Andy Warhol | Paul Swan / 1965 [film on dance]

 paul swan and the aesthetic

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andy Warhol (director) Paul Swan / 1965

 

As I observed in my July 2022 essay on Charles W. Allen and Francis Trevelyan Miller’s 1916 film, Diana, the Huntress, in which dancer Paul Swan performed as Pan, Swan was perceived as a major dancer throughout his early years. That work was choreographed by modern dance pioneer Ruth St. Denis, herself highly influenced the aesthetic principles laid out by François Delsarte, his disciples and his Society of Gymnastics and Voice Culture.

     Delsarte, who had inexplicably lost his voice, began a search to comprehend the relationship between personal emotions and physical gestures, over time developing a codified system connecting mental attitudes, physical postures, and gestures. He believed that one’s emotional state could in fact be communicated through one’s physical appearance and performance.

     For example, the extension of the body would be in relationship with the feeling of self-realization; the feeling of annihilation would translate into a bending of the body. Practicing those positions would reinforce the feelings they traduce and all emotions would have their own bodily translation. The gesture reinforced the emotions and the emotions were reinforced by the gestures. Arguably, this was an early Western version of ideas that had long been in action in Eastern thought, that such would also be able to help the dancer or gesturer to open himself up to  those emotions. And accordingly the gesture came to take precedence to the verbal language used to describe the gesture. As he wrote:

 

“What we say is not what persuades but how we say it. The speech is inferior to the gesture because this last one corresponds to the phenomenon of the spirit. The gesture is the agent of heart, the persuasive agent. Sometimes 100 pages cannot say what one sole gesture can express, because in that simple movement our whole being comes to the surface”

 

His codification of the system was also organized under the omnipresence of what some historians call his “understanding of the Christian concept of the trinity,” influenced presumably by this ideological system and the thought of Saint Augustine, the medieval scholasticism and the Neo-Platonism.

     His theory is full of classifications that are always divided into three categories. Called applied aesthetics, it is divided in three parts: the statics, the dynamics and the semiotics.

     The body similarly is divided in three zones: the physical, the emotional and the mental, which correspond to the inferior members, trunk and arms, and neck and head respectively.

     Delsarte argued, moreover, that there are three languages: the affective, transmitted through voice, the elliptic, expressed through gestures and the philosophical, traduced by the articulated word.

      Movement is of three orders: opposition, parallelism and succession, according to the intervention of the physical, emotional or mental part.

       Movement, moreover, is divided into three categories: eccentric, concentric, and normal. And there are three laws for movement (The laws of harmonic movement):

 

1. Law of the harmonic posture: there’s a need to obtain a balanced and natural attitude like the position of perfect rest in Greek statues.

2. Law of opposed movement: every movement of one or several parts of the body demands, for balance principles, an opposed movement of the rest of the segments.

3. Law of the harmonic muscular function or of the succession of contractions: the force of a muscular function must be in direct relationship with the size of the muscles. Therefore muscles should start from the big muscles that surround the pelvis.

 

    Delsarte had two major pupils who spread his theories, Steele MacKaye and Genevieve Stebbins, and it is these two spread the word to modern figures such as Ted Shawn, Isadora Duncan. Ruth St. Denis, and Rudolph Laban.

     By this time, however, Delsarte (1811 – 1871) had been almost forgotten in France, and as his ideas became popular in the US, his teachings quickly became so distorted and mechanized that the entire system soon lost its reputation and grew out of favor.

     Indeed by the time Paul Swan began dancing under its influence it had already begun to grow out of favor.

 

     As I wrote on his 1916 film dancing: “As Pan, Swan presents another, far more innovative dance pattern, although also highly influenced by the Delsarte’s Aesthetic. By this time, however, Swan had already done some of his entirely nude dances which intrigued and scandalized dance admirers and which would later find a ready enthusiast in Isadora Duncan, with whom Swan may have had an affair.

     Although he does not appear nude here, the young Swan, billed as ‘the most beautiful man in the world,’ represents a Pan who is sufficiently undressed to make his movements appear scandalous to some viewers of the 1916 short.”

      Indeed, the eroticism of Swan's nude and near-nude performances was shocking and innovative for the time. A journalist described the reaction of Paris audiences to shows that Swan starred in: "even this gay city has been shocked really and truly by the prevailing cult of nakedness, whose expositions grow more and more daring." Swan described himself in 1915 as "the only man in the world who has the courage to take off his clothes and dance." Surely given his nude dances he might have been arrested and imprisoned, even more so because of his known homosexuality. But his apparent heterosexual marriage to the open-minded Helen Gavit certainly accounted for something. As his biographer Richard Londraville wrote, "He was able to walk through the world much more freely than most homosexuals would at the time. He was very lucky to have a wife that he could fall back on."

