"What makes butch women butch?" she asks. "Butches don't move. The moving torso is feminine. Bully is about female masculinity. We approximate a metal show -- that metal-rock place -- of boyish rawness." The ragged and fevered rock score (performed live by Violent Green) becomes the masculinizing metaphor for a clutter of bully gestures. In structure, movement vocabulary, and noise, Bully exposes the exaggerated "high femininity" of modern dance.
As a child, LeGendre learned her share of ballet, tap, and jazz, all meant as an adjunct to her training as a gymnast. "It was a real JonBenet Ramsey scene," she says. "It was all about thinness as worthiness. Whose body is better? Is my body worth being seen?
"As a dancer in this culture," she continues, "you're dispossessed, disenfranchised, disempowered. You're a worker of the body. The only other workers of the body are whores and massage therapists and healers. So it puts you in a really delicate place in terms of your relationship with the rest of the community at large. People think you're an airhead or entirely 'of the body' -- sensual and non-articulate. You're publicly eroticized, too. Because your body is your tool, people feel they have permission to talk about it. Even smart, respectful artgoers feel they have the right to comment on my ass.
"To this day, I struggle with this arrangement because it's so anti-feminist in nature and because it's so disempowering: the quintessential objectification. This is a lifelong struggle, going from being an object to subjectivity. Bully works at changing the predator [and] prey relationship."
There is a terrible moment in Bully when the bullies surround someone with sounds. "Not words -- sounds," she says. "Boys know a hundred sounds for farts; they can burp the whole alphabet. My mother can't make sounds. I can't burp one letter." The sound in the scene is a nonsense word, but repetitive, grating, prolonged. "This scene is a gift for my mother, full of the energy of conflict, the vibe you feel when something's about to explode."
In counterpoint to the harshness of Bully is its companion piece, Sissy -- The Pleasure of the Ordinary, a "much softer, more feminine" performance, set to the music of Ryuichi Sakamoto. It examines the "whiny, girly, manipulative" side of life and the pleasure derived from this extreme gender expression.
"In these two pieces, I'm fully aware of my movement agenda and my feminist agenda and my political agenda. I've found that the subject of a particular piece, be it history and my grandmother (Sit on the Lap, 1996) or the loss of vision (Bathing the Blind, 1998), is almost secondary to my agenda. I'm trying to become smarter by knowing what my agendas are, so I don't get locked into repetition or apply elements to a particular piece that are not unique."
In addition to knowledge of her competing agendas, LeGendre is aware of the "profoundly anti-capitalist experience that being a dancer is." But recent funding coups have started to open doors. A prestigious grant from New England Foundation for the Arts has enabled LeGendre to finally pay her dancers. "This eases things, makes me less desperate in my relationship to my dancers. Now they aren't always running just to make ends meet. They're not injured from doing things in a hurry. They can focus."
"As a dancer," LeGendre concludes, "you're vulnerable before you perform. Your performance is a gift -- a generosity met with judgment, toxic shame converted to fire."
Bully and Sissy will play at On the Boards, March 30-April 2. Call 217-9888 for tickets and more info.
