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. The 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. Accordingly the gesture reinforced the emotions and the emotions in turn were reiterated by the gestures. Arguably, this was an early Western version of ideas that had long been assimilated Eastern thought, and the exercises he created 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 can not 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 who 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 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,biographer Richard Londraville. "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 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. 

     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 his film of the same year, Camp.

Los Angeles, October 9, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).