sarma

The late José Limón in an article he contributed to Selma Jeanne Cohen's book The Modern Dance: Seven Statements of Belief, wrote that he had always thought that dancing was something for girls to do until he saw Harald Kreutzberg perform. He then realized that "a man could, with dignity and a towering majesty, dance."

Limón like many male dancers in America during the first half of this century started his training late; in those days, for social and economic reasons, people didn't encourage their sons to aim for a career in dance (many still don't). Such men brought to dance - particularly to the so-called modern dance - bodies that were springy and strong, but without much finesse. A limited limberness coupled with mature backmuscles would have kept many of them from, say, lifting their legs high in arabesque, even if they had wanted to. Most didn't. They looked and tried to look - like men dancing rather than like dancers who happened to be male.

I remember Limón's company of the fifties. A lot of the men were built like runners. Supporting Limón in his various versions of the tragichero role, they emphasized qualities most Americans think of as masculine: strength, directness, a kind of brusqueness that doesn't preclude tenderness. Limón himself, with his huge gestures, stabbing footwork, often seemed to plunge into dancing-shoulders first-like a magnificent bull.

Times have changed. This summer, Connecticut College's American Dance Festival, where Limón was for many years cock-of-the-walk, proved to be - among other things - a small anthology of male dance styles. Watching Daniel Nagrin perform some of his famous solos from the forties and fifties, I was struck by how different most male dancers of the seventies are from this tough and charming man with his gallery of recognizable male archetypes. Nagrin's characters have less grandeur than Limón's did: he's adept at portraying the suave heel, the gambler, the frustrated city dweller, the gangster. (Imagine Humphrey Bogart dancing.) Nagrin's style turns on a dime, shoots straight, and doesn't mess around.

It's difficult to pinpoint exactly how, when, and why dancers and choreographers began to modify this rugged ideal of male dancing. Certainly in the fifties, men like Donald McKayle and Talley Beatty, who adapted modern dance forms to black subject matter and dealt with their heritage - African, Caribbean, or American - as they understood it, showed without any fuss that a man could ripple his body, roll his head around, move his hips and rib-cage in independent circles and not tarnish his image.

When, also during the fifties, Alwin Nikolais began to develop his theater of light-magic, sensuous colors and shifting forms, one of his avowed intentions was to get away from the story-telling aspects of dance. Unlike most directors of modern dance companies, he was not his own star performer, and he neither wanted nor needed to create heroes whose griefs an audience could identify with. In Nikolais' works, the dancers are only part of his fantastic environments. Together they may suggest a complicated organism or pulses of energy or a kaleidoscope of bright patterns. Sex plays little part in Nikolais' dances, and his movement style doesn't emphasize differences in gender. Nikolais dancers tend to have highly articulate bodies; they can execute many intricate gestures simultaneously. Men and women are equally light, fluid, and subtle. (That some of the dancers - Gladys Bailin or Phyllis Larnhut, for instance - have been sexy is a piquant point, but not a vital one.) A few weeks after the Nikolais company appeared at the American Dance Festival, a young going-places-fast company called Pilobolus took over the stage. And although Pilobolus was formed by four athletes who began studying dance while at Dartmouth, the dancers make few overt demonstrations of manliness. They're awesomely strong, but they softpedal their way into complex designs made out of several bodies. Linking onto each other, standing on each other, the dancers can form a fluid succession of pyramids, inkblots, many-linked creatures. Their choreography makes the individual disappear and reappear in the same way Nikolais' does. The two women now in the company are used, for the most part, simply as valuably light-weight bodies.

Not all unisex choreography is sexless, however. In the Louis Falco Dance Company, the dancers are vibrant, highpowered, beautiful to look at. In cheerful dances, they celebrate their own prowess with almost voluptuous satisfaction; in tragic ones, they hurl their bodies around as if abusing or exhausting them were an appropriate metaphor for spiritual torment. Their sexual contacts are acrobatic and casual.

When Falco danced with Limón several years ago, he looked like a strong and beautiful baroque angel-part male, part female-swirling in the orbit of an aging king. He is a splendid example of the breed of male dancers that developed as society's definition of sex roles began to stretch and slacken. Many of these dancers were able to begin their training at an early age. They can arch their backs and raise their legs high; yet supple as they are, they still emphasize strength. They can toss women around and at the same time compete with them in flexibility. They suggest not adult men, but idealized images of youth.

Their virtuosity endears them to many choreographers. During the sixties, even Martha Graham, who had once cast men as stiffly strutting phallic figures or sturdy lovers, began to make dances full of a muscular, almost ornate eroticism -dances in which both men and women seemed as turned on by the motions of their own bodies as by the sight of anyone else on stage. And, although in classical ballet male and female roles are carefully delineated in terms of movement, many contemporary choreographers working in ballet have also exploited the possibilities of the limber male body. Some of these choreographers, Jerome Robbins for instance, deliberately play around with traditional roles, letting men support men, or women support men; others, like Gerald Arpino, capitalize on the excitement an audience feels at seeing a dancer's limbs stretched to capacity.

However, the new generation of experimental choreographers, those who avoid role-playing altogether, might consider the aggressively glowing muscularity of the dancers in Falco's company just another kind of sterotyped role. (Even a rapscallion of an old avant-gardist like Merce Cunningham lightly acknowledges a difference between men and women in his dances. His dancers' bodies, their genders, are part of their individuality, important for the subtle variations they impart to his movement style.) Some men who choreograph now, who build a style on their own bodies, appear to be uninterested in implying how they as men ought to dance. They don't limit what they do, but neither are they flamboyant with their bodies. Take, for instance, Ted Rotante, who with his partner and co-choreographer Nora Guthrie closed this summer's festival. Rotante has trained in a variety of styles, but I don't know whether it's his eclectic background or his sensitivity to movement that gives his dancing an unusual amount of nuance and variety. He can power gestures from deep inside his body like an African dancer; he can look as light and dry as Fred Astaire or as nimble-jointed as Murray Louis (once Alwin Nikolais' leading dancer, now director of his own company), or as strong-man as he chooses. But whatever his role of the moment, he is undeniably himself dancing, apparently unworried whether or not he is creating an indelible masculine image.

When I watch him and other men developing along similar lines, I think that maybe male lib is finally hitting the dance world. It's nice that men can dance like kings or tough guys or the boy acrobats of antiquity, but why should anyone have to play those roles all the time? Especially in dances that purport to reflect the changing rhythms and patterns of contemporary America, it seems unnecessary to harp on the differences between men and women - and equally absurd to deny that such differences exist.