xy

XY

The bar in ballet goes horizontal, the bar in a strip club is vertical, together they form the cross, the x and the y axis.

X Axis

The body of the ballerina tries to lift itself upward as though there is a string coming out of her head. The calves are a dominant feature, all that space between the arms and the legs of a ballerina, the air that she sculpts by the line of her slender body.  Relevé lift, the entire mass balancing on a point, the toes direct the body, the paws of the ape generally ignored by the human, become exoticized, made different and admirable, the body is raised out of the averageness of standing. As the ape rose upward, front paws drew food to the face becoming dominant for their ability to pull the external into the mouth, sustenance brought into the body. The ballerina is upheld in the arms of the man, her prop, she prefers a snug and tight existence without food, her whole body speaks it’s form at once. The foot is returned to prominence again, she extends the pointing, normally reserved for fingers, back to toes. Lift. Weightless. She pretends to be a feather, and the stance of the mind changes the position and weight of the body. She rises.

The Slut

A ballerina is the opposite of a slut. She is so flexible, she is constantly flashing her vulva tucked tightly inside the confines of her leotard, layered under the spandex. But she makes us still, we watch, and the body doesn't think of sex, or strength, we think of air, we follow some story, she is the channel through which the evidence of narrative flows.

'Let us congratulate her now! Lift your glass, raise it high, and touch the air, that which she so deeply dreams to be united with, join it with libations!' -Everyone

We need to notice her.  Like the graffiti artist, the ballerina falls prey to style. All those years, all those hours spent in study of form, musculature, feeling her equilibrioception AKA balancing, proprioception allowing all the parts to move together, interoception becomes refined by practice, all to be a piece of glass, an ornament intended to be gazed through. Perhaps a talented ballerina adds a special flair, a control or an economy of gestures she can manage that no one else has seen before or since, and she exemplifies a moment in time, her life is a mandala, the body erected by form, directing our attention past its finitude.

Y Axis

Along the vertical pole the slut is free to exorcise shame, she is taught yet wild, passive yet in control, the pole dancer. Rather than lifting she tumbles, weight is the aspect of her form. She hovers in the air, pole between her thighs- good god the stunning pressure her illusion creates, the pole lodged between her legs highlighting that tantalizing zone of almost theres. She relinquishes and falls. Her exposed flesh is so present, advertised by the teasing invitation of her garment. Her weight is what we note, the way in which the body sags, similar to a body in bed, hanging.  The exposure of gravity.  Real love is a man's penis, scrotum, resting helplessly on his thigh, and female breasts sliding this way and that like eggs in a pan. The sexual toy is the restraint of sex inside the promotion of it.  Sex is unconscious, the nudity of the stripper reminds us of our own collapse, when we literally fall on the lover, metaphorically growing in and towards the one we desire, the double weight of it all. 

Hustle

The poll dancer punctuates our sagging with a sales pitch, she is a presentation, she shoots a glance as her ass sticks out, her back arches in, and her head tilts upward in the performance of sexuality. When the stripper kicks open her legs it is not to reveal the air cast between her sculptural thighs, but admits to the flesh that frames it.  She is similar to the child lifting up her skirt, thrilling in the admission of her body, exclaiming that she was born an animal desiring to expose, to be both literally and metaphorically revealed. The tight tuck of the vulva, this time, is to include your sight as the watcher through exclusion of the reality of her body. Like the Greeks who allow the drama to happen offstage, the inclusion of imagination reveals the actual trope at hand- the viewer always desires themselves.  The strip of sparkles that rests so snugly admits to the presence of watching in all desire.  You never want the other as much as you desire the adaptation of selfhood.  The other is there as a drug to stimulate and transform the average day into the language of arousal, the symphony of adulthood with its many musicians, sonatas, concertos, the echoes of the previous scores writing the dream of our current experience. Oh the X and the Y- the rise and the fall of a body! She moans. The voice travels like a wave. Up and down. Up and down. Up and.... We can never complete. It would spoil the song. Rather, rattle on, the drums timbre, the boom and clack.

Point of Cross

The body is always absolutely right and wrong. It sings itself at the start and close of day, it clamors itself at every conscious instant, and as such, of course, we must escape it. What is living if not the desire to flee. The ballerina and the pole dancer, the air and the flesh, the line and the curve, the rich and the poor, the body united at the center of the X and Y.