Fogarty & Evans/Movies, Moves and Music, 8. ‘Anything But Ballet’: Individuality, Genre-Bending, and Sexual Expression in Center Stage

This chapter argues that the employment of popular music throughout Center Stage functions to break the impenetrability of ballet, securing its place within a more commercial (or lowbrow) mainstream, while elevating popular music to the role of reconstructing ideas about classical dance. It also explores how genre determines individual and sexual expression, manifested in the overt declaration of masculine and feminine identities in movement and in the use of alternative gestures in classical ballet, which similarly disrupt conventional notions about ballet traditions. Rock and pop music further enable the characters in Center Stage to use alternative gestures in order to disentangle the standard gender roles that still dominate ballet.