Dress for Success - skirts for men common in dance productions - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, Oct, 2000 by Janice Berman

IT'S OUR COSTUME SPECIAL ISSUE, and I thought it might be a worthy moment to ask for a little forum. Just send your answers to dancemagazine.com Question of the Month: Men in dresses--what's up with that? Or, for that matter, men in skirts? In days past, the only male dancers in dresses were the Ugly Stepsisters in Cinderella, Mark Morris and the Trocks. Today, it's a veritable hemline fraternity. (Good thing Spencer Tracy isn't around to see this. Remember his line to Katharine Hepburn in Desk Set? "Do I look like the kind of guy who would care about the hemskirt?" Spence was born too soon.) You may have seen the wonderful Robert Tewsley of the Stuttgart Ballet in a maroon velvet floor-length getup for Christian Spuck's Dos Amores. You may even have been lucky enough to glimpse Mikhail Baryshnikov in a skirt during a White Oak performance.

Maybe it's the obverse of macho. Yes, in other cultures and climes a dress, sarong, kilt or some variation thereof is standard masculine attire. Yes, I know. But onstage, the decision to wear such a garment speaks to intense male security (and if Baryshnikov doesn't have it, who would?) or an awareness that skirts feel and look better than pants for certain moves and moods. Last year in Escondido, California, I saw Baryshnikov in the solo Tamasaburo Banda choreographed for him. Misha was wearing a samurai-style skirted garment and it was really terrific looking, as, not surprisingly, was the choreography. Two chuckleheads behind me started giggling, and at intermission another couple remonstrated with them for making so much noise. Fists were raised, cooler heads intervened and that particular culture war ended in a draw. Now wouldn't it have been refreshing if there were an argument over the content, rather than the wrapper?

In the New York City Ballet's most recent Diamond Project outing, a Peter Martins piece featured men in dresses (see GLITTERING DISCOVERIES MARK NYCB PROJECT). And Baryshnikov will be wearing another dress during his White Oak tour that pays tribute to the Judson era. (Read all about it next month in Wendy Perron's interview with him.)

You have to wonder whether all this will have a rebound effect. Maybe the prevalence of skirts will encourage Mark Morris to put all his dancers in Isaac Mizrahi pants. Then again, maybe the Ugly Stepsisters will start wearing leisure suits. Heck, we've already seen Matthew Bourne's swans, with their feather-festooned pedal pushers, or paddle pushers. So much for men in skirts. No tutu froufrou here!

And what will be the offstage influence of all this knees-up adventurism? Well, already some entrepreneur in Scotland has decided to update the traditional kilt, rendering it in hip, contemporary fabrics like animal prints and adding a newly enlarged sporran (it's that purse in the front, in case you were wondering), the better to accommodate a cell phone.

It was, of course, bound to happen. All those years that girls and women had to wear dresses and skirts everywhere--to school to hang on the monkey bars, even to slog through snowstorms to the office where it was not uncommon, in the '60s, to hear a male boss tell a female employee, "We like to see legs here." Snapped one of my coworkers, "Then look at your own!").

And then, one day in 1969, it was all over. Very quickly. One morning, I looked up from my IBM Selectric and there was one of the newly hired senior-level women, wearing beige trousers. The next day, I wore grey ones. None of the men said a word. We had Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and it was as if there had been a long storm, and suddenly the sun came out, and women were wearing slacks, trousers, bellbottoms, pantsuits and lots of really ugly-looking polyester. By the 1970s, some even hazarded hotpants to the office. And did you ever hear anyone say that she missed her dresses?

And pants still feel really good. To me, anyway. But maybe if you've been dancing in them all your life when you'd just as soon be wearing a free-moving skirt, or maybe if you're a guy and you've been wearing them all your life, living in them when you'd just as soon be wearing something a little different, something new to the office, to climb a tree, to change the oil, to go get a beer--you have a different take on them.

Think of it. Maybe the only thing between men and skirts is the persuasive power of the men of dance.