The performance centers the bodies of naked young female dancers in peril. A motorcycle drives circles around a row of dancers engaging in track and field practice, namely sprinting hurdles. In another scene, dancers cut wood with chainsaws, larger-than-life skeletons strapped to their backs. At one point, Cordua maunders around the stage on an electric wheelchair and, with wit and dry contempt, recounts fragments of her life as a ballerina. A dancer dies twice, she says, first at the end of her career and then at the end of her life.

Watching the stage, I felt a much longed-for sense of communion with Holzinger’s sensibility: the discipline and disciplining of the female body; the risk of performance; le petit mort. I’d been wondering about what it is that I value about pornography and why, for more than a decade, it has had such a hold on my imagination. I have found it hard to articulate.

After the performance, walking away from the theatre, I thought more about the relationship between dance and porn: though they are treated very differently, there are many similarities. While ballet is celebrated as high art, commercial pornography is sidelined as trashy and lowbrow, the lowest common denominator of commerce and self-expression. But watching Holzinger, I began to think about how ‘good taste’ and ‘bad taste’ sometimes spring from the same source. I have come to wonder if the separation of ‘pornography’ from ‘art’ doesn’t also provide an opportunity for a different kind of experience, precisely because pornography is often approached without the pretense or expectation of art. This allows for a more direct encounter between performer and audience, where the encounter’s the thing, not the dance.

I can’t imagine anyone was shocked at the Volksbühne. The audience of that venerated People’s Theater has seen it all. What was so compelling was that, at every turn, the dancers were performing risk – those risks inherent to performance in general and those required by Holzinger’s production. Their bodies were on the line.

Cordua reflected on this notion as she crossed the stage. She had never been the best ballerina, she told the Volksbühne. In fact, she never even commanded some of the basic movements. Her tone arch, perhaps with a hint of sneer, she recalled that others pointed out that what made her extraordinary was her presence.

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Cordua first shot to fame with a scandal – the scandal of the year according to Die Zeit newspaper – which followed her performance as first soloist in John Neumeier’s 1972 production of The Rite of Spring, when, after a fit of inspiration in the rehearsal room, Cordua danced her final solo stark naked.

The Rite of Spring was first performed in Paris in 1913. Vaslav Nijinsky composed the dance to a score by Igor Stravinksy, producing an erratic, clomping choreography that supposedly incited (or nearly incited) a riot at the premiere. Nijinsky was not new to controversy. A star of the celebrated dance troupe Ballet Russes, he was used to challenging the propriety of the Parisian cultural elite. One year before The Rite of Spring, he had debuted a new performance, Afternoon of a Faun, which took the emotion and queer eroticism that had made his name to new extremes, at one point, stripping back the choreography to feign masturbation on stage. Today, Nijinksy’s Faun is recognised as the first modern ballet and, as academic Katie Horowitz writes in her essay on Nijinsky’s pornographic legacy, it created a new paradigm for live performance: a confrontation with ‘the spectacle of the body in and of itself, rather than the spectacle of physical virtuosity to which [audiences] were accustomed’. In Jennifer Homans’s 2011 history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels, she writes that it is the masturbation that sticks in people’s minds, but in this eleven-minute performance, Nijinsky was also attempting ‘to invent a new language of movement’. Homans observes that for many modern artists of the twentieth century ‘sexuality was a genuine source of artistic innovation’.

I wonder if Nijinsky’s Faun crossed Cordua’s mind when she danced her final solo in 1972. In a series of photos from Neumeier’s The Rite of Spring, I see her muscular frame tense and open, the whip of hair as she furies across the stage. Descriptions of the performance suggest choreography that might have suited a mosh pit. Ecstasy and exposure, exertion and Eros. Pure presence.

In this light, Cordua’s orgasm onstage at the Volksbühne – an orgasm that appeared authentic and real – takes Nijinsky’s Faun one step further. Each performance required a confrontation with ‘the spectacle of the body’, its pure presence.

