Rather than searching for meaning behind appearances or among an endless play of data, we should analyze culture as an activity upon those surfaces. If hatred, fear, and rage are tattooed into the skin of the nation, they should be read as they are, not for a supposed meaning behind or beneath them, nor as temporary features that might simply be wiped from the surface.

—Kathryn Felishman[1]

This piece began what feels like thousands of worlds ago, and just a year and a half from now. What began as a straightforward review of a mainstream dance performance—“what did you think” (garbage do not go see)—has become something more. In 2020, with each month's new, generationally seismic event, new shards grew and mutated. The review changed the more I thought about why I didn't like the Christmas Spectacular. In the end we have whatever this is, somewhere between the mouth of a volcano and a performance review. 

In part it seems so so so off topic, like reading poetry in the middle of a warehouse party, during a war. And, who really cares so much about the Rockettes and Christmas in general, let alone now, let alone in July.

What is interesting are the ways innocence and disembodying American myths are remade and kept frozen in place season after season, made and remade over and over again by the institution of the Rockettes. So as we move through this month, farther and farther from the Christmas Spectacular—and yet with each passing day, horrifyingly, closer and closer to it—as we think and talk about returning to forms of normal, let’s also think about the heat and the thaw.

But again, mostly: Who really cares about the Rockettes?

Last last December, as with every year except for this one, the Rockettes performed a marathon of their Christmas Spectacular. I attended one performance with my Mom.

The show opens with a dusty 3D sleigh ride (including first generation cardboard glasses). We pretend to sail through the air following a white Santa and his sleigh. We fly down from the North Pole via Ellis Island and Washington Square Park, across a flattened, cartoonish version of New York City (sponsored by Chase and Coca-Cola) to land gracefully and loudly in Radio City Music Hall.

We then move relatively seamlessly from an opening song featuring the Rockettes as Christmas stockings come to life, 36 dancers high-kicking in an urgent clenched-teeth-smile-everything-is-fine rhythm, high-kicking around and across the stage, into another song and dance about Christmas. Then a feel good journey in search of the perfect gift for a parent, then to Rockefeller Center, then a trip back to the North Pole, and finally a procession through the desert with baby Jesus (with real camels) all slouching towards Bethlehem under an actually remarkable night sky that melts into a massive star floating upwards with dancers and light spinning through the air high above the stage. In addition to the Rockettes’ physical talent, the show also has its moments with lighting and elaborate stagecraft. 

Along this whole journey a white Santa acts as master of ceremonies (and a proxy voice for the Rockettes as an organization). He fills the space between the dance routines and songs with his own anecdotes and nostalgic expression:“the way things used to be”, “the way things ought to be”, “some things just shouldn’t change”, 

The Rockettes have their considerable skills, but in some ways the show is not all that unique. It is infused with an ambient white supremacy that hangs in the air—a gauze and noxious gas. It is easy to imagine their Santa saying these same vague things in defense of capitalism, or apartheid governments, or social structures in America, or housing policy, or mass incarceration. 

Look at the gee-aww-shucks-Thomas-Kinkade arrangements of holiday songs and their preoccupation with a vague tradition that sounds a lot like “Make America Great Again.” The Rockettes have performed at many Presidential inaugurations, most recently at Donald Trump’s. [3]

Some of the Rockettes felt that they could not perform in good conscience. This exchange between a Rockette and their manager and CEO James Dolan is revealing: 

I mean, it just sounds like you're asking us to be tolerant of intolerance.” Her comment was followed by uncomfortable laughter around the room and a pause. “Yeah, in a way, I guess we are doing that,” Dolan said. “What other choices do we have? What else would you suggest?” [4]

Ultimately that performance was voluntary, and the Rockettