Will this be the year two women lift the glitterball?
The hit show needs to consider tradition and the physical demands of dancing before making changes, says critic Laura Thompson
As regular as the autumn equinox, or so it seems, Strictly Come Dancing is upon us once more. The launch show for the 16th outing aired last Saturday, and already the season is attracting the usual “controversies”. Does anybody recognise more than half of the contestants, and why are at least two of them trained dancers? So far, so familiar. Over the past two or three seasons, however, a more interesting question has been raised: should the show feature same-sex couples?
The openly gay “TV doctor” Ranj Singh, a contestant in the new series, is reported to have asked producers if he might dance with a man, while the Rev Richard Coles, a participant in 2017, has expressed his support. So, too, has judge Craig Revel-horwood, who commented drily: “You only have to decide who’s going to go backwards.” There is, it would seem, a growing momentum for a change in the rules. So much so that Susan Calman – who is married to a woman – was obliged to defend herself last year against criticism for dancing joyously with a man.
The BBC recently declared that it had no plans to introduce same-sex couples. Nevertheless, the show is introducing some same-sex partnering among the professionals, which might be a way of getting audiences used to the idea.
The main change would lie in the dance dynamic. To put it very basically, women cannot lift each other high in the air, while samesex bodies meld differently from those of a man and woman.
The BBC must also be acutely aware that one of the main reasons Strictly is so popular is its retro style, with its gorgeous, smiling, skin-revealing dancers and excitable whispers about training-room love affairs.
The irony-free glamour and Seventies-style Saturday nights watching television en famille is precisely what the audience likes. As former participant Rob Rinder said, in reference to the issue of same-sex partnering: “Some things ain’t political, and Strictly is one of them.”
Yet recent research suggests there is a history of same-sex partnerships in one of Strictly’s most popular dances. The tango, which quite literally looks like sex on legs and would appear to be the definitive dance expression of heterosexual erotic power play, was commonly danced by two men when it was developed in mid-19th-century Argentina.
This was mainly because there was a gender imbalance in the population at the time, and partners used each other to sharpen their skills before trying them out on a girl. But the tradition continued well into the 20th century. A famous photograph shows a collection of butchers posed in tango positions while radiating machismo, and it is even suggested that the classic tango turn, or giro, was invented on a construction site (a particularly nimble hod carrier?). Alongside this, there was a semi-secret gay tango scene, just as today there is a “queer tango” scene. There is also a fast-developing world of same-sex ballroom dancing, as documented this year in Gail Freedman’s acclaimed US film
Hot to Trot. In the UK, meanwhile, the Same-sex Dance Council organises competitions including the Pink Jukebox Trophy, held at the evocatively named Rivoli Ballroom in Brockley, south-east London. It is all a very long way from Stately as a Galleon, Joyce Grenfell’s glorious homage to the Olde Tyme Dance Club, where an excess of women makes same-sex partnering a necessity (“The gent is Mrs Tiverton, I am her lady fair…”).
Broadly speaking, dance is a physical representation of emotion, and dance partnerships are about closeness and chemistry. Therefore same-sex couples are both logical and inevitable in every area of the dance world. In contemporary dance they are commonplace, especially male-- on-male: Maurice Béjart, Roland Petit, Mark Morris and Jiří Kylián are just a few of the choreographers who have explored this territory. Nor is classic ballet immune: in 1995 Matthew Bourne turned Swan Lake upside-down by creating a fluttering corps of male cygnets.
Female duets are less usual, although they can be traced back to the delicious, faintly transgressive dance of the “girls in grey” in Bronislava Nijinska’s 1924 ballet Les Biches. Much later, the peerless Sylvie Guillem performed Here and After by Russell Maliphant, a pas de deux for women in which their physical sameness, and the palpable sense of softness within strength, opened the eye to new dance possibilities. So, too, does Duet, a short new work by the Royal Ballet’s Kristen Mcnally, which has the dancers create a relationship not by touch but by mirroring and flickering eye contact. It is delicate, and enchantingly fresh.
It is also limited, at least in comparison with the majestic pas de deux of classical ballet: the near-unbearably tender Act II of Swan Lake, the triumphant gilded finale of The Nutcracker, the tumultuous Shakespearean clashes of Kenneth Macmillan’s Mayerling. The soaring lifts, the shape-shifts, the interplay of force and submission could never be replicated in a same-sex duet. The dynamic is simply too different.
Yet in a society preoccupied with notions of fluidity, in which theatrical casting can go any which way and canonical works can be rewritten to change their gender perspective, the very idea of the traditional pas de deux is itself tantamount to sacrilege – unless one happens to be Alexei Ratmansky, formerly director of the Bolshoi, now of American Ballet Theatre, who last year wrote: “Sorry, there is no such thing as equality in ballet: women dance on point, men lift and support women. Women receive flowers, men escort women offstage… And I am very comfortable with that.”
Ratmansky was responding to two new works produced by New York City Ballet, both featuring significant same-sex duets, one of which cast a male dancer in a previously female
To put it very basically, same-sex bodies meld differently from those of a man and woman
role. The choreographer, Justin Peck, described it as an “exploration of gender-neutrality”, and garnished his Instagram post with hashtags, among them #genderneutral #equality #diversity. By comparison, Ratmansky could be portrayed in some quarters as the man of yesterday, insisting “there are gender roles in traditional ballet”.
He is quite right, of course. Yet the new need not damage the old. If the producers of Strictly Come Dancing are planning their own leap forward, they will be shrewd enough to understand this very well.