Dying Swans and dragged up dames: a photographic exploration of the
ageing dancer.
Dr Helen Newall and Mark Edward
Dying Swans interrogates cultural images of the agile and able performer. It
concerns the photographic parody of famous dance images: images are recreated
in homage to the originals, but subjects – usually female, young and able - are
replaced by an obese, gay, drag performer. This project is an hybrid of two
independent projects driven by themes which intersect, but is an independent
investigation in its own right into documentation and media images of dance and
the disruption between expectation - driven by age, gender and heternormativity
– and image. By examining cultural representations of the tragedy inherent in
dance (that dancers are either too old or too injured), it questions cultural
obsessions with youth, photoshop and the erasure of age from performance.
Mark Edward’s project is to explore the ageing body by writing from the
perspective of the third age. His project reflects on ageing, as both a gay man and
performance artist, positioned in an hegemony of youth driven performance and
media agendas. His work questions the cultural expectation of 'dancing your
age', and what this might be, through examination of popular representations of
the dancing body, and by so doing he examines the cultural meanings aligned
with what it is to be ageing and a performer in contemporary media. His thesis is
that social and cultural influences, including the contemporary media, seem to be
moving contemporary society to a body normative which involves the removal of
the (hi)stories and creases age naturally brings in an attempt to have currency,
or make faces marketable. He explores Schwaiger’s concept of the ageing body as
an ‘inflexible mask’ (Schwaiger, 2006: 14-5).
Dr Helen Newall’s project is a photographic exploration of the seams and
disruptions between performance photo-documentation and the performance
itself. Sontag, Barthes. Sontag states that performance simultaneously exists and
annihilates itself. Newall proposes that the photograph edits and resituates
performance by distilling the ephemeral flow into a series of split second
moments which the innocent viewer (ie someone who has not seen the
performance but sees the images) then expands out into a performance which
did not exist: the photographs become a metonym not only for moments absent
in performance documentation, but for moments which never existed. The
expansion that the viewer makes is thus a disruption from what existed and
which is now lost and that which is supposed. There is myth making in this
disruption, which creates a sort of scar tissue that re-skins performance into
something that it never was. The photograph often does not capture physical
exertion, but effortless poise held in perpetuity. It idealizes the heroic dance
legend even as the performance itself is past its dance by date.
In Dying Swans, Newall and Edward position the ageing drag performer and
dancer, as being similar in their fates. The archetype of the physically and/or
mentally injured dancer – Black Swan, The Red Shoes, Benjamin Button – is a
potent tragedy of beauty cut short. Dance (and youth) is thus situated as a fragile
and ephemeral thing, rather than as the hard physical slog which gets harder
with age and which is usually what pushes the swans out of the lake. This is
when most dancers are put out of their misery. But if not, when we watch an
ageing dancer, what do we see? Are we watching the given performance, or are
we watching a metonym for the performer they once were? How do we watch
the ageing performer without seeking the myth of who they once were and what
they could once do? It examines in Drag Culture the on-the-body ‘photoshopping’
of the male physique into a female physique and how ageing is equally
unacceptable here. And asks whether the comedy inherent in an ageing drag
artist situated as a dying swan or a fire bird (or even a fired bird!) is really our
defense mechanism against the truths of ageing that such images expose? The
poster is a discourse of word and image. The Dying Swans project will culminate
in the autumn of 2013 in an exhibition of words and images.
Bibliography
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Edward, M. and H.Newall, (2011) ‘Temporality of the Performing Body: Tears,
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