Choreography's secret history
Dance
Published 04/05/2012
by Paul Parish
http://www.ebar.com/arts/art_article.php?sec=dance&article=201The transgender choreographer Sean Dorsey is working his own mode of being an LGBT genius. I can't say I like his current mode as much as I did his very first work The Outsider Chronicles, which evoked the awkwardness of being the wrong gender in brilliant detail, with every geeky gesture ringing true. But it may just be that being transgender is different from being queer, and the issues are more complex than I find I can be comfortable with.
Dorsey is a transgender man, child of two progressive lesbians supporting his aspirations to masculinity, who after a decade of breast surgery and hormone treatments has beefed up to the point where only his large pelvis and centralized nipples betray his birth-sex. He's one of the most imaginative dance-makers around. His latest work is a thorough-going revision of The Secret History of Love, which does for transgender prostitutes what Roots did for African Americans: it's a sentimentalized history, told with the queer version of survivor guilt, in homage to the transgenders of the 1920s, WWII, and the 1950s, whom he's interviewed and studied, whose testimony is worked into a voice-over sound-montage.
