Pelvises by Eleanor Garran
Associate fiction editor Julia Kooi Talen on today’s bonus essay: Imbued with brilliance and wit, Eleanor Garran’s “Pelvises” x-rays the ways this heart-shaped bone moves in the world. How compulsory heterosexuality fissures the joy in our pelvic bones. From the start Garran’s sharp prose pulled me in, urging me to dance.
Pelvises
Pelvises are inside people and we try to trick them or hide them and they control us.
You don’t often see someone in daily life do something pelvis-driven, which is why performance, watching it or doing it, is so liberating—this is where pelvises can be free. My favourite thing is when they take over the body and assume their true roles as leaders.
Pelvises can’t walk, they can only thrust, so a pelvis-controlled walk is more like a series of deep jumps. Knees wide and bent, spine slumped down, arms hanging. The pelvis moves the body forward in jolts, not up or down but in a straight line forward. Once you start to identify the pelvis move you see it everywhere. It is the embodiment of anarchy and joy.
My favourite people have joyful pelvises. Anyone at all who lets their pelvis lead becomes an innocent, a hopeless clown. (Everyone is.)
When I was twelve and worshipped him, my brother was in a strange, glamorous play in a small dark room. The lighting was velvety and sensual; someone ate a banana under a spotlight. Periodically a group of men in big boots did fantastic low pliés and leapt across the stage, imaginary rope around their pelvises taut and low, building to a magnificent tension until they couldn’t help but hop forward. The men looked dignified, unaware that they were being moved across the room in this way.
In commedia dell'arte, a lazzi is a physical joke. When the joke is done, the performer jumps to face the audience, limbs thrust out in a happy extension of the pelvis. While jumping, the performer says, “Hey!” They mean, “What a delight, you saw me be funny!”
A major proponent of the pelvis is the German choreographer Pina Bausch.
Pina’s dance Kontakthof looks as if it is some kind of strange beauty pageant, performed in a church hall. All the men and women move toward the audience first forward then backward, rotating and thrusting their hips and buttocks at the audience, concentration on their faces.
The women in Pina’s Rite of Spring engage their pelvises in a similar way to the men in my brother’s play. If I were a choreographer, my dances would consist solely of this movement. They sit low in their centres of gravity, backs straight, knees spread and bent, arms flopping forward from their shoulders in two straight lines. Mostly in unison, they bob up and down. The bouncing of their pelvises leads the rest of their floppy bodies: their knees close then open, their arms are momentarily flung up then dropped crossways then straight again. They are marionettes being shaken up and down by the string attached to the pelvis. It is the only string marionettes need.
Also in Kontakthof, a passive woman in pink is examined by men. The men are curious, like cats. They start by wiggling her nose, rubbing her tummy. Then there are more and more of them and they are more and more curious. The stakes of the piece are made clear when one of them picks her up as if to gauge her weight and she slumps, still passive. The man hugs her from behind, low around the hips, and lifts her then lets her weight fall in his arms a few times, like a sodden beach ball. The weight is in the pelvis; the rest of her is raised then slumps back down, her legs dangle. The pelvis is the measure of her weight, her passivity, her defendedness or, here, her lack thereof.
All of Pina’s dancers’ movements are strange—a kiss like a desperate looping peck or a kiss repeatedly disrupted by collapse, or a kiss engineered then frozen. All the dancers’ movements are distorted and so I can believe that they are real.
Pina’s dances that I’ve seen seem to truck in compulsory heterosexuality, but I don’t mind, because I feel like Pina sees heterosexuality the same way I do—like a mad dreamscape cocktail party with a river or a mountain in the middle of the ballroom, no windows, people frantically trying to dance the parts of men and women to unheard or too-fast music. A cocktail-party frenzy where there are two roles to choose from, both absurd.
Pina’s men can be in drag and her women cannot. I feel for these women. But at least, there is always a discomfort, an uneasiness, in traditional femininity (thinness, long hair, gowns) that is revealed to us through the sweat, nipples, wrinkles, dirt, creases that appear in the women on stage. The artificiality of their demeanour is always understood as artificial. But inherent to the Pina universe seems to be the belief that there is no escape from this.
All Pina’s dancers, but especially her women, are alone. The men can find momentary intimacy with women or with each other; the women can only find it with men, and it is not enough. Life is a searching and not finding; it is the central truth of the dances.
Sometimes people try to hide the joyfulness of their pelvises, and this saddens me.
I believe Taylor Swift is gay. I don’t mean the living person named Taylor Swift, whom I don’t know. I’m talking about Taylor Swift the mask that eats into the real Taylor Swift’s face, Taylor Swift the public entity made of light. I can confidently tell you that she is gay because her pelvis is tilted in a gay position, gay in this context meaning free.
I used to think Taylor Swift was gay because her hetero demeanour was so bizarre and artificial. Her passive-victim-love-princess persona was comical; it made so much more sense to imagine it inhabited by someone who didn’t believe it at all than to imagine it inhabited by someone who half, even almost, believed it. It seemed too strange a skin to fit well. But I was only daydreaming.
It depends whether Taylor Swift is living in Pina Bausch’s world or in mine, whether compulsory heterosexuality is a bad cocktail party you can’t leave or one you can.
I have stopped worrying about the person who inhabits and animates the Taylor Swift skin because there seems no gap now, her demeanor and her body have become one giant, vivid glove.
I've been told performers are effective because they have no inner life. I've been told their exterior life is all they have. I believe it now. What they have is reckless, dominating pelvises.
The place to hold a person is around the top of the pelvis. Not where the hips are widest but just above, the base of a person. The Buddhists say it’s a portal for emptiness or fire. I think it’s a place to know you exist, and know other people exist with you. When do you hold more of a person than when you wrap your arms tightly around this place, or when you lift it, or when it rises to you?
Eleanor Garran is an Australian writer living in Minneapolis. They have an MFA in poetry from the University of Minnesota, and their work is published or forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Hobart, Creative Nonfiction, Entropy, The Cincinnati Review, and New Orleans Review.
