Gender Performance, Gender Norms and Dance

As Richard Schechner suggests in Performance Studies, gender is essentially a performance. In daily life, gender is a performance based on one’s life experience and gender roles assigned by accepted social norms. The concept of gender first makes sense when being performed. Similarly, performance on stage, including dances, is a demonstration of gender and sexuality. As Judith Butler suggests in Gender Trouble, ‘gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame’ (p.33). Furthermore, the stylization of gender performance in dance also reflects the consistency or transformation in people’s perspective on gender norms. This essay will analyze the gender representations in different dances with specific examples of choreographers or choreographies. Some of them are conforming while some are subversive to the prevailing gender norms characteristic of patriarchy and heterosexuality, but all of them speak about the stylization of body and repeated acts in dance that give birth to gender performativity and conceptualize ‘gender’.