30 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW
line of his body, rather than his flesh, suavely or sensually accentuating his masculine bearing. In contrast, my costume reinforces the
illusion of femininity, with dominant notes of either fragility or
eroticism. Typically, costumes are made of yards and yards of gossamer fabric, adorned with plumes and glitter for the smooth dances,
or of satin or lace, ruffled and beaded, attached to spandex bodices
for the Latin dances. The shoes are high-heeled spikes, of gold or
silver. Like ballet slippers, they are fragile, offer little protection to
the foot, are meant, like pointe, to extend the length of the leg, and
seem to defy gravity. They throw the torso forward and make balance more difficult for the woman than the man, whose footwear
resembles very flat street shoes. The costumes serve as accoutrements necessary to showcase an idealized vision of male and female,
so that the costumed dancers approximate living pieces of sculpture.
All their movements aim to maximize this vision of perfection, of
men and women with mythologically correct bodies, as if Adonis
and Venus incarnate were to dedicate themselves to Terpsichore.
The overall effect is one of grace and elegance. Subsidiary effects
include man serving woman, chivalrously presenting her, courting
her, desiring her, vanquishing her. In this landscape, the female
body is a prize actively sought by the male, who uses his power, his
finesse, and especially his body as lure.
This landscape, so carefully constructed to accentuate body, and
powerful in its own right, is energized and embodied in the dance. It
becomes part of the world of the dancers, who, in an act of reciprocity, express themselves in this stylized world by stylized encounters.
Each dance reveals both the soul of the dance and the soul of the
dancer through the body. The self revealed is romanticized, idealized, and more or less erotic. Here is the second domain of human
movement, what Van Den Berg describes as "the exposition of
[one's] inner self; of the secrecy of head and heart." For it is in the
movements of the body that the "hidden inner self becomes
visible."6
However, given the nature of ballroom dance, the exposition of
the inner self is a paired venture, and more problematic for the
woman than in other forms of dance. First and foremost, all movement is initiated and controlled by the man. He "leads" and she
"follows." The very language surfaces the deeply-embedded core of
traditional male/female roles. In fact, all dance patterns are labeled
from the man's point of view. Thus the basic patterns in all the
ballroom dances move forward for the man, backward for the
