A Reconsideration of the Male Dancer

With all the chatter in recent months concerning men’s behaviour towards women and the role of the male Yang in relation to female Yin,
it might be an interesting notion to re-evaluate a very fundamental service that men have taken on over centuries, simply the very Yang role of showing women off to their best advantage.

Not long ago, a clever woman saw the value in being seen on the arm of a powerful man and folded that image of herself into her plan for conquest in much the same way that the man whose arm she decorated would improve his position and ensure esteem and envy among the ranks of those who were vital for him to impress simply by being seen with her. Whether it was because of her family lineage or her enviable beauty, the woman was well aware of the power of her value. (See The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, who, herself, was a very independent woman.) In short, the role of the Yang man was to introduce the woman into a world wherein she might display her talents and create her own powerful Yang success. A useful metaphor illustrating this is the role of the male dancer in the pas de deux of ballet. In the classical ballet art form, the male dancer uses his physical strength in a very Yang way to lift and showcase the female dancer, but takes on a passive, very Yin position, by allowing the female dancer to be the focus of attention, allowing her to take on the Yang energy.

Back before the advent of public strip clubs where one might see comely young women and men, wrapped around a metal pole, undulating to loud music, wearing nothing but shoes, there was a time in the nineteenth century, the 1830s and 40s to be exact, when dancing in general and the new craze known as “the ballet” were all about focusing on female beauty. Male dancers were critical to the new art form, but it was the revenue generated by the female dancers that put the males in the shadows.

Today, most of us think of ballet as a lovely entertainment that is attended by the more discerning and educated factions of society and is the perfect opportunity for grand-ma-ma to garner quality time with the granddaughters by taking them to the Nutcracker as a prelude to the holidays. But the original ballets that grew out of performances of the Paris Opera were not intended for granny and the girls…they were produced for a largely male audience.

Part of the allure of the new dance craze came as an outgrowth of the international Transcendentalist Movement, which was a rediscovery of nature and was akin to the popular Spiritualist Movement in that both popular thought forms promoted the ideas of life after death and a world populated by spirits, clinging to the worldly sphere long after physical death. It was also a period of extreme romanticism so, the notion that women should be presented on stage as romanticized, fanciful, ghostly, other-worldly creatures seemed very much in sync with the values of the times. It was an era when the difference in the qualities between men and women (their Yang and Yin) was celebrated as one of the glamourous new polarizing mysteries like the newfound interest in the realms of the living and the dead. Women began to be seen in a new light… no longer as possessions, but as lovely, spiritual, unfathomable creatures that promoted the values of the church and floated ethereally through life as a gift to mankind. Women’s beauty, to the high-minded, was less about inspiring lust and more about eliciting the nobler and more appreciative, self-sacrificing instincts in men. In fact, most of the story lines of the ballets of this period involve the male protagonist dying for the sake of love or the female sacrificing herself to save her beloved.

For the male audience, this presentation of female dancers as spirits, like the ghostly paramour danced by ballerina Carlotta Grisi in the 1841 premiere of Giselle or a myriad of other ballet fairies, swans and sylphs, allowed female dancers to be displayed as ethereal beings in coloured tights and calf-length gossamer costumes that revealed their bare arms and ankles and challenged the conservative morals of feminine display. So, it was men who paid to see these ethereal lovelies, these romanticized notions of female perfection, and it was the society swells and stage-door- Johnnies who came to celebrate this stylized presentation of female beauty by bestowing patronage on the dancers and their corresponding dance companies as well.

In order to reinforce the illusion that the dancer was something other than flesh and blood, en pointe (on point) dancing was introduced. By balancing all her weight on the tips of her toes in wooden-tipped, padded slippers, the female dancer was able to convey the idea that she had barely touched down on earth and that she was so transcendent that she fairly floated in the air. That invention coupled with the introduction of wind machines and artificial mist completed the illusion that the waif-like dancer was not of this world.

The image of the idealized female dancer was such the rage that fans started collecting coloured lithographic reproductions of illustrations of these women dancers. These pictures came packed with cigarettes or cigarillos, and were traded like the baseball cards of a century later. A savvy gentleman might invite a friend over to see this collection and exchange a Fanny Elssler for a Maria Taglioni, if he had trouble acquiring his elusive favourite.

The longing for perfection and the popularity of the new imagery of flying fairies and ghostly temptresses created by the ballet in the 1830s and 40s was so popular that it spawned an entirely new way of describing feminine beauty. Young women began to be referred to by their adoring male admirers by other-worldly terms like beguiling, enchanting, alluring, ethereal, transcendent… too lovely to be substantial and mystical. They were also credited as being creatures of beauty, confections of loveliness and creations of perfection.

It was abundantly clear at that time that the focus of attention and admiration was strictly on the women. Male dancers were of little interest to the largely male audience who had come to celebrate the female form. The primary reason that little or no attention was given to the male dancer was that his job was seen as that of simply maneuvering the female dancer into positions where her talents and beauty might be displayed to their full advantage. But it was he, the male dancer, using the Yang of his physical strength, who created the illusion that the sylph could fly. He is the one, standing out of the spotlight, that holds her aloft, at arm’s length, allowing her the illusion of graceful flight. It is he who turns and tumbles her to afford the audience a view of what might appear to be her graceful and fluid transition of form and movement.

Over the course of nearly two hundred years, we have learned to train our eyes on the ethereal dancer held aloft in a breathtaking display of beauty and have somehow come to believe that she is truly deserving of being the center of our attention. But we have also come to believe that she is more important than the muscular athlete that suspends her, seemingly effortlessly, overhead. We have been trained to place our attention on the female prima ballerina and make her the unquestionable focus of the pas de deux. Perhaps, we need to stop and think about the role of the male in his support and showcasing of women, not only in the dance, but in our culture as well.

In an age when we like to ignore the long accepted thankless support of women by men, maybe, we need to look at the pas de deux of ballet as a metaphor. We need to see that for the last four decades we have focused solely on the presentation of the female, creating organizations that are exclusive to women and declaring year after year “the year of the woman”. We have so singularly extolled her worthiness and her career building Yang accomplishments that we have forgotten that, as with the ballerina, there is often a man, using his social or physical Yang strength and his Yin allowing to support and enable her. (See The Art of Allowing in Nobody Wants to be the Girl Anymore, page 9).

There are mentors and husbands and investment capitalists that have aided and supported her cause and efforts and she could no more take flight and succeed without the help from many others, both women partners and supportive men, any more than that breathtaking ballerina could fly on her own. Let us not forget that it is the male dancer that has the masculine strength to lift the female to new heights, to put her on display and create the illusion of transcendent beauty that showcases her talents for the world to see. It is the male dancer that affords the ballerina her ethereal quality…gives her wings and allows her to soar.