Thousand Ways There Are to Move: Camp and Oriental Dance in the Hollywood Musicals of Jack Cole1, The

Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement, Spring 2003 by McLean, Adrienne L

Jack Cole (1911-1974) is often called "the father of American jazz dance."2 He developed his dance style while working as a choreographer and dancer in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, and "Cole technique" has strongly influenced both film dance and American theatrical dance generally. While he is probably equally famous today as a coach and mentor to female stars such as Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, and, particularly, Marilyn Monroe, Cole's most important innovation in dance terms, the one that made his work so influential, was his coupling of "accurately observed" oriental, Indian, and African-American dance movements to jazz music (Delamater 1981: 117). If Cole's name is not currently well known among film scholars, it is partly because his films do not demonstrate what Jerome Delamater calls the "stylistic unity" of those canonical musicals where the choreographer (e.g., Busby Berkeley, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly) functions as auteur, or where dance is the "controlling feature" of the mise-en-scene (as it is in the musicals of Vincente Minnelli). Nevertheless, in his heyday Cole was one of the most powerful choreographers working in Hollywood, with contractual control over the movement design, camerawork, costuming, lighting, and editing of his dance numbers.3

Another reason that Cole's importance may have been downplayed over the years is that he was gay, a fact well known by his co-workers but not, predictably, alluded to publicly outside of his creative environment. Yet, Cole's status as an invisible gay man (to use Moe Meyer's term) is crucial to more than an understanding of the satiric, parodic, or misogynistic-"Camp" -elements of Cole's film work (Meyer 1994). It is also a necessary precondition for his particular mode of deployment of oriental dance as a practice. Here, I examine the interaction between the irony, aestheticism, theatricality, and humor of Cole's discourse of Camp and the Orientalist dance practice he used in his musical numbers.4 Meyer defines Camp discourse as "the total body of performative practices and strategies used to enact a queer identity, with enactment defined as the production of social visibility" of erased or displaced (closeted) homosexual identity (Meyer 1994).5 Visibility, or invisibility, is the term that links Cole's Orientalist dance practice and his use of Camp discourse, for Cole's Orientalism, like his gayness, was often "invisible" as such. That is, because he worked within a dominant, patriarchal, and compulsorily heterosexual system of representation-classical Hollywood cinema-Cole's gay signifying system, like the Camp discourse of other gay performers and choreographers, became a "hidden transcript" within the "heterosexual frame" of his films (Drewal 1994: 176-177). What made Cole unique among his colleagues, however, was that his hidden transcript was, I suggest, oriental dance technique, which he manipulated precisely to reorganize and reconceptualize standard binary gender roles.

Cole did choreograph or direct the movement of several films with ostensibly oriental subject matter-including the two sound versions of Kismet (William Dieterle, 1944; Vincente Minnelli, 1955)-which employed conventionalized costumes, names, musical styles, and desert locales to ensure that audiences would "read" the subject as "exotic" and "foreign." But Cole's use of oriental dance was otherwise seldom recognizable through costume or music alone. Unlike his erstwhile mentors Ruth St. Denis (1877-1968) and Ted Shawn (1891-1972), for example, Cole relatively rarely created what film audiences would understand in visual terms to be "oriental dance." Instead, the dynamics of Cole's movement styles, his use of the body and the impulses that drive its expressive motions, were the loci of oriental influence on Cole's work, and the source of power supporting his hidden transcript.

The question is not whether Cole, or any other American, depicts non-Western cultures "authentically" or uses them to more "positive" ends. But, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes, forms of oppression are not all congruent; "the person who is disabled through one set of oppressions may by the same positioning be enabled through others"(Sedgwick 1990: 32). More important, the supposition that one is either oppressed or an oppressor, or that "if one happens to be both, the two are not likely to have much to do with each other," is, according to Sedgwick, usually wrongheaded (Ibid). Orientalism and homophobia are often linked, for example; Orientalism is not only racist but homophobic (Moon 1989: 19-54). Camp historically is also a direct consequence of homophobia; it is a "subterranean" discursive practice that results from living in a world of compulsory heterosexuality. Cole's Orientalist dance practice, because it was also a Camp practice, helped to undermine the homophobia of conventional "Hollywood Orientalism."

In her essay "Male Bonding, Hollywood Orientalism, and the Repression of the Feminine in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket," Susan White uses the term Hollywood Orientalism to refer to Hollywood's tendency "to conflate Eastern culture with corrupt sexuality, a degraded or treacherous femininity and male homoeroticism"(White 1988: 132). Certainly many Hollywood films of many different genres-war films, biblical epics, adventure films, comedies, and musicals-routinely reproduce visually and thematically what Edward Said calls the "imaginative geography" of Orientalism, according to which the Orient is described as feminine and fertile, its main symbols being "the sensual woman, the harem, and the despotic-but curiously attractive-ruler "(Said 1985: 90, 103 ; Shohat 1997). Nick Browne also details the invidious and reprehensible ways in which American "dominant popular Orientalism" in early films, film theory, and theater design coexisted with and screened out institutionalized and violent racial repression of Orientals themselves (Browne 1989). I do not intend here to downplay the paranoid racism of Orientalism as a category of thought or expertise or as a liminal dreamscape on which to project displaced Western erotic and political desires. Rather, I argue that because Orientalism has, as Said tells us, "less to do with the Orient than it does with our world" (Said 1979: 12), who chooses to practice it, and when, and why, demands further analysis. In other words, studying the basis of American Orientalism as it occurs in specific places and times will tell us nothing about the Orient but may teach us, as Browne's work so clearly shows, much about American culture itself.