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Like sport or dance, porn is an activity in which people explore their limits: making conscious choices to push the boundaries of their bodies, aware of the need for training, proper preparation and recovery time, and the risk of serious injury. Because of the place to which porn is relegated in today’s culture, this physical endeavour is thought about differently to the way we think about what a ballet dancer endures when dancing en pointe, the stress put on the musculoskeletal system, expected and unexpected injuries, the impact on the foot itself. In ballet, the pain and sacrifice are sanctioned.

In her newsletter ‘My Pointe Is . . .’ former ballet dancer Chloe Angyal writes that women’s pain is a condition of ballet’s existence:

It’s not special or remarkable, it’s just there. Every day. Some days are especially bad, and there’s a difference between dancing in pain and dancing hurt. But sacrificing and suffering are inevitable if you want to look, move, and live like a ballet dancer – and that sacrifice is part of the glamour and mystique of the art form. 

Perhaps nothing in ballet is as iconic as the foot en pointe – it telegraphs the idea of discipline and sacrifice. In today’s culture, it exemplifies ‘high art’, but this was not always so.

Jennifer Homans writes that the origins of what is today called pointe work lie ‘not in a poetic vision of the ethereal, as it is often thought, but in a crude stunt’. It was Marie Taglioni – ‘one of the most important and influential ballerinas who ever lived’ – who first refined and elevated this ‘stunt’ into high art in the nineteenth century, adapting the move from Amalia Brugnoli, who danced ballo grottesco, a then-popular style of Italian dance known for its sensationalism and comic acrobatics. This aesthetic reconsideration began in earnest with Taglioni’s performance in La Sylfide at the Paris Opera in 1832.

At this moment across Europe, the ballerina was taking the spotlight away from the male dancer. As dance historian Rachel Shteir points out: ‘The rise of pointe as a universal symbol for feminine display and of the adagio as a sensuous female motion meant female performers could spread their legs, turn out their toes, throw back their heads, and dance with abandon.’

Marie Taglioni’s foot en pointe became a symbol of romantic fantasy across Europe. There is a drawing, printed in Homans’s Apollo’s Angels that shows one of Taglioni’s muscular calves, foot laced into a toe shoe, wreathed in billowing clouds – a fetishistic image. This rendering of it captures the tension between an illusion of lightness and a body primed for performance. Taglioni adapted the en pointe technique, refining what the ballerina deemed as ‘crassand to be avoided’, so that she could ‘rise to her toes elegantly, without raising her arms, or in any way revealing the effort involved’.  Why was a display of effort – the body straining, pushed to its limits – associated with a less refined sensibility? The notion of ‘refinement’ is a value judgment in itself. Who gets to judge and why? It comes down to the context, to the era. The twenty-first century is a new era, and in it, I believe that a wider cultural reassessment of the value of sexually explicit expression, of pornography, is underway.

Ballet has always demanded much of its performers, and those performers have demanded much of themselves. Emma Livry, a student of Maria Taglioni, suffered terrible burns when, as she prepared to step on stage at the Paris Opera, her costume caught fire from the open gas flame of a wing-light; she died later that year, aged just twenty, of causes related to the incident. Years before Livry’s accident, an imperial decree in 1859 had been made to prevent such tragedies: treating all scenery and costumes at the Opera with a fireproofing solution. This so-called ‘carteronization’ after its inventor Carteron, weighed the gauzy fabrics down and making them look soiled, spoiling the effect of lightness. Many dancers refused to wear these costumes. Livry, who had herself witnessed a fellow dancer catching fire, still wrote a letter of protest to the Paris Opera, opposing the flame-retardant costumes, ‘I insist, sir, on dancing all first performances of the ballet in my ordinary ballet skirt, and I take it upon myself all responsibility for anything that may occur.’ She said she’d consider another option, as long as it did not spoil the effect.

The writer and pornographer Stoya wrote about Emma Livry in Dazed in 2014, in an essay responding to proposed legislation that would make condom-use mandatory in porn. Stoya, who first heard of Emma Livry when she was a young ballerina herself, uses Livry’s story to illustrate why she was against the proposed legislation:

Like Emma Livry’s distaste for stiff skirts spoiling her illusion of weightlessness, I dislike the idea of being forced to use barrier protection when the accompanying friction impedes my ability to deliver the best performance possible.