     In his speech after the performances that Andy Warhol recorded on tape in 1965, he bragged still that he had never once been jailed.

      In the early 1930s Swan moved permanently to Paris, both painting and dancing. Most of the former except his portraits of Duncan have been lost because of the Nazi occupation. And his dances from that period are now forgotten. In the late 1930s he returned to the US, took up residence in the few Carnegie Hall apartments and from 1939 to 1969 danced and declaimed in Sunday night recitals almost without a break. Among the many who attended his recitals were Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, and others. Presumably Warhol had attended before determining to film him.

     Although the Aesthetic by 1965, when Swann was 88, had long been abandoned by modern and contemporary dancers, and Swann himself had studied other methods, even becoming a private pupil early on with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes star Mikhail Mordkin, he continued to perform the Aesthetic. And it was that outlandish devotion to a tradition which surely he knew was totally out of style and meaningless that apparently led Warhol to describe him as the very definition of the “camp aesthetic.”

    For anyone without knowledge of who this man was or without comprehending his absurd devotion to a method long lost, Warhol’s film of this elderly man who can hardly any longer move his limbs and who spends much of his time changing into skimpy, outdated costumes which he himself had made, some of the accessories, as he admits, purchased in the dime stores, must seem simply pathetic.

      Swan does not seem at all embarrassed about a no longer attractive body, dressing and undressing almost in the nude in front of the camera. Moreover, he not at all embarrassed for quoting, in the first piece, long passages from the outdated Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, gesticulating in the broad hand waves of the Aesthetic.

      In his elegy for World War I soldiers, he jousts with a wooden sword and kills dozens in his dance “Two Hero’s Slain” before laying down the sword in surrender.

     In his “Three Oriental Numbers”—of which I could discern only two—he don’s his skimpiest of costumes to play out the stereotypes of Asian dance and culture.

     Unable to find his black slippers in order to correctly perform his “French Peasant Dance,” he spends the end of the first reel and much of the beginning of the second behind the stage curtain swearing at the situation as Warhol’s cameraman or others keep calling for him to come out and perform even with the wrong shoes. Finally, his pianist joins in the search and Swann finally reappears.

      Whereas the camera of the first reel was static, allowing us to observe the dance properly in full perspective, the second reel represents a moving camera, which truly does turn Swann’s performance into something very close to Jack Smith’s Normal Love and Ron Rice’s Chumlum of the previous year.

      As he attempts to dress for one more dance, the photographers realize they are quickly running out of film and request that he appear, he arguing that they are probably going to cut most of it anyway, but finally he does reappear to declaim some of his own poems, again embarrassingly outdated works with rhyming couplets and archaic language. The following poem is typical [line breaks mine]

 

           I sometimes think that love is only pain.

           And when your sad eyes smile I think it’s only ecstasy.

           When you’re from my side, love seems only longing

           and unrest. And when I kiss your lips contentment sweet

           is all I know. So, what is love? It won’t be every mood

           and every mood somehow reflects it less and less of you.

     

    His final speech, beginning with his statement of never having been in jail, ends abruptly as the camera runs out of film.

    Rather than perceiving him as pathetic I endured the entire 66 minutes with fascination—yes, also with frustration—and admiration that someone could continue to be so totally devoted to something he surely recognized as laughable and outré. His stubborn performance was without hesitation or analysis, almost as if were keeping the tradition of the art in which he was educated alive despite the fact that he could no longer move gracefully or, at moments, even step into his shorts he wore that represented the characters he attempted to emulate.

     As Susan Sontag noted, the essence of camp is “its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration,” that sexually it goes against the grain, cherishing either the androgynous or the extreme sexuality of figures such as Jayne Mansfield and Victor Mature; its source is from passion and naiveté not from a winking, mocking knowledge of its idols. Just as Jean Genet argued for a sense of elegance, so Oscar Wilde argued for style over sincerity. I would add that camp emulates mannerism as opposed to pure originality. And it emanates always from the sincere even while its queerness or oddity of viewpoint is recognized.

     Seeing these performances of Paul Swan, one can only agree that Swan is enacting the sacredness of a camp experience. And it is clear why Warhol included him in his film of the same year, Camp.

 

Los Angeles, October 9, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).

