Body Impossible: Dynamics of Race, Sexuality, and Virtuosity in the Dance of Desmond Richardson

This dissertation theorizes the dance career of Desmond Richardson through the related paradigms of race, gender, and sexuality in order to generate a socio-culturally nuanced understanding of the concept of virtuosity in performance. I have selected four distinct performance contexts of the 1990s through which to analyze Richardson's contribution to ballet and contemporary dance. Keeping questions of identity in the foreground, I interrogate both the racialized and gendered politics of concert dance companies and the role of versatility in Richardson's career. Central to this dissertation are both the discourse of virtuosity and the mechanics of the production of virtuosity as a mode or quality. Richardson's virtuosity is especially distinct in its harnessing of multiple dance styles and techniques. Despite his overall signature style, one that privileges hybridity over singularity, Richardson knowingly emphasizes certain techniques in certain settings in order to respond to the call of the work in question. Richardson's concert dance career began at Alvin Ailey, and in 1994 he both co-founded Complexions and began dancing with Ballett Frankfurt. It was three years later that he embarked on ABT and SFB's Othello./nThe dissertation opens by questioning the relationship between the moving body and the photograph's supposed stillness. Through a reading of surface and stasis, it explores the status of labor as manifested in the particular photo-choreographic context of the Alvin Ailey poster. Placing dance studies into conversation with critical race studies and visual studies, I ask how skin, flesh, mutability, and labor coalesce to present or undermine a multicultural ideology. The chapter engages with Anne Anlin Cheng's concept of mutability, Vijay Prashad's discussion of AfroAsian identity and polyculturalism, Krista Thompson's notion of shine, and Elizabeth Grosz and Hortense Spillers' writing on flesh. The next chapter puts forward the concept of choreographic falsetto in analyzing the queer of color aesthetics of Complexions Contemporary Ballet. In locating the vernacular influences on ballet in Richardson and Dwight Rhoden's hybrid style, the chapter comes into conversation with Roderick Ferguson on queer of color analysis, Bettina Brandl-Risi and Gabrielle Bradstetter on virtuosity, André Lepecki on stillness, and Brenda Dixon Gottschild and Thomas DeFrantz on Africanist aesthetics. In thinking the role of virtuosity in terms of gender transgression, this chapter posits that hyperkinetic corporeal performance appears to be both a space of license, on the one hand, and a space of shame, on the other. I claim that virtuosity operates at--and blurs--the border between popular and high art, defining the location of the virtuoso's potential transgression. The third chapter engages with themes of visibility and authenticity in the blackface practices of American Ballet Theatre and San Francisco Ballet's Othello. To reconcile the production's use of blackface in the absence of Richardson in the title role, I turn to Linda Williams' theorization of melodrama to demonstrate how blackface and virtuosity continually complicate the (in)visibility of blackness in Othello. The final chapter, on Ballett Frankfurt, explores how Richardson and choreographer William Forsythe's combined modes of improvisation create a notable shift in their practices to a "black radical tradition." I cite George Balanchine and Steve Paxton as influences on Forsythe. Richardson and Forsythe's collaboration collapses racial and choreographic signifiers, lingering in the difficult space of illegibility. Through concerted practice, such illegibility functions as a refiguring of the relationship between subjectivity and blackness. I trace the way Frankfurt dancers describe an otherwise modernist aesthetic of difficulty as "fun," ultimately positioning the body as the locale of choreographic and ontological agency. In doing so, I traverse the interval between what Forsythe calls a "[staging] of disappearance" and what Fred Moten refers to as the inevitably "improvisatory exteriority" of blackness.

Advisor: Jackson, Shannon