Felicia Mccarren

In Nutcracker’s waltzing flowers, in Loie Fuller’s shape-shifting calyxes, in Fokine’s Rose danced by Nijinsky, choreography created plant roles that nuance social or biological genders. Choreographies inspired by the green world imagine a wider range of gender roles that dance is well placed to represent on stage. I have argued that dance—culturally central, wordless, and often featuring women—offered historic stagings of scientific understandings of bodies and bodily signification. In this project, I want to explore whether botany, rather than anatomy, offered dance a model of gender different from performance or performativity. Dance’s performances of gender—coded into movement, different from drama’s gendered costumes --might best be seen in roles based on flora rather than fauna. In the cultural history of biology, and of concert dance, ideas about the dynamics and variation of sex in plant science find their way to the stage. In parallel with naturalists, choreographers are thinking through natural as well as social definitions of gender. What sorts of gender narratives did botany make possible for the stage, and what sorts of roles has concert dance made possible for plants? Against a historical background of rising biologism, professionalization of science, and state-centered bio-power, does dance, in the matter of gender, respond not only to science, but also to nature? In this sense, the stage is also a laboratory.