| Abstrakt: |
In this article, I examine Kenyan-born Canadian multidisciplinary artist Brendan Fernandes' 2018/19 The Master and Form, a sculptural installation and performance that addresses mastery, constraint, and freedom within ballet through the artist's experience as a young queer ballet dancer of colour. Pairing Sara Ahmed's phenomenological readings of queerness and whiteness with scholarship on the politics of race, sexuality, and dance, I explore how Fernandes processes the historical forms of ballet that excluded his queer, non-white body and creates a space where a lack of balance can become the norm. Even as his cast of dancers are limited by the installation's rigid structures, I argue that they are given freedom within the largely improvisational performance to generate iconoclastic forms and sustained disorientations as they work with, against, and beyond the sculptures. Fernandes' engagement with ballet in The Master and Form displays the discipline's stringency but also its potential for malleability, demonstrating how the 'gray zone' of museum performances can be effectively used to critically explore minority identities. Though the work's austerity and affectlessness could contest its radicality or potential for invoking progress, its visible adjustments to ballet ultimately speak to the power of gestures to craft alternatives to dominant systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
