THE END OF SWAN LAKE
Urvi Vora
Image by Aditya Sarin
I didn’t intend to begin this essay by saying that my grandmother died recently, but she did, exactly during my period of procrastination before the deadline I should’ve taken a lot more seriously. She’d been in bed for the last seven years, declaring almost six years ago that she was done. She’d been sick for as long as I can remember. When she died, she was the thinnest she had ever been. If she had decided to get up one day, we would have had to buy a completely new wardrobe for her. In her last days, she wore a loose, light-blue cotton shirt that my mother stopped wearing a while ago.
I got the news when I was checking in at the Ahmedabad airport on my way back from Dholka, a village a little over an hour away from the city. After fifteen years, I was returning to the house where my grandmother — the same one — had grown up. I spent less than seven minutes in the damp, slightly smelly, and decrepit house. A lot of that was spent locating my name on an old family tree painted on a wall and taking a picture for my brother. I did spend a few hours in the farm around the house, pleased that many dogs lived there. My partner and I were made to take a picture next to a ceramic horse in the verandah. The two of us called him Sultan and decided that it would be best if Sultan stood in the centre.
At the airport, I spent a while on the phone, telling my best friend about the events of the day, and thinking, “Wow. What a great moment.” And, of course, I felt sad, as one should, but not too sad because my grandmother had been ailing for a while. Just the right amount. But every time I tell this story again, I can’t help but perfect the telling of it just a little more.
My sick grandmother died after I visited her childhood home. Too much like a headline.
I visited my dying grandmother’s childhood home in her last days. Too subtle.
I allowed my grandmother to leave us in peace after visiting the place she loved. Too spiritual but my mother would like it.
I killed my grandmother. Okay, I know it’s intense, but, for a moment, I thought it.
I received the news that my grandmother had passed away at the airport on my way back from her childhood home, which she had loved very much. There? Maybe.
And after a while, and I don’t mean this in a sinister way, I would tell this story with the same pauses when I met someone. Sometimes with a smile on my face, taking the first sip of my coffee in a café, sometimes beginning by telling them that they shouldn't think of this as a tragedy. It was a good story.
Eventually, I killed that story too.
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Deaths make good stories. Swan Lake is one such story. Composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and originally choreographed by Julius Reisinger, Swan Lake was premiered in 1877 by The Bolshoi Ballet. Let’s do this really fast for those who aren’t familiar: The ballet begins with Siegfried out on a hunt to kill some swans he has noticed flying overhead. He gets ready with a crossbow in his hands when these swans land next to an enchanted lake. He stops himself when he notices a white swan turning into a beautiful maiden in front of him. This maiden is Odette, or the swan princess, cursed by Rothbart to remain a swan by day and a human by night, but only next to the enchanted lake. This spell can only be broken when one who has never loved before promises to love her forever.
The original rendition, in 4 acts, 4 scenes, was, quite evidently, a tragedy, and not just because of its problematic depiction of love, with a damsel in distress and a messiah in the form of a gorgeous, pirouetting, young man. My heart breaks twice: once for the terrible story and once for Odette’s death. Odette chooses to take her life upon finding out that her evil twin is to be married to the prince. She’d much rather disappear than remain a swan forever.
Scene. A group of female dancers are standing on the periphery of the stage performing an adagio sequence with their arms. Siegfried and Odette promenade in the centre, before being pulled away, much to their dismay. A heartbroken Odette climbs on top of a cliff at the back of the stage. She looks at Siegfried who has collapsed to the ground, and at the princesses distressed and helpless. And she jumps.
This scene has been re-created in all sorts of ways — from happy endings (the English National Ballet created a version in 2015 where the choreographer seems to have been inspired by HR terminology like ‘change management’, ‘successive planning’, and ‘conflict resolution’, and has given every character a happy ending); to films using it as a subplot (Black Swan); to a vindictive, revengeful end for Rothbart. It has also, in some cases, become an independent entity, and gained its own identity, leading to Le Morte du Cygnes (Ballerina, in an English version), a 1937 film about the world of ballet. Deaths make good stories and excellent performances.
