Interpreting Jean Borlin's Dervishes: Masculine subjectivity and the queer male dancing body

Dance Chronicle

Volumn 22, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 223-238

  Burt, Ramsay ^a  

^a DE MONTFORT UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0344376486     PISSN: 01472526     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01472529908569348     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. Wigman appeared in performances organized by the Dadaists and is claimed as a Dadaist in some of the Zurich Dadaist publications. I am grateful to Susan Manning for informing me that Wigman included a Dervish dance in her cycle of Ecstatic Dances performed in 1917 and in revised form in 1919. Wigman also "danced Nietzsche" at the Cabaret Voltaire. In his Flight Out of Time, Hugo Ball recalls her "turning, always turning" as she recited from Thus Spake Zarathustra as part of the program The Self in Rhythm and Space (Susan Manning, letter to author, December 12, 1997)
2. Bengt Häger, Ballets Suédois (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), p. 10
3. See Ted Shawn and Gray Poole, One Thousand and One Night Stands (New York: Da Capo, 1979), p. 63-7
4. Erik Näslund, "Animating a Vision: Rolf de Maré, Jean Borlin, and the Founding of the Ballets Suédois," in Paris Modern: The Swedish Ballet 1920-1925, ed. Nancy van Norman Baer (San Francisco: The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1996), p. 47
5. The first overtly gay journal in France was Inversions, which was first published in Paris in 1924. See Vernon Rosario, "Pointy Penises, Fashion Crimes, and Hysterical Mollies: The Pederasts' Inversions," in Homosexuality in Modern France, ed. Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan Jr. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 202
6. and Gilles Barbedette and Michel Carassou, Paris Gay 1925 (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1981), p. 14
7. Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant (London: Fontana/Collins, 1968), p. 26
8. Rosario, p. 14
9. Kenneth Archer and Millicent Hodson, interview by the author, London, January 1998
10. Felicia McCarren, "The 'Symptomatic Act' circa 1900: Hysteria, Hypnosis, Electricity, Dance," Critical Inquiry, No. 21, Summer 1995, pp. 756-7
11. Stéphane Mallarmé, Igitur, Divagations, Un Coup de dés (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976), p. 200
12. McCarren, p. 758
13. Häger, p. 96
14. Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representations: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 91
15. Derrida argues in his essay "Khora" that it is impossible to give a closed, fixed translation of the word khora as it occurs in Plato's Timaeus (see Jacques Derrida, On the Name [Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1993])
16. See Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (London: Picador, 1997), pp. 11-3
17. McCarren, p. 752
18. Showalter traces it back to Jean-Baptiste Louyer-Villermay in 1819 (see Showalter, p. 64)
19. Derrida quotes a similar sentiment in an exchange between Freud and a colleague (see Jacques Derrida, Disseminations [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981], p. 207)
20. "The young men who graduate from the École Polytechnique who intend to become heads of factories and wrack their brains over mathematical calculations, often become victims of these afflictions," J.-M. Charcot, quoted in Showalter, p. 65
21. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol 1: An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 101
22. Bengt Häger says that Borlin visited North Africa and saw Dervish dancing in 1919 (see Hager, p. 10)
23. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 8
24. Emile Bataul, quoted in Showalter, p. 69
25. Kenneth Archer and Millicent Hodson, "Seven Days from the Dervishes Diary," Dance Theatre Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1998, p. 35