MYLEN and Brandon Stansell (composers), Trent Atkinson (director) | Hometown / 2018

 out of control

by Douglas Messerli

 

MYLEN and Brandon Stansell (composers), Trent Atkinson (director) Hometown / 2018 [5 minutes] [music video]

 

In the first few minutes of Brandson Stansell’s music video Hometown, the singer confronts a mother packing up for her son, obviously sending him out of their home for being queer. “You brought it on yourself son.” “I didn’t have a choice, ma.” “I don’t believe that,” she summarizes, the common refusal of parents to comprehend that being gay is not a decision that one makes, but that it is made for you by your natural desires. And in fact, it carries with it a force of feelings that most young men attempt to deny, divert, alter at first before finally accepting what they gradually know is inevitable: to admit to themselves and their family that they are attracted to other boys, not to the opposite sex.

     Although Stansell is full-grown in this rendition of the event, we understand it to be a scene he experienced as a young man coming out to his conservative gay family nearly a decade earlier than this song’s release in 2018.

     Beginning as a backup dancer for Taylor Swift, Stansell quickly rose in the Country and Western charts after the release of his albums Dear John (2015), Slow Down (2016), For You (July 2018), and now Hometown. Stansell has quickly risen on the queer Country/Western charts to stand along side such notables as Steve Grand, Chris Housman, Chely Wright, Ty Herndon, and Cameron Hawthorn.

     Since he has shamed the family through his admission, as his mother puts: “You need to go.”

     We see the singer walking down a wet street, bag in hand, leaving home before he starts up his real tearjerker which begins years later as he seems to be contemplating just what his hometown, the place he was forced to leave, actually meant to him:

 

“It’s been a while since I’ve seen you

With your one red light and Baptist steeple

The people hear are hard to face

The memories harder to erase.”

 

     But instead of feeling bitter and angry, the chorus of this ballad is almost a contradictory statement of forgiveness and, even more importantly, recognition that this town is what has made him who he is.

 

“But I can’t change it

That’s OK cause

I’ve learned to let it go

It’s out of my control

It might sound crazy

I should say thank you

Cause now I finally know

Who I really am

And I’m made from my hometown.”

    That last line sounds almost like a strident march, a declaration of pride, despite, as he continues, how hard to is to talk to his father and “My mom I don’t know anymore,” and the fact that “all the late-night talks turn to fight wars.” He’s been able to lay it all aside and still declare his love of town and family.

     In an interview with the Huffington Post with Curtis M. Wong, Stansell reiterates the position in takes in this song:

 

“People in the country sphere and in the South are more open than we give them credit for. …My hope is that [LGBTQ] people ― especially country music lovers who are living in the South ― will see this and realize they’re not as alone as they might feel at times and that people who have LGBTQ brothers, sisters, sons, daughters and friends realize that when those people decide to share their truths, that it’s not an easy moment. It’s an important moment, and it should be treated that way.”

    Wanting to film nearer to his Georgetown, Tennessee home, his director Travis Atkinson and he decided to on Nashville, although instead of following a narrative of small town stores and steeples, Atkinson has chosen, after the initial dramatic dialogue between mother (played by Janet Ivey) and son, to show only one long camera run down a street of lower middle class housing before focusing on the singer himself. There are only brief moments of past memories, observed primarily through windows, from the backs of individuals and odd angles, all of which reassert the outsiderness of Stansell even as an adult, with occasional nods from figures in his past who treat him almost as a passing stranger. As Stansell admits, “his relationships with many of family members remain strained.”

    As Wong’s piece underscores:

 

“It was like having a therapy session on film,” he said. “I was having to relive a lot of things that I’d blocked out.” Turns out, those on-camera tears were legit. By the time shooting wrapped, he said, “My camera crew was crying, my director was crying, and I was crying, so I was like, ‘OK, I think we got it!’”

 

     For all the tears it might still arouse, however, the anthem-like strains of this song remove almost all sentimental aspects of the narrative, as the singer/composer asserts his continued commitment to his roots.

 

Los Angeles, December 1, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).

 

 

Brad Hammer and John Duff | Is It a Sin / 2022

sinning till the end

 by Douglas Messerli

John Duff, Anil Sebastian, Max Bergå, and Scott McFarnon (composers), Brad Hammer and John Duff (directors) Is It a Sin / 2022 [3 minutes]

 

John Duff stands in a church, wondering if it’s sin to love. Already, given the Duff has made several clearly gay albums, and despite the fact that in that past he has refused to be called gay or put in any kind sexual category of what he describes as a “box,” that he’s posing the question all religious gay boys inevitably have to.