Almost all the music composed by Tchaikovsky ensures that one cannot miss tragedy when it comes on stage. He has a penchant for announcing entrances for characters by creating themes for them — you know, for example, that Rothbart can’t be far away when you can hear the basso profundo. He doesn’t just stop at characters, and uses themes for moods and plot changes as well, in that we can imagine Love, Danger, and Sorrow queuing up in the wings, entering when it is their turn. So, as soon as the last scene of the last act begins, you know how it will end. You know Tragedy is just warming up, practicing her arabesques in the wings, about to jeté onto the stage any minute now.
(A note about tragedy: it doesn’t become any less tragic even if you know it is coming.)
In Ida (2013), the tragedy is a much less remarkable moment. The film is about a young woman, Anna, on the verge of taking her vows to become a Catholic nun. Wanda, a state prosecutor and her only living relative, tells her that she is actually Jewish and that she was born with the name Ida. The two embark on a road trip to find out what happened to Ida’s parents and Wanda’s son. Towards the end of the film, once they have buried their family members in a Jewish cemetery and after some heart-wrenching discoveries, they return to their old lives, where nothing is the same again. Overcome by grief, Wanda takes her life.
Scene. Static, black and white frame in a messy apartment, things lying around. She enters the frame, opens a window and leaves the frame. A second of stillness. She enters the frame, stubs her cigarette, and leaves the frame. A second of stillness. She enters the frame, and walks purposefully towards the window, then jumps with complete ease, without disturbing the frame. A second of stillness.
Unlike the death of the swan princess, this jump comes unannounced. I would’ve missed it had I looked away for a second.
(A note about tragedy: it doesn’t become any less tragic even if you almost miss it.)
Towards the end of the year 1980, Francesca Woodman, a young American artist who had started taking photographs at the age of thirteen, assembled some of her images for a book entitled Some Disordered Interior Geometries. On January 19 1981, at the age of twenty-two, a few months after she had named that book, she killed herself by jumping out of her apartment window on the Lower East Side of New York City. It is a death that I find both remarkable and unremarkable at the same time. It is unremarkable in that I can’t actually describe the scene here. I have no visceral, riveting images of the way in which she jumped that I can share with you. We know that she was unable to find galleries to present her work at in New York, and we know that she was a young woman navigating a thankless and unwelcoming art world. She did not leave a suicide note but she wrote a letter to a friend not long before her death:
My life at this point is like very old coffee-cup sediment and I would rather die young leaving various accomplishments, i.e. some work, my friendship with you, some other artefacts intact, instead of pell-mell erasing all of these delicate things.
(Note to the reader: Death isn’t erasure.)
The performance theorist Peggy Phelan (2002) invites us to think of Woodman’s photographs as a rehearsal for her death (Barthes, 1981), in a way that her death survives her art, rather than her art surviving her death. She points out something that makes Woodman’s death ‘remarkable’: “Central to Woodman’s photographic self-portraits is a refusal to be still. Woodman’s insistence on exposing this resistance within a medium dedicated to arresting stillness lends her photographs a dramatic force that spills over the frame of the image.” In all her photographs, by focussing on the forms of blurry bodies and objects, she refuses to be still. Her first significant solo exhibition was in New York City five years after her death.
(A note about tragedy: it moves, and it moves me.)
When I was in college training to be a professional dancer, I came to the conclusion that the only photographs of dancers that engage with what dance is are the ones that put an imperfect body in motion in the frame. What brings a photograph of dance close to the sensation of moving is its refusal to be still and its insistence on its own disappearance. When I trained as a ballerina at the Russian Academy in Central Delhi, I hated the ten minutes towards the end of the class that would be dedicated to jumps. I spent a lot of my childhood being reminded that, while my alignment was good, I had no elevation. There is a very specific technique for jumping that can be learnt, theoretically, in five minutes and, practically, in any amount of time between six months and nine years. You must land on your toes and roll your weight back towards your heel as you bend your knees. Once you do learn how to jump, though, and have better control over your breath and your flailing arms, jumping is exhilarating. The technique for jumping is focussed on coming down, and yet the best jumps are the ones that, just for a second, leave you hanging, a little bit out of control, not knowing when exactly you will land.
