Dancing the Impossible: Kazuo Ohno, Lindsay Kemp and Our Lady of the Flowers

Abstract

Despite Genet’s claims of ‘impossibility’, the ‘ballet’ of Divine’s death in Our Lady of the Flowers has provoked various choreographic responses, particularly from avant-garde dance practitioners. In Japan and in Great Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, two seminal works based on Genet’s novel appeared: Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno’s Divinariane in 1960, which was reworked into Admiring La Argentina in 1977, and Lindsay Kemp’s Flowers: A Pantomime for Jean Genet, performed between 1968 and 1974. The word seminal, with its etymological association with semen, is appropriate when discussing these performances, since both of them draw upon Genet’s connection between choreography and male masturbation. Genet writes the solo embodiment of erotic memories as a kind of dance, and both Ohno and Kemp manifest this in their work. These choreographies also use the character of Divine to present complex images of masculinity, ranging from the solipsistic artist to the gregarious drag queen tragedian. Just as Genet’s Divine moves between ‘he’ and ‘she’ in Our Lady of the Flowers, so Kemp and Ohno redeploy masculinity and femininity in their dances, presenting an androgynous subject who refuses stable gender identities.¹

Since Divine is dead, the poet may sing her, may tell her legend, the Saga, the annals of Divine. The Divine Saga should be danced, mimed, with subtle directions. Since it is impossible to make a ballet of it, I am forced to use words that are weighed down with precise ideas, but I shall try to lighten them with expressions that are trivial, empty, hollow and invisible.

(Genet, 1990, p. 61)