The overarching theme of my thesis research comes from a place of questioning why I make art in the first place. This is something that I have been confronting from the moment I started college. Why do I dance? Why is dance important? I find that questioning why I am doing what I’m doing consistently challenges and stimulates my own personal and creative growth. From this, my research has turned into observing myself and people around me, causing me to consider performative behavior beyond theatrical settings. The questioning started from observing outwardly, but I realized that I have to start within myself first. This is regardless of what the content becomes and which way it goes, how these ideas feel in my mind and body, and how I can find a starting point for my research from the physical action of looking inwardly, of digging up what I am questioning.

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As a twenty-one year old woman who has performed for audiences almost my entire life, by now I have noticed just how much the male gaze manifests in our current society. What I have noticed is that the values that the male gaze follows also show up in other areas that may not necessarily seem tied to it, but I think are actually very much connected: the central value of requiring the need to live up to a standard outside of ourselves. In the simplest form, asking the question “Who am I existing for?” is essential when navigating a world that has been manipulated by the white supremacist heteronormative capitalist patriarchy, especially on social media, and especially when making art.

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 The male gaze, coined and defined by feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey, “suggests a sexualised way of looking that empowers men and objectifies women.” As a dance artist and performer, this is naturally something that I have noticed and thought more about in my own experience performing for an audience, which has led me to the following questions:

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How does an active-passive relationship manifest in an audience-performer relationship? When do dancers get objectified?

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How has this viewership evolved with viewing dance on social media?

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Who is a performer’s audience on social media?

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As someone who also makes her own work, I find myself turning to questions similar to what I asked myself earlier:

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Why do I make work? Who am I making it for? Why do I share it? 

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And further:

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Why do I share dance on social media? How does art exist on social media, compared to outside of it? Can and should art exist on social media, without falling into the mindset of wanting “views”, “likes” and “comments”?

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From my thought process of these questions, what I have come to realize is that the framework that the male gaze exists in, is essentially the idea that our society tells us that we have to live up to something outside of ourselves in order to be appreciated in this world. Social media can have a huge influence on this. Artists can take on the responsibility of resisting this framework, but what does this resistance look like in a world that is now so dependent on technology and social media?

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In all of my research around these questions, I have found connections to artists who explore relationships between audiences and performers, the male gaze, and technological influences on biopolitical systems from long before social media took off: artists such as Marina Abromavic, Adrian Piper, Teresa Burga, and Yoko Ono. Current day music artists such as Fiona Apple talk about the complexities of viewership in her Criminal music video, and Angel Olsen touches on being sexualized regardless of what she makes art about, with her album and specific song Whole New Mess. With all of these artists’ work in mind, my intention with my own work is to explore the multiplicities of sensation that come with performing, how it feels to dance with someone watching, with no one watching, with a camera watching. I’ll also explore what it feels like to be an audience member. I will reflect on the live performances I have both been in and seen, and how much it compares and contrasts with virtual performances; trying to figure out what constitutes a performance online, and if we are always performing on social media. 

 

I think that I am interested in these ideas because I know that it is a common experience that dancers, performers, artists, women, people of a multitude of backgrounds and identities who get consistently objectified and hyper-sexualized have. I am digging into my own experiences to be able to share and listen to others’ experiences too. My enactments are interactive with their audiences, to help provide a starting point for their own digging, as well as to receive feedback for my research if they are willing.

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In my fantasy process, I create a work with a cast in the Y Gym. Our process explores our experiences of how it feels to perform, if and when we fell in love with it, how our relationship has changed with it over time, our multitude of experiences performing in person. We also explore how it differs from performances on social media, and how different aspects of social media affect performance, as well as audience. We dive into what it is like to be an audience member on social media compared to in person, we question if, when we “follow” someone on social media, we are also their audience member. What constitutes a virtual applause? 

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The work is shown in the Y Gym for an in-person audience, but also has a virtual component that is interactive with the live performance. The dancers perform with the fourth wall, but they also break it. They question how the audience is viewing them. They may invite them to watch them dance, and they may also request that they don’t. They explore how confrontation of the audience in person, changes on social media as well. 

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In this pandemic world, this work will probably unfold to mostly be explored and shown virtually. Depending on where I am located in the spring, and the state of the pandemic, perhaps some outdoor performances will occur. A cast, which I could meet with via Zoom, could explore these ideas with me in their own locations, and these conversations based on all of our experiences could occur. We could even explore what a performance would look like on Zoom, and what it is like to be both an audience member and performer on this platform. We’d also interact with our family, friends, and roommates about viewership, the male gaze, and social media in all areas of life; exchanging experiences to find a wide array of discoveries. 

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I find that this research feels essential to me in order to figure out how to navigate this world that is becoming more dependent on technology and remote viewership everyday, and that has been consistent in the objectification of hyper-sexualized people. I wonder but am also fairly certain that these areas are of common interest for a lot of people. My hope is that my research is merely a fraction of the wider conversation happening, and that our questioning can bring us together so that we can move forward to try to understand this twenty-first century world a little bit more, and move it in what we best feel like the right direction is for generations to come.