In ballet as in porn, Stoya writes that risks are taken and sacrifices made for a slim chance at success that is likely to last only a short time: ‘To enter either profession is to accept the likelihood of certain harmful side effects and the risk of more serious damage.’ In porn, this might include ostracization by family, peers or society, or difficulty securing other forms of employment later in life. ‘The sacrifices I’ve made for my work were willing,’ Stoya continues, ‘but they were sacrifices nonetheless and I would appreciate the freedom to continue to evaluate which risks I feel are worth taking and which safety measures I deem best to employ in each individual situation.’ Stoya suggests that had legislators asked the ballerinas how to improve their working conditions, the solution may not have centered around the bodies of the performers, but their working environment. Perhaps, she writes of Livry’s accident, the flames could have been enclosed or relocated.

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I used to think of cinema as the natural medium to discuss alongside porn. Following Carol Clover’s academic work on porn and slasher films, I saw sexually explicit media as an example of a ‘body genre’, like horror and melodrama. Or as Linda Williams – who from the 70s and 80s laid the groundwork for the academic field of Porn Studies – puts it, ‘films that promise to be sensational, to give our bodies an actual jolt’; films which lie ‘on the edge of respectable’.

But as I look closer, the more fitting bedfellow might yet be dance: a clear line can be traced from the mainstreaming of pornography in America in the 1970s back through to the Romantic ballet performances of the nineteenth century. The shared theme is the spectacle of the body in high and low culture, and how the stages for this spectacle have long been spaces of contention, ill repute and moral outrage.

Romantic ballet arrived in America in 1827 with French émigré Francisque Hutin, recounts Rachel Shteir in Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show, when she became the first solo ballerina to perform in New York. She caused a sensation with her performance in The Coquettish Shepherdess at the Bowery Theatre in lower Manhattan, and this performance marked a shift in taste away from genteel English dancing. At that time, only sex workers bared their ankles in public. Her dress, costuming new to the times, floated up to her waist as she danced, causing audience members to blush, leave the theater, or stay to see their fill. The New York Observer reported that: ‘The exhibition is to all intents and purposes the public exposure of a naked female.’ Soon legs were on display everywhere.

In working-class theaters, it was much the same: in dime museums, a coin bought access to the human body on display as a scientific curiosity; in concert saloons, the audience could drink in the burlesque spectacle of the undressed woman; in brothels and salons, the tableau vivant (enactments of famous paintings) popped up as one more way to meet the demand for nudity.

In addition to the rise of Broadway, burlesque and vaudeville theater flourished and actors increasingly moved between both forms. ‘Striptease’ entered the lexicon in the 1920s as an art form that promised more bare skin than it delivered, and which flourished in burlesque theaters and carnival tents. Some female performers of the time – as in the modern porn industry – saw this career path as a chance to become financially independent and self-determining, one they preferred to other jobs, and for some it offered a mode of self-expression and a way to challenge the bounds of how a woman was allowed to express herself.

That is, until ‘movies spoiled it’. This epitaph for the classic striptease comes from Sol Goldman, the longtime operator of the Gayety Theatre, which opened in 1906 and is Baltimore’s oldest remaining burlesque theater. As burlesque theaters closed, a new market opened up for filmed burlesque shows, often featuring strippers and chorus girls from the stage. The mid-century saw the dawn of the exploitation film and the ‘nudie cutie’.

‘The exploitation business was an extension of the circus carnival,’ recounts film producer Dave Friedman in The Other Hollywood:

girlie shows, freak shows, gambling games, rides, ballyhoo, hullabaloo, all done at a local level. But think about this: If you’re in the carnival business, you can only be in one place at one time. And if you get rained out, you’re dead.

Film turned out to have some practical benefits. On film, a show could be in multiple places at once, and one never had to worry about the talent getting tired, sick or aging. Movies ‘spoiled it’, but then movies became ‘it’.

