A Slippery Stage: Tensions and Solidarities in the Cairo Cabaret

This ethnographic case study viscerally explores the micro-level of tactics, tensions, and insights cabaret dancers offer in regard to macro-level gender, class, sexuality, and nationality politics within Cairo, Egypt. As the night wears on in a Pyramid Street cabaret, the dancer’s stage becomes increasingly slippery, not just from five-pound notes littered across the dance floor, but from the increasingly volatile intra-MENA male clientele, who contentiously perform their masculinities and nationalist identities through tahayas (greetings) and tipping. As the tipping wars become more heated, the cabaret ra’asa (female dancer), remains the centrifugal force in precariously performing, playing, and being policed by these intersectionally vexed power plays. This case study comes from larger Critical Dance Studies and Middle Eastern Studies ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo; it explores the ways raqs sharqi and other marginalized moving bodies engage with slippery possibilities despite and amidst the tensions of precarious political and economic transformations Egypt has been experiencing since the 2011 revolution.

Every Little Thing He Does: Entrepreneurship and Appropriation in the "Magic Mike" Series

This essay analyses the theatricalized performance of stripping in the popular films Magic Mike (2013; dir. Steven Soderbergh) and its sequel, Magic Mike XXL (2015; dir. Gregory Jacobs). As several pieces about the series have argued, the filmmakers align making oneself an object of desire with an ideology of the ‘entrepreneurial subject’—a versatile and flexible subject suited for a post-Fordist economy—through the figure of ‘Magic’ Mike, a contemporary factotum, played by the charismatic Channing Tatum. Following a critical dance studies approach that attends to the intersection of body and gesture with socio-political, historical, and economic structures, I suggest theatricalized sexual labour in these films reveals the racial exclusions from the ideology of entrepreneurship. Key to my reading is the concept of ‘magic’, part of Mike’s nom de strip. Mike, the hegemonically masculine, heterosexual, white male protagonist, is magic because he is magnetic and effortlessly talented, in such a way that even the material world seems animated by his thrusting pelvis. Magic functions as an ideological device that attempts to hide the labour of training and performance as well as the structures of production in which this labour takes place. Considering the appropriation of black aesthetics in Magic Mike XXL’s performances of striptease, the film seeks to evaporate the spectre of race, that is, the way the white fantasy of the entrepreneurial subject is supported by the appropriation of racialized and especially black labour. While the narrative does not confront the appropriation of black labour directly, an analysis of the performances of striptease shows the film working through the issue on another level, in the complex entanglement of flesh and fantasy, agency and objectification, and racial and gendered desire.

Short Reviews

Gabriele Brandstetter's Poetics of Dance has remained unavailable to English-language readers until now. Widely considered a landmark book of dance scholarship when it first appeared in Germany in 1995, this provocative analysis of the early twentieth-century avant-garde in Europe is sure to continue to influence a new audience. The book's initial publication advanced the application of critical theory and interdisciplinary approaches to dance that now constitute the field of critical dance studies. Caringly translated by Elena Polzer with Oxford Studies in Dance Theory series editor Mark Franko, this work remains a unique analysis of modernity that illuminates dance as an “act of transmission,” a bridge through theatre, literature, and visual arts altering relationships to how movement is reproduced and how space is conceptualized. Brandstetter's central premise expands through reading body imagery as a historically specific context from which the iconography of pictorial patterns open up perceptual concepts. The interdependency between new models and vocabularies of modern dance and literature appearing at the turn-of-the-twentieth century brace the argument that avant-garde aesthetic debates and concerns moved through body imagery and figurations in space. The poetics of free dance (and later forms of Expressionist dance appearing in Germany) as it took shape in Europe foregrounds the dancer's movement as a transformative language and symbolic system of cultural deconstruction and renewal.

Dance Discourses: Keywords In Dance Research

The formation of what Randy Martin has called “critical dance studies” (1998) has gained increased momentum over the past decade. Martin's notion of critical dance studies clarified how dance scholarship was being reshaped by the explicit inclusion of critical theory in its methodologies and epistemologies. One of the major consequences for dance studies in embracing critical theory was the identification of dancing and choreographic practices as being also theory. Understanding dance as theory is not equivalent to seeing dance as the sole provider of the theoretical tools it needs for its own analysis (this would be intolerably solipsistic). Rather, it means that dance becomes a privileged practice ready to provide analytical tools for theorizing other areas of social performances: politics, culture, formations of disciplines and their bodies (docile or resistant). Dance is a mode of theorization that theory itself would need in order to address the social and political problematic brought by issues close to dance such as mobilization, embodiment, subjectivities, participation, representation, desire, discipline, control, etc.