Jumps, apart from being breath-taking, can also lead to tragic, catastrophic occurrences, as we have seen above, by making bodies disappear. The last that we get to see or imagine of these bodies is the exhilarating upward-downward motion of the final jump. What is striking about each of the leaps we’ve talked about is that even as the body disappears, we are not left with absence or stillness. (Francesca would rather die than erase those delicate things.) These jumps leave us with the ghost of movement rather than the presence of stillness. In doing so, they do not present us with disappearances or the realisation of death, but instead hand us a ghost of life itself. The jump reminds us of what the body is, one last time, before it disappears. The ephemerality of this moment and the traces it leaves lingering makes it the kind of disappearance that becomes performance.
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But bodies disappear often, and in many ways.
We should all stop using the word performance because we either misuse it or we use it to denote just about everything. The possibility of making meaning at all is pushed to the corner because of the images it evokes every time it is uttered. I think I got it — Dress up. Pretend. Act. Lie. On stage. Backstage. Funky hat, boisterous outfit. Someone else. Elsewhere. Anew. Just stop — that’s not what I meant. (To paraphrase Butler poorly.)
But I’m going to use it anyway.
I performed the role of the White Swan when I was sixteen (or seventeen, perhaps) in a 6-minute jazz rendition of the abridged Swan Lake choreographed by a senior male dancer-choreographer of a popular dance company in Delhi. I would meet the Prince in the centre of the room while the other swans fluttered around us. He’d take my right hand in his, I’d lift my left leg in arabesque. He would grab my thigh and lift me over his head, flip me around. I’d slither down his chest and his waist until I was breathing (heavily) on his face. “That’s it — keep her down. Now, you almost kiss — your lips need to almost touch — a bit closer. And you swivel and run back. Enter Black Swan.” This is the story of my first kiss. Rehearsals could be brutal, mostly because I’d often get feedback I didn’t know what to do with. “You’re not quite there — feel this. Give. More.” Until we found ourselves, the two of us, in a dark room with more feedback. “Give. You — give her more. She needs to feel this.”
Maybe the last one wasn’t a part of Jazzy Swan Lake. Maybe there were two different choreographies, with two different twenty-five-year-old boys. I can’t quite recall now.
Sometimes, bodies disappear in completely unremarkable ways, like with Wanda’s jump, which could easily be missed.
I have an excellent, almost immediate response to why I mostly do solo work these days — I can’t stand the idea of being around middle-aged, divorced, straight male choreographers. (“Why don’t we see enough women creating work in this field? It’s 2019, for god’s sake!” They probably can’t stand the idea of being around middle-aged, divorced, straight male choreographers.)
Well, it is not exclusively that. I either can’t stand them or I’ve slept with them; the lines are rather blurry. I’m joking, of course. I’ve slept with all of them. Joking, again. Consensually, too.
In his article Boy Problems, Ty Mitchell refers to “a dirty secret about gay boyhood: that we eagerly seek out pleasure alongside danger, that when a man gives it to us we feel shame and remorse unevenly, and that we are still blameless for all of it.” Young teenage boys coming-of-age look to men who are older and more experienced for the semblance of a queer kinship in a world where they are not afforded a space. I imagine this is true of teenagers of different sexualities and genders who don’t necessarily feel like their desires align with the world that they are forced into. I imagine this is true of what he calls “the erotics of teen angst” – They [we] aren’t looking to be hurt, to be in danger, but they [we] are asking to be undone.
I looked to older men for a kinship of creation, of beauty, and of skill. By giving consent, I was maybe looking for an opportunity to jump — knees bent, upward-downward, not knowing when I would land. I was only asking to be undone. An unremarkable disappearance. We don’t rehearse for abuse; we just perform it.
(Note to the reader: Undoing isn’t erasure.)
