The music changed to a march. The dancers ripped the flower from their hats and pulled them down to resemble a soldier’s headwear. Then they turned their canes upside down holding them as if they were guns and started marching off the stage. Simultaneously, the lights on stage turned dark blue and the dancers faces turned serious. Their once extravagant and lighthearted movements now became stiff, possessing an intensity and friction. The audience however, laughed at this shift in theme. All the dancers marched off stage with the exception of the center girl. She continued to march in a circle making faces and poking fun at the others. Finally, she left the stage laughing loudly at herself. She came on one more time only to reveal she was a man. The audience laughed loudly and the piece ended.
Within this piece, there was multiple times that Fosse, an…show more content… Within film the idea of the male gaze is always present. Under this issue it is understood that, “men do not always do the looking, but they control who does” (Devearaux, 339), meaning that even if a woman is watching this piece she is looking at it through a man’s eye because the medium of film is always controlled by the male. Under the male gaze, the female body will always be sexualized no matter what choreography she is executing, how she is dressed or what she says. Fosse sees women as merely objects, from the heavy makeup masking the girls’ true form, to the filming of a dancer’s buttock shaking. These focal points were clearly for the pleasure of men. Fosse takes the person out of the performer on stage and shows movement through an object which is the female’s anatomy. This occurs because the male gaze is driven by “sexual anxiety” (Schultz, 368), meaning that a male feels the need to look at a woman as an object in order to make her difference and the “mystery” that surrounds her seem rational in his
