Spectacular Choreographies of Epic Proportions

This essay traces my journey as a dance artist, scholar, and teacher, and elucidates the strategies with which I have learned to articulate my creative voice, to locate myself within the field of dance, and to perform my identity with self-determined agency. Using the first person and locating myself within this text is a strategy that I have drawn from feminist methodology, a meditation on voice, and a mode of autobiographical performance. This essay also examines the life, career and choreography of Ricki Starr, a ballet-dancing wrestler. Starr became a symbolic icon for me, and his use of ballet vocabulary offered me a powerful example of how to disrupt and challenge the norms of cultural hegemony. Starr’s work in the wrestling ring (and on television, in film and in the music industry), is a powerful case study that conveys some of the ways that dance allows for complex and challenging portrayals of gender identity as enacted through physical storytelling

Aesthetics · Art · Ballet · Choreography · Concert dance · Conversation · Dance · Dance improvisation · Icon · Improvisation · Jazz dance · Literature · Modern dance · Narrative · Sociology · Storytelling · Visual arts · Communication · Computer Science · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts · Sports, Gender, and Society