#270° oversplits

[flexibilityisfreedom]

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[jadagul]

Like, if you made a commitment to choreograph only dances that could be performed by any human of any body type, that would in fact limit your dancing a lot. (Quite a lot: some people physically can't dance at all!)

In contrast, if you choreograph your dance to be some super demanding thing and then just say anyone who can do it can do the role, that expands who can do what. (And like, sure, if your dance calls for 270 degree oversplits then maybe there are no men who can do that, and then you don't cast them, but you don't need an explicit no-men rule to make that happen.)

The place where this critique makes some sense is in a unison performance that's choreographed after the company is assembled. In that case, each new dancer you add introduces new limits to what you're allowed to choreograph, but if they all have basically the same skillset and physical capabilities then adding new dancers doesn't limit it much.

If you have nine slim ballerinas and one curvy hip-hop dancer and you need them all to look the same then you have to be careful. And similarly, I imagine that if you have nine female ballerinas and one male ballerino and you need them all to match, there's choreography you have to avoid that you could probably do with ten female ballerinas.

But this brings us back to the selection thing. If you're running a dance company, you probably have some idea what things you want your dancers to be able to do. (And like, even if you hire ten similar-looking female ballerinas they won't have exactly the same capabilities!) So if a man can in fact do all the things you expect to ask your ballerinas to do, maybe let him do it.

I do actually have one more objection to that in a unison ensemble piece, but it comes from a sort of aesthetic perfectionism that I don't think is actually the goal of most dance companies? But last time I did serious ensemble dance performance we dyed our hair and all used the same makeup so that we'd match physically as closely as possible. A mixed-gender company would break that. But that's like three layers deep of being demanding about weird things, and can't possibly be what anyone is talking about 99% of the time.