Switching between lead and follow:
Choreographic possibilities to challenge the heteronormative gender binary in DanceSport
Introduction
Latin DanceSport, the competitive counterpart to social ballroom dancing, is a discipline popular mainly in the Global North.
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Dancers perform five dances per round: Samba, Cha Cha Cha, Rumba, Paso Doble and Jive. Sometimes the first two dances are swapped, depending on the federation organising the competition. At its highest level it may look something like this:
DanceSport is choreographed and not improvised.
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Although DanceSport comes from social dancing, as all routines are choreographed, there is no real need for leading and following in the improvisational sense of the word. In social dancing, the follower may not know which move is coming next.
Both partners know the routine inside-out. Leading and following is more about aesthetics - creating resistance and speed, drama and emotion - and the right gender performance. In this way, partnering mixes with choreography to create the proper heteronormative performance.
This coordination between partners is facilitated and constrained in DanceSport with the hold. The hold is both about function - the points of contact which allow partners to communicate with each other haptically - and cisheteronormative aesthetics: the hold gives the outside world the illusion that the male partner supports the female partner. It’s all an illusion, however, since she carries herself independently.
Basics about connection
DanceSport is about synchronising movement between two people. In its simplest form, this coordination can be described as mirroring.
It looks like this:
Although there is no need to improvise what comes next, the scene considers it a marker of quality for women to act as if they don't know what's coming, in order to create a certain lag or resistance in the connection, and a causality: she won't do what he hasn't suggested. Trainers aiming to teach the concepts of heteronormative leading and following use language that affects the mindset and self-esteem of students, especially if they are very young. Any parent that’s waited for a child to finish their private lesson or accompanied them to their competition will have heard expressions such as "He is the one who has to decide" or "As a girl you should follow what he wants to do" or "Girls are not supposed to use their brains." This is taken to the extreme by many top trainers who explain in lecture demonstrations that she should not breathe if he has not initiated it.³ It looks like this:
Latin dances emerged from the appropriation of dances from Latin American countries, such as Cuba or Brazil, which were then imported to Europe and transformed, standardised and codified in order to be marketed to a white middle-class audience.¹
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European appropriation significantly altered the dances, sometimes mixing several into a single competitive dance. It’s interesting to note that DanceSport underwent a rapid evolution towards ‘higher, better, faster, stronger’ in order for couples to attract the attention of judges, creating a palpable fear that the style was losing its identity. To counteract this sense of loss, people in DanceSport keep referring to the "basics" or "roots," which eventually led them to look at the "original cultures" - only to realise that there is not much to learn from them, since the dances at DanceSport competitions have almost nothing to do with the dances in Latin America. Indeed, Hazel and Alan Fletcher visited Brazil in the hope to learn more about Samba - in vain.
As a result of this neocolonial appropriation of Latin American dances, heteronormativity, homophobia, racism, transphobia and sexism are commonplace not only on the dancefloor, but also offstage.² These systems of oppression are constitutive of the style and manifest themselves in many ways. The one that interests us here is the cisheteronormative injunction that men will lead and women will follow, which acts as a kind of social law that must not be broken.
The interaction between partnering and choreography manifests itself in the principle of centrality. The man is always in the centre, while the woman is shown around like a pretty object, offered up to the gaze of the audience.
His steps are mostly simple, very limited in space, and directed towards the audience in order to divert its objectifying gaze.⁴
In heteronormative routines in which roles are distributed compulsively according to gender, choreography and partnering interweave to create cisheteronormative aesthetics that glorify male supremacy and female submissiveness.⁵
"Many top trainers explain in lecture demonstrations that she should not breathe if he has not initiated it."
The creativity in constantly switching roles knows no bounds, and only when many people have played around with it will we know the full extent of what is possible - until then, we can marvel at Michael Chen Yichao & Steven Greenwood - or try it out for ourselves!
