Research in Music Series, Guest Lecture: Maeve Sterbenz

Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025; 11:00am-12:00pm; Bromery Center Rm. 421

Research in Music Series: A Talk by Maeve Sterbenz
Assistant Professor of Music at Smith College

Choreomusical Ambivalence in Katy Pyle’s Queer Reinterpretation of The Dying Swan

Abstract: In the growing subfield of choreomusicology, writers have acknowledged the malleability of musical structure and meaning, suggesting that music may register very differently within a merged dance-music composite. Katy Pyle’s queer contemporary reinterpretation of Michel Fokine’s 1905 classical ballet variation, The Dying Swan, represents an alternate take, not only on the choreography and the setting (re-envisioned as 1990’s AIDS activism), but also on the music—from Camille Saint-Saëns’ Le Carnival des Animaux—which undergoes a significant shift in tone and feeling. Pyle’s version takes after Fokine’s in some respects, maintaining the tight, quick movements of the feat and undulating, wing-like arms, while interposing new material that is less polished in character, flopping, flailing, and floundering. The dancers flutter slowly around the stage until, at the point of utter exhaustion, they each collapse one-by-one of AIDS-related illness. The abject tragedy of the scene is laced with absurdity, favoring self-effacing inelegance over a full-throated expression of melancholy. Doing so brings the music into an ambivalent affective register, quivering on an uncomfortable ledge between miserable and outrageous, and puts the ballet in line with a wider queer aesthetic characteristic of the ACT UP coalition to which Pyle’s ballet alludes.