    The original lyrics of the first three stanzas read:

 

If all’s forgiven

Then why am I imprisoned

Can I get a minute

On my knees

 

Please

If you’re wasting time

Then waste it on me

If it always ends

Then we should be free

To love

Am I free to love

 

Is it a sin

To touch you

Is it a sin

To say there’s no one above you

If it’s a sin to love you

Then I’m sinning till the end

Thank God I’m forgiven

 

      But in producer Eric Kupper’s remix of what YouTube describes as the “Official Music Video,” the last line, repeated several times, which I kept hearing as “God I’m gay then,” which I interpreted to read that if it was a sin, he was something other, a gay man outside the church. Others hear it differently, reporting back what’s written or at least something closer to it. (I took a test, without divulging what I heard or even that I heard something different, with several visitors).

     At the site @IAmJohnDuff, the singer writes the message that follows:

 

“Hi everyone! Thank you for watching my video.

     As a gay man, I have dealt with immense guilt and shame for my whole life—due to indoctrination and moral codes created by the church.

     As a lover of Christ's teachings, I have felt overwhelming forgiveness and acceptance.

     As an adult with reading comprehension skills, I struggle to see where the church picked up its bigoted and judgmental stances on love… and how exactly those views abide by Christ’s teachings.

     As a rebel, I wrote “Is It a Sin”. A song for people like me, who do not want to denounce spirituality—but rather ask why they should be denied a place in it.

     I hope you enjoy the song and video. They mean a lot to me. Much love!”

 

     My hearing or mis-hearing (the only line I hear differently from the published lyrics) is not terribly consequential, however, since this still remains a song about hopefully being forgiven for loving God even if the Church calls his loving other men a sin. Most fundamental believers, however, Might even see Duff singing such a song in a church-like setting might deem Duff’s song and actions as blasphemous.

     And there is a big different from admitting to being gay and being forgiven for it.

    But the truly important thing here is that instead of his early denials of being gay, fearful of being categorized, he seems to now accept it as fact.

 

Los Angeles, July 3, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

Georges Feydeau | The Farce Awakens Feydeau x 2: Going to Pot and Stark Naked / 2026

farce without curtains

by Douglas Messerli

 

Georges Feydeau The Farce Awakens Feydeau x 2: Going to Pot and Stark Naked / 2026, directed by Daniel Passer at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble / the performance I attended was a matinee on November 8, 2026

 

The popular French boulevard writer of farces, Georges Feydeau (1862-1921), created plays beloved by the French bourgeoisie, works which featured restrained and unpermitted sex, forcing his characters, often innocent and just as often guilty, to slide under beds, stuff themselves into closets, exit and enter quickly through various doors, or just run for the nearest cover as wives and lovers act out their various roles of shock and dismay.

     A good farce is a messy affair, but enacted with near perfect ensemble timing, each leap to escape, attempt to cover up and hide the fact that the individual is not behaving to the requirements of bourgeoise society must be skillfully carried out if it is to make us laugh.

     Moreover, as these two short works make clearer than ever, there was amazingly a element in the farces by Feydeau of the Belle Époque that previewed what would later become the absurdist values of Ionesco and to a certain degree even Beckett: the twists and turns of language, the misunderstanding of behavior, the incomprehensible actions of a disobedient wife—which occurs in each of these short works—and the true ridiculousness of what is being demanded of them by their societally proper husbands, all echo absurdist works that remain with us even through Joe Orton and Edward Albee. And yes, these works are sexist, but they also make us laugh at those very pretensions.

    In the first work, the husband, Fallovoine (Barry Del Sherman) has little interest in the fact that his son hasn’t been able “to go,” his response, “Go where?” He is most distressed by the fact that his wife, Julie (Julie Mann) dares to bring in a washcan of dirty water into his study and, most importantly, that at late hours in the morning she is still indecently dressed in a house coat, with curlers in her hair, despite the fact that he has an appointment with Choullioux (Justin Blanchard), a wealthy manufacturer who just might order up his unbreakable porcelain chamber pots which he hopes might be sold to the military, making him a fortune.

     Getting his wife dressed or even out of the room with washcan in hand is nearly impossible, and the appearance of the badly-behaved child (wonderfully portrayed by little person Kody Nelson, who takes a moment out to explain to the audience that he is not really an underage child, but a full adult playing a child, ironically commenting on our present overreactions of child representation in plays and movies) makes matters even worse.

    The porcelain pots do indeed easily break, the wife refuses to dress, and the “baby,” reminding us some of the bratty babies portrayed in early filmmaking, in particular, the very clever first talkie by the great French director Jean Renoir, Baby’s Laxative (1931)—which incidentally is based on this Feydeau short work, but presents us a much more elegant rendition—manages to make the men drink his laxative for him, resulting in obviously embarrassing events, including the still-improperly dressed wife’s final revelation that Mr. Chouilloux’s wife is sleeping with his cousin.