Some disappearances are more remarkable. They announce themselves like Tragedy (from the wings).
Dance continues to be (in 2019!) one of the fields consisting of a majority of women and a small percentage of men. Not just women, though. It is the one field that creates more space for queer bodies and goes a step further by, in its very form, inviting the queering of bodies. Dance makes what’s odd seem sexy; bodies make irreverence feel like freedom. After a problematic comment recently made by Good Morning America’s Lara Spencer about Prince George’s interest in dance, noted choreographers, dancers, and educators, along with thousands of others, turned to social media to say that #boysdancetoo. Men and boys talked about their own experiences of being bullied for dancing or wearing tights as children, and how they’ve struggled to be where they are now. Women, unequivocally, showed their support and talked about the rigorous, trying lives of young male dancers, which eventually led to Spencer issuing a public apology and claiming ignorance.
As a response, even after the apology, over three hundred dancers gathered in Times Square as part of a flash mob, to show support and to reassert that men and boys can dance too. The videos I saw were powerful: of men of all ages, with tears in their eyes, practicing their right to be who they choose to be and find space in a field that ridicules them. Patriarchal structures affect us all and we should stand together against them. (Who knew, right? This is sarcasm.) The fields of dance and performance, despite their openness to bodies, remain steeped in latent homophobia and ageism which has continually pushed men — and in particular young, queer men — to be the targets of discrimination. And yet, at the top, we have more male show directors, artistic directors, and board members.
A hashtag that I follow on Instagram and find quite uplifting is #browngirlsdoballet. There are about seventy-five thousand images linked to this hashtag, and a lot of them overlap with #blackballerina, which also has about twenty-five thousand images linked. I’m unsure about their origins, but they are both flooded with images of Misty Copeland, or little girls imitating Misty Copeland. Copeland, @mistyonpointe on Instagram, a principal dancer for American Ballet Theatre, became a sensation in 2015 by being the first African-American dancer to have been promoted to this position within the company. In May 2015, she danced the double role of Odette/Odile from Swan Lake at the Met. After that performance and the outstanding reviews, her promotion had seemed inevitable.
Now, as of November 2019, the posts are mostly of other young African-American dancers posing the way that Copeland perhaps would, reaffirming that there is potentially space for them too. If she could do it, they could do it too. Both cases mentioned above have been momentous and significant. For a young boy, somewhere, who has been bullied, and for a young girl, whose parents are unhappy with her choices, these hashtags must be liberating. They remind us that equal representation is important, and that, often, bodies are searching for some kind of sameness.
Jia Tolentino writes in her article The I in the Internet, that “[in] the absence of time to physically and politically engage with our community the way many of us want to, the internet provides a cheap substitute: it gives us brief moments of pleasure and connection, tied up in the opportunity to constantly listen and speak. Under these circumstances, opinion stops being a first step toward something and starts seeming like an end in itself.” Without disparaging equal representation in performance, I’d like to point out that making representation the end goal can be a lot more dangerous. By allowing it to be the point of contention, and, also, a source of victory, we make invisible the extant structural struggles. We, without intending to, contribute to the disappearance of the problems that non-male or non-white members face, of wage disparity, of subordination in theatres, and of problematic representations in performances. I would like to see more hashtags that excite me about the future of the dance world, but I would also like other bodies to have a chance to take space, to demand equal wages, to make sure we accept queering minds and not just bodies, to ask why (in 2019!) we continue to tell the story of the ill-fated White Swan pitted against the Black Swan when really it’s the structure around them which they should be fighting, for teaching them that the only way to happiness is in union with the opposite sex.
