Pippin's Sexcapades made me Squirm

I spent my last week at Yale before summer break working on Pippin, the Dramat's commencement musical, and, although I'm certain that there's an interesting discussion in the gender roles intrinsic to the costume shop (after an afternoon spent alternately doing delicate stitchery and draping chain with a hammer and a vise, my boyfriend exclaimed "I have the best butch girlfriend ever!), I'm more interested in talking about what happened onstage.

Pippin, the show's protagonist, is a young man who becomes increasingly dissatisfied with everything. He loses interest in sex as a means to fulfilment after his participation in a raucous, but empty, orgy which occurs in the first act. As part of the choreography, Pippin is lifted by four male dancers and is briefly lowered onto a series of dancers who lie under him in a very mechanistic interpretation of the sex act.

In the original choreography, all the dancers that Pippin had sex with were female, and lay flat on their backs, until Pippin was lifted off them and they hurried out of the way of the next girl. But sometime between early rehearsals and the performance, one of the female dancers was swapped out for a male dancer, who lay on his stomach while Pippin was lowered onto him.

The dance as a whole was not strictly heteronormative. The pairings of dancers in the background were f/f as ofter as m/f, and were sometimes m/m/m/m, but it was the anal sex acted out by the protagonist that got the biggest audience reaction during performances. At every show, the m/m sex act got an enormous laugh, while the m/f pairings passed unremarked.

Sitting in the audience, I felt vaguely uncomfortable. But I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the appropriate response would be. There's something wrong when its only the gay encounter that reads as a joke, even if the entire sequence is played for laughs. At the same time, I don't know whether the real solution is to insist that homosexuality be treated as identical to and interchangeable with heterosexuality.

What reaction would you have to Pippin's encounter? What would you hope to see from an audience?

Tegan, Sara, Kaki, Kim, Jessie and Odessa

Hey! I'm big into music, so my posts are probably going to discuss that. This week, I'm going back in the archives to recommend some of my favorites from or about queer women from the last couple of years.

I recommend: Tegan and Sara's Sainthood

I'm not entirely sure if I know a queer woman who isn't into Tegan and Sara. When I was in high school I went to one of their shows and the crowd was approximately 95% girls in couples and 5% awkward boys. Sainthood, their sixth album, was released last fall and though it is a grower, it's already become a classic in my eyes. They left behind some of the folksy and prog rock inspired spirit of their previous album, The Con, and spend most of this album exploring this strange but interesting fusion of subdued punkinshness and synth pop. I love Tegan and Sara because they write songs that are so damn listenable - Sainthood is no exception.

I recommend: Kaki King's Dreaming of Revenge

I read somewhere that Kaki King is the best and most famous out female solo acoustic guitarist. I don't know if that is true but I believe it. This album came out in March 2008 and I have been simply obsessed with it ever since. She jokes that this was supposed to be her pop album - and while I don't know if I would necessarily call it pop, it is a beautiful album. There's something on here to please almost everyone: "Pull Me Out Alive" has a modern rock edge, "Life Being What It Is" shows her prowess as an acoustic songstress, and "Air and Kilometers" is vaguely experimental (so much faint percussion in so many polyrhythms!), yet it is also very earthy. But best of all is "Montreal." It's a beautiful, ethereal gem of a song that only really reveals itself to you when you're by yourself on a rainy day with great headphones and just an ounce of sadness in your heart (not too little, not too much).

I recommend: M83's "Kim and Jessie"

The jury is still out on this one, but I'm pretty sure the song is about a pair of girls in love. Whatever the correct interpretation of the song is, I don't really care because it such an accurate distillation of what it means to be a teenager in the muted pastels of a John Hughes movie. It's pure drama, all haunted screeching synths and crying guitars over a steadying drum machine. You can't really decide whether to dance or to drown in the memory of your own pained adolescence, such is the genius of M83's foray into beautiful nostalgia.

I recommend: the video to Caribou's "Odessa"

This one isn't queer-related at all, I'm just obsessed with the song (especially the pan flutes, my god!) and the video is well done and very haunting. It employs the faded polaroid aesthetic in with a skill that is essentially confusing but also so pretty. The girl (our Odessa, I believe) is cute too!

(image credits: last.fm, photobucket.com, and photobucket.com)