Queering DanceSport choreography
Although the heteronormative division of labour is assumed to be based on a gendered 'nature' or 'essence,' the skills involved in leading or following are actually unrelated to gender or sex.⁶ The prerequisite for dancing any role is an able body and years of training and practice.
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Even the leading experts in DanceSport agree that no one is born a great dancer.⁷
The queer social dance scenes have known that for decades, and nowadays the more normative social dance scenes seem to have come on board.⁸ The Equality DanceSport scene, which developed to allow some members of the queer community to compete, has also implemented the option for everyone to dance the role they want, and even to change roles during the dance. Some countries that are part of the WDSF are already implementing same-sex dancing (Austria) or role switching (USA) within their national competitions.
Decoupling sex and gender from dance roles decentres gender as an implicit judging criterion and disrupts the cisheteronormative norm. This decoupling will lead to a re-evaluation of choreographies to include moments where partners change roles during a dance performance.
We want to show what dance could look like if we allowed switching within a single performance, while respecting the WDSF's explicit quality criteria, which don't mention gender at all.⁹ In other words, we are keeping the technique; we are just changing one parameter.
This routine can become even more interesting by adding more people to it who fluidly switch roles throughout.
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You’ll argue: “This is not realistically achievable in competitions!” And yet we would like to encourage choreographers to play with group formations and dance roles.
In contrast to the discipline of formation, we are interested in the multiple ways of relating and the neural plasticity encouraged by switching roles within a larger constellation. We illustrate these principles with the same routine, this time extended to a group of dancers.
This routine can be made more interesting by adding moments where the dancers switch roles. Notice how the routine becomes more tridimensional and the interaction between the two bodies evolves continuously.
We illustrate this principle with a routine that we transformed to demonstrate the additional choreographic creativity that comes from switching. We begin with a heteronormative version.
The flexibility required to switch can bring virtuosity to both choreographies and performances. We illustrate the kind of choreographic creativity that comes from constantly switching roles in a short Basic Rumba video:
Why should we care about switching,
and how to implement it in our dancing?
Instead of a strong man moving a frail woman, something more meaningful can emerge, allowing for interaction, exchange, and playfulness in the exploration of new choreographic possibilities disconnected from cisheteronormativity. Switching also allows us to experience more of who we are on the dance floor, regardless of gender and dance role, opening up space for us to find out who we ultimately want to be, with less pressure to conform to the norm.
We know that much more needs to happen for this change to take place within heteronormative competitions.
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Pragmatically, dance teachers and choreographers will need to choreograph based on their dancers' abilities rather than gender;
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Teachers and adjudicators will need to be trained to deconstruct the cisheteronormative gaze.
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And on a more meta level, we need to make it cool for men to be led by women - and the fact that this promises to be difficult is just a reflection of wider societal issues.
We are aware of this, but we want to start here by developing a new imagery, one that is positive and allows us to expand our imaginations to things we didn't think were possible.
"The flexibility required to switch can bring virtuosity to both choreography and performance."
"We need to make it cool for men to be led by women - and the fact that this promises to be difficult is just a reflection of wider societal issues."
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"Many top trainers explain in lecture demonstrations that she should not breathe if he has not initiated it."
We illustrate this principle with a routine that we transformed to demonstrate the additional choreographic creativity that comes from switching. We begin with a heteronormative version.
This routine can be made more interesting by adding moments where the dancers switch roles. Notice how the routine becomes more tridimensional and the interaction between the two bodies evolves continuously.
This routine can become even more interesting by adding more people to it who fluidly switch roles throughout.
Learn more
You’ll argue: “This is not realistically achievable in competitions!” And yet we would like to encourage choreographers to play with group formations and dance roles.
In contrast to the discipline of formation, we are interested in the multiple ways of relating and the neural plasticity encouraged by switching roles within a larger constellation. We illustrate these principles with the same routine, this time extended to a group of dancers.
The flexibility required to switch can bring virtuosity to both choreographies and performances. We illustrate the kind of choreographic creativity that comes from constantly switching roles in a short Basic Rumba video: