The female gaze

Tamara Rojo programmed three female choreographers for her English National Ballet spring bill because, she said, she had never danced a ballet by a woman, and wanted to see what women would produce. Just the two begged questions here. First, that female choreographers are being stifled by institutionalised sexism in the ballet establishment. Second, that female choreographers, if allowed to see the light of day, would offer a differently thought, differently imagined argument from the general tenor of those pesky male choreographers who dominate the stage.

The first assumption has been swallowed whole by the luminaries and enablers of the art world who flooded Twitter after the première with ecstatic gasps, and by supportive critics who wrote approvingly that it proved that women can do choreography after all.

For the purposes of reacting correctly to ENB’s bill, it’s necessary to ignore British ballet’s founders, German and American dance’s radicals, many of the finest British choreographers of the past quarter-century, and start from the clean sheet of outright oppression. Is that really what Rojo thinks?

The other question is much more interesting, which is whether the three She Said choreographers would show up with something fresh and different from some supposedly standard male eye. I expect poor Wayne McGregor’s ears were burning as social mediatchiks spluttered that all that men want to do with women on stage is abuse them, bend them and splay them.

But in fact She Said had a school-of-that- genre piece in Fantastic Beings, the dimly lit, eagerly aerobic neoclassical drill of Aszure Barton. The busy moves of unisex dancers in lizard-green bodysuits under a vast blinking eye declared unexceptionally that women like a workout just as much as men do, and included a spinning climax in hairy costumes that resembled going through a car-wash.