Exploitation films were often framed as educational in how they revealed the ills of society. The pretense of these films was that they were part of a public awareness campaign that would lead to the depicted ills being removed from society by the proper authorities. But really, the exploitation film was a movie that showed what Hollywood back then would not, and now still rarely does. Sexual excess.

One of the key locations for the representation of sexual excess was south Florida. There, Bunny Yeager, best known for her iconic collaboration with pin-up Bettie Page in 1954, was learning about making movies while working as an on-set photographer for sexploitation filmmaker Doris Wishman. Friedman, the ‘trash film king’, was spending his winters shooting at nudist colonies in the mid-1960s. A young Chuck Traynor became part of this scene. By the late 1960s, Traynor was running a topless bar and was friendly with a biker gang whose female cohorts were proficient in a sex act called ‘deep throat’. Meanwhile in New York, Linda Boreman suffered serious injuries in a car accident. She moved back in with her parents in south Florida to recover. Her resources were limited, and she described her parental home as abusive. This was where Chuck and Linda met. It began as a romance: boy meets girl. Traynor opened a door for her to anywhere but there. Within a few years, Boreman would play the part of Linda Lovelace in the 1972 film Deep Throat, and history would be made.

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Recontextualizing the history of porn, threading it into a history of dance and the body as spectacle, can only go so far. To get to the heart of why society devalues sexual expression, we have to look within. It is possible that the refusal to acknowledge the value of sexually explicit expression has a protective function. Risk, after all, is not born by the performer alone. The audience partakes in this communion, and this communion is a risk in itself. It is a confrontation with desire.

In her 2013 Empson lecture, Adrian Piper, the American conceptual artist and philosopher, described the psychological space that must be invoked in order to experience contemporary art: ‘To be at home, in this place means to be comfortable with unsynthesised intuitions: with unfamiliar things and happenings and states and presences that confound and silence the mind and decompose the ego.’

This sounds similar to the conditions that lead to the spark of arousal. You are confronted with a presence (a person, a gesture or composition), and you enter an altered state, feeling things you might not think are part of you – but nonetheless, there you are: in the throes of desire.

Piper describes Immanuel Kant’s view of a similar state of being: ‘an anomalous presence appears . . . we intuit it, but it fails to behave in accordance with our conventional expectations of cause and effect’. Kant takes a negative view of this unsettled state, comparing it to a ‘void’ without meaning. Piper contrasts Kant’s view with that of William Empson’s, whose ‘sensitivity to his own creative process… led him to regard this state with interest and respect’. Free from the strictures of familiar labels and categories, we are invited to explore, to borrow a phrase that comes up in discussions of queer and feminist porn, the ‘diversity of our desires’.

Desire is often non-consensual, observes Andrea Long Chu, who has written about how watching sissy porn catalyzed a realization about her gender. In a public space, between individuals, depending on how desire is expressed or contained, this gaze can be experienced as hostile, welcoming, amusing, neutral. It’s complicated and often fraught. Porn, like dance, provides a context in which the gaze is invited to linger, and this permission alone is a powerful force. It is a space where we can commune with our ‘unsynthesised intuitions’. It’s available to us, if we allow it to be.

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There is something to be gained by changing the terms of how porn is contextualised in the mainstream. By not considering that there is value in pornographic expression, it becomes almost impossible to think about porn and its workers as people who can be driven by ambition and passion or as masters of a craft. Whatever porn is or is not, like dance it is rooted in the body. Framing porn as a performative art and valuing it as such might lead to saner conversations about safe working conditions for performers. Since porn is presumably the form of sex work that people most commonly engage with, it might also lead to a greater understanding about the nature of sex work and its many iterations across the spectrum of privilege and how to address related social issues.

My hope is that an alternative history of the commercial adult film industry, offering a new and expanded way of viewing sexually explicit media, might lead to a different kind of conversation, a revised canon. I hope it might also lead to a curiosity about other films, performers and creators working with sexual expression and how this work has shaped society.

I believe that our unsynthesised intuition can be a sacrament, a sacred state; the art that invokes them creates a space for communion, a ritual through which we may be overtaken and emerge changed, even by the simplest of affirmations. Cordua’s orgasm at eighty: a vision of pleasures to come.