When we begin to feel good about the glorified instances of representation, what might we miss? Tolentino points out that “[a] hashtag is specifically designed to remove a statement from context and to position it as a part of an enormous singular thought.” The hashtag seems designed to erase the fact that men do continue to hold most positions of authority, reducing this joy felt at Times Square (or in front of my laptop) to what she calls ‘performative solidarity’, even though the people actually present there might have a much more nuanced opinion of the same. Often, we mean well, but we erase bodies anyway. I like that Maggie Nelson states as an absolute, irrefutable rule of thumb in her book The Argonauts that “when something needs to be wilfully erased in order to get somewhere, there is usually a problem.” A much more remarkable disappearance. So, if the only way to feel good is to homogenise the experience of dancers, then we should question that feeling. And yet, watching that video at Times Square (thrice) gives me goose bumps, and I wish I hadn’t felt like a killjoy when I finally sat down to write about it.
Some disappearances are both remarkable and unremarkable: resistant to being captured, but unable to stop moving.
After my grandmother’s death, my mother has found that she has a lot more time on her hands — she has gone on a holiday, acted in a community-organised play, and, as she informed me a while ago, kept up her goal of 10,000 steps a day. The days when she doesn’t manage to walk as much, she just brisk-walks in our living room after dinner, lest her sister overtake her. They both have identical Fitbit watches and they share this data with each other so neither of them skips a day. Sometimes, when I ask her how she is, she taps on the screen and tells me her heart rate and sometimes she just looks at it and says, “I need to find my phone, your brother is calling.” As she walks away, I amuse myself by telling myself that my mother is now a cyborg. That, really, we all are — from the old man I see with a pacemaker to the young athlete who is purchasing a special sports bra to optimise her performance on the track. Our lives have, as Donna Haraway predicted, hybridised and become entangled in networks of technology and bodies — we can’t imagine any other way to live.
Haraway envisioned these cyborgs as new feminist entities, programmed by feminists themselves, building a future in their own ways. She imagined that by not feeling an ancestral connection to a set of parents or to a system, they would act like ‘bastard children’ and operate in irreverent ways by breaking problematic patterns and forcing upon us new ones. So, cyborgs would not be something unnatural or artificial, but subvert such classifications. I’m going to take two cases of ‘becoming-cyborg’ here that are arrived at through deliberate interventions: The Transgender Body and The Cyborg-Artist.
Allucquére Rosanne Sandy Stone, a philosopher and artist, underwent gender reassignment with the Stanford Gender Dysphoria Program in Palo Alto. In 1987, while studying under Haraway, she wrote The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto, inspired by Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, but also as a reaction to what Stone perceived as a transphobic strain in feminist academia. In many lectures, she has defined the moment of reassignment as the moment when she was born. A new body, a defiant body; resistant to categorisation, irreverent in her engagement with the world. A cyborg, as she was called by Wired. On the other hand, the right-wing conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, has used this against the trans community by claiming that trans rights activists are creating cyborgs to destroy civilisation. This claim, along with others, led him to be suspended from Facebook and YouTube for bullying and hate speech.
On 5 August 2019, after severely being criticised by the queer community, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill was passed by the Lok Sabha. While this version addressed some problematic issues such as the criminalisation of begging, it failed to incorporate many issues brought forward by various parties including, but not limited to, the right of transgender persons to self-perceived gender identity without undergoing sex reassignment surgery and the correct identification of intersex persons. If we are all cyborgs now, which cyborgs does our environment actively erase? Which cyborgs have we erased historically, by simply naming them so? I’m uncomfortable about continuing to call these bodies cyborgs if we don’t yet know how to give a cyborg rights and agency.
On the other end of the spectrum, we can observe cyborg artist-activists Neil Harbisson and Moon Ribas who co-founded the Cyborg Foundation in 2010 “to help people become cyborgs, promote cyborg art, and defend cyborg rights”. Scrolling down on their website, we find the ‘Design Yourself’ section: a 5-step approach to becoming a cyborg. And, further below, in quotation marks but without any attribution: “We are the first generation able to decide what organs and senses we want to have.” They have a bill of rights with five rights stated, one of them being ‘Equality for Mutants’, to be treated as “natural persons” are. These propositions are predicated on the belief that becoming a cyborg is a desire that deserves to be fulfilled. If we began to see these desires as fundamental, as many do, are all bodies going to become equal? Which body gets to become a cyborg, and which one remain a ghost of the cyborg it desired to become?
