In any kind of musical theater that involves dance, from ballet to a book musical, a pas de deux can dramatize a lot of different things -- flirtation, romantic exhilaration, the dawning or the fading of love. Because it involves a complex physical conversation between two people it almost always evokes the sexual act itself, and sometimes it does so in a very conscious way. It can do this without ever making explicit physical references to the sexual act, and is usually most effective when it doesn't -- when it evokes the moods and the moral evolutions of sex, mistrust, anxiety, curiosity, trust, surrender, transcendence. It can chart the interior narrative of sex, rather than its mechanics, mechanics which one proper British lady once described as "always the same ridiculous motions". The pas de deux can be a kind of metaphysical pornography.
(Image © Paul Kolnik)
It is certainly that in the ballets of the great choreographer George Balanchine, whose whole body of work can be seen as a meditation on the etiquette of sex. He saw a relationship between the formal behavior of ceremonial occasions and the courtly rituals of the boudoir -- for him, the two arenas of life informed each other, celebrated each other. His pas de deux could be funky, raunchy, wild and on the edge of control, but there was always an element of graciousness in them, of the mutual sympathy that fuels genuine physical passion. They were always about sex as an expression of love, whether sacred or profane.
The pas de deux in the musicals Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made at RKO in the 1930s are almost always about the sexual act, and very consciously so. "Of course, Ginger was able to accomplish sex through dance," Astaire once said. "We told more through our movements instead of the big clinch. We did it all in dance." Hermes Pan, who collaborated with Astaire in the creation of his dances, said, "We showed things you couldn't talk about."
After their first great pas de deux, in The Gay Divorcee, danced in a seaside pavilion to the music of Cole Porter's "Night and Day", Rogers falls back on a settee in a dreamy post-orgasmic languor. Astaire stands over her with a kind of cocksure but slightly goofy satisfaction and offers her a cigarette -- a classic post-coital ritual. (The production still above doesn't really do justice to the moment.)
In Roberta, probably the worst of their RKO vehicles, the characters they play (second leads) don't have much of a romantic narrative. They seem attracted to each other from the start, and the only suspense in the relationship comes from wondering when they're going to admit it to each other. It happens, of course, after they do a highly sexualized dance at the end of the film. They exit the arena they danced in and backstage Rogers again collapses in dreamy exhaustion. "I think I'm going to have to give in to you," she says. Astaire asks her what she's talking about. "I thought you were going to ask me to marry you," she answers. "I was," he says. "All right then," she says, "I will." "Thank you," he says -- and they shake on it.
It funny and charming, and the gag works because he's already told her he loves her, already asked her to marry him, and she's already said yes -- in the dance.
In Astaire's early years when he danced in vaudeville with his sister, their act always had a narrative element -- it told a little story in twelve minutes or so. In the romantic pas de deux he created for himself and Rogers on screen he never lost sight of the fact that the best sex always has the dynamics, the lineaments, of a good story. It was an insight he and Balanchine shared.
Balanchine considered Astaire to be the greatest dancer of the 20th Century -- and Balanchine had seen all of them, worked with most of them. It undoubtedly wasn't just Astaire's technique that impressed Balanchine, it was his expressiveness, and the fact that for both men sexual love was at the center of their artistic imaginations.