies from The Ohio State University.