There are a limited number of doctors who might actually agree to operate on individuals in this manner, and most of them are constrained by law. Also, by privatising such surgeries, such augmentations, we ensure that they are only accessible to those with large amounts of money, even if the rhetoric that surrounds such ‘transhumanism’ is one of a pure desire to explore. The edges of humanity and the future of the mutant seem to belong to the very rich, in the world we have built ourselves.
Even being an ordinary cyborg, like my mother, comes at a cost. No body enhancement or modification operates outside the demands of the market. She will get a new phone which has better compatibility with the watch, and then a software update which will make it faster and better. And then, she will have to buy new sports bras which promise her an aesthetic that goes with this new body. And then she will want that new body. (I don’t know, actually; she is quite against dieting, but we’ll see.) As Tolentino writes in a different article, there are “rewards for succeeding under capitalism and patriarchy; there are rewards for even being willing to work on its terms.” There are rewards for allowing yourself to be erased.
(Note to the reader: Erasures happen at the hands of patriarchy and capitalism.)
But I’m here writing this, and you are reading this, and, even as bodies are disappearing around us, we are flirting with their ghosts. Perhaps we need to figure out how these ghosts perform. There are cyborgs who have taken matters into their own hands. In other corners of the internet, you can acquaint yourself with groups of body-hackers sitting in their basements, making copious notes about what worked this time. There are performers who have stopped working with exploitative men and tired narratives, and created work that lies outside that template. Perhaps here they are: the cyborgs we hope don’t disappear.
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We seem to be standing at a vantage point, watching bodies being undone, getting erased, and eventually disappearing. My grandmother had been undone a long time ago; she wanted to disappear. The thing about bodies is that as they leave us, they leave behind traces, and their ghosts. They refuse to be still. Apparently, we are always performing — by acting, by being, by affecting. And in that we are constantly moving. And in that we are constantly disappearing.
We watch performances for the moments of stillness and movement and for the moment of complete disappearance, for the end. We learn to love performances for the ghosts that we continue to see in the dark after the bodies have left. Disappearances remain the central and most extravagant acts of performance. Perhaps deaths make excellent, riveting performances because they remind us of what performance is, after all — the ultimate act of disappearance.
So, how do we begin to care for every body that is threatening to or beginning to disappear?
(Note to the reader: We must keep moving with the ghosts that refuse to be still.)
WORKS CITED
Aronofsky, Darren. The Black Swan. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2010.
Barthes, Roland M. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1981.
Benoit-Lévy, Jean and Epstein, Marie. La Mort du Cygne. Comptoir Français du Film, 1937.
Butler, Judith. Gender trouble. Routledge, 2002.
Cyborg Foundation. Cyborg Foundation, 2010.
https://www.cyborgfoundation.com/. Accessed 4 November 2019.
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, and London: Free Association Books, (1991) 149-181.
Kourlas, Gia. “Lara Spencer Apologizes, and There’s Dancing in the Streets.” The New York Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/arts/dance/lara-spencer-apology-gma.html. Accessed 4 November 2019.
Mitchell, Ty. “Boy Problems.” The New Inquiry.
https://thenewinquiry.com/boy-problems/. Accessed on 4 November 2019.
Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Graywolf Press, 2015.
Pawlikowski, Powel. Ida. UK: Artificial Eye, 2013.
Phelan, Peggy. "Francesca Woodman’s photography: Death and the image one more time." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27.4 (2002): 979-1004.
Stone, Sandy. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” Camera Obscura (1992) 10 (2 (29)) 150-176.
Tolentino, Jia. “Always Be Optimizing” Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. London: 4th Estate, (2019) 63-94.
Tolentino, Jia. “The I in the Internet.” Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. London: 4th Estate, (2019) 3-33.
Woodman, Francesca. Some disordered interior geometries. Philadelphia: Synapse Press, 1981.
Urvi Vora is an artist and researcher based out of New Delhi. She is currently touring with her work SKUM Manifesto and is working on a project around intimacy, called The Naked Lunch Series.