It was an experiment to take the lap dance as a “leading metaphor” for a process of performance research. If you ask a young performer and dancer who has learned the trade of contemporary performance aesthetics to perform a lap dance without giving any parameters of movement, without actually showing it; if you tell them to just use the material that comes handy, the whatever-material, and then, bang, on the very first day they, all of them women, just produce highly sexualized little dances, well structured, with gusto, with all the flexing and thrusting one can expect, and still with a nice ironic distance to it, what can you say? Bingo! Or: Omg, what spirits have I carelessly evoked?
Seeing this spontaneous lap dance production, coming literally out of nowhere after the participants had already lived and danced through several workshops, sometimes teaching them a fixed repertoire, sometimes inviting them to improvise, or to meditate on the body and space, almost felt like watching a bunch of puppy dogs who finally had the freedom to run free. There was a suspicion, that sex is the repressed of contemporary dance aesthetics just waiting to return. But it is not as easy as that. Actually it has quite a come back at the moment. If art and entertainment go on to melt into each other the formula of all commercialism, namely that sex sells any product, also seeps into dance production. If so overtly sexual signs do not refer to sex. And that was precisely the question: all the sexy moves and gestures of the culturally imprinted lap dance repertoire we know from film and media come so handy because they refer to something else, at least not to intimacy. I do not quite believe that even a well trained and smart young dance professional can enter into intimacy from scratch. Just like inventing a lap dance.
To juggle with personae has become the daily routine of contemporary performance. The sexy stripper offering her body is just one more. There are no hard feelings, no feminist repulsion, just a little wink of an eye, some tongue in cheek in several meanings of the word. Why not play with it? I enjoyed watching this ease of slipping in and out of those masks, but I also secretly wished for some resistance that I could not quite bring into the process of the first week.
We discussed the question if Fischer-Lichte’s beloved binary of “Leib” as the living body in its environment and semiotic body as significant surface in an artificial situation is applicable here. If we would go for the “Leib” as being exposed in a lap dance we could either face a situation of violation and self abuse or we could fall trap to some reactionary Jungian myth of some archaic sexy wild femininity hidden in every female that would be activated in the situation of the lap dance, – just like Jamie Lee Curtis’ famous cheesy scene in “True Lies”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfirdF7LCR4
unknowingly dancing for her husband Arnie, but mistaking him for an agent; she starts to rotate her arms clumsily but in a few moments, as if the music of the soundtrack would catch her, the sexy beast wakes up and knows immediately how to smoothly squirm her torso.
So even though the body ideology might insist that this is the female body as it truly exists this is very much a routine of “having a body” and therefore a matter of the semiotic body. Maybe the lap dance does not hurt any (post)-feminist feeling because it is so very much the highly formalized inscription of a semiotic body, the act of wearing gestures, moves, signs of femininity like a mask. Almost like the dialectic answer to Butler’s by now common sensical claim of the gender being performed: we know that the “woman” is constructed, so lets show them the best constructed (if not built) woman we can manage.