     If I have already seemed to tell you too much of the plot here, you are missing the fact that it is not plot that is truly important in farce, it is the way the story occurs, the minutiae of events along the way that truly matter, including how well they are executed

     And this cast is superb in that execution, having timed everything down to the second so much so that at moments their language and behavior is simply dizzying. Particularly, in the far more interesting second short play, “Stark Naked,” Rachel Avery as Clarisse, who in this case is not truly stark naked but wears only a tiny negligée that fully reveals her breasts and body contours (it is a hot day and she is simply not comfortable in full clothing) to every man she meets, including the eager servant Victor (Ryan Nebreja). In this work her politician husband (Blanchard) insists that she dresses properly before the arrival of his arch-enemy merchant who ran against him in the last election, Himmelfaar’s (Del Sherman) arrival, a name Ventroux always ends with a “t.”

    Once more his demands have little effect. as his wife weaves a trail of illogical language and actions that finally ties him up in knots as he realizes, little by little, that his entire hopes to become the prime minister will go down the drain as she, stung by a wasp in the derriere demands to have it “sucked out,” first by her husband, then Himmelfaar, then Victor, and a “doctor” upstairs, who is not a real doctor but works in the Department of Medicine—reminding us, of course, of one of Trump’s nefarious appointments. Finally, when a reporter from Le Figaro arrives (played by Nelson, who again reminds the audience that he is not a real reporter but an actor portraying a reporter), he happily attempts to do what the others have resisted, and succeeds.

     Perceiving that his real arch-enemy has been watching the events from his apartment window across the way, Ventroux abandons all his career ambitions in a truly unexpected manner.

    Once more, the cast is simply excellent, proving laughter and entertainment to the audience with their expert memory and precise movement of the complex machinations of the entire work.

   I too laughed and enjoyed both works immensely, as all audiences who attend this play will. But I still felt something was missing.

    As I expounded to my accompanying friend on our drive home, perhaps Passer, who formerly acted as a clown in the Cirque du Soleil’s Zarkana performance and before that in Franco Dragone’s La Rĕve is just not the right director for farce. His brief introduction relates his understanding of farce to be related to the Marx Brothers, Chaplin, Burns and Allen, and the sketches on Saturday Night Live and Monthy Python, a real misunderstanding, I believe, of works such as Feydeau’s

     Farce is not truly vaudeville, and surely not a comic sketch. In high farce, since it still represents the epitome of middle-class aspirations, the work nearly always performed on a curtained stage with utter seriousness, even with finesse. Despite all the running, chasing, and hiding delusions, farce retains a wall around itself as if it were the most serious theater possible. Decorum is demanded even if unobserved. As Feydeau himself wrote: “You have to place ordinary people in a dramatic situation and then observe them from a comic angle, but they must never be allowed to say or do anything which is not strictly demanded, first by their character and secondly by the plot." One could never stay that of comic figures and TV sketch artists where improv is so rewarded.

     In short, Feydeau using the stage to present us with a form of decorum with which the characters on stage seldom can never bring themselves to fully engage, never asks his actors to speak to their audiences as much as to engage with their audiences. This is bourgeois theater for the common man and woman.

     Passer often does just the opposite, his actors cruising the theater before and even while the plays begin and continue and attempting to engage with nervous audience members. During the time needed between the plays for a new set-up, he forces Nebreja and Nelson to do a virtual sideshow act of climbing up and down ladders. The association of bodily movements each time when the name of a guest in their houses (Chouilloux and Himmelfaar in particular) comes up quickly becomes distracting. These routines are funny only for a few seconds.

      What is worse is that Passer provides no source of the translations of these two short plays, so we have no idea how much was actually added or subtracted to the texts; just how Feydeau-ish are these two short Feydeau plays? If Renoir is to be believed, there are a great many changes.

      These are only personal reflections, however, and I strongly encourage audiences to hurry to these two exuberant farcical works. We do need more of such comedy these days in our lives, and this is where you will certainly find it. How often do we even get a Feydeau work performed these days?

     Moreover, almost everything that the Odyssey Theatre has presented over the last several decades has represented some of the finest in world theater in a city, despite many small innovative companies, that needs more attention and audience participation. I promise you an enjoyable afternoon or evening at The Farce Awakens Feydeau x 2 with a talented cast to be reckoned with.

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2026

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance (November 2026).