Quote:
Originally Posted by Zorba
I know you (Tarik) disagree with me here - but to my mind the ultimate frontier for either gender is androgyny - something I can't pull off! If I can't figure out what gender a performer is (regardless of artform chosen), I'm just fascinated and think that's the coolest thing!
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I'm with Tarik on this one. I find it really distracting not to know. For me as an audience member it's totally the wrong way to go if a dancer is trying to convey messages "beyond" the male/female thing. Does that make sense? When someone goes for truly androgynous I'm wondering a) is that a man or a woman (draws the attention like an impending costume disaster), and b) why does he/she dress that way? To make me go
, to make some sort of point about his/her sexuality (that I'm not interested in)? I don't know... What it absolutely
doesn't succeed in doing (for me) is to write the male/female out of the equation and let the art be experienced as just human. On the contrary, it just accentuates it, like the elephant in the room that no one mentions.
I've seen men dancing very masculine and very feminine styles, and like both, as long as it's good dancing. Conveying a feeling is what it's all about IMHO and neither men nor women have a monopoly on particular feelings. Having said that, some audiences are going to have problems with the feelings some dancers want to convey... I'd have thought it was part of a professional's job to gauge the audience/venue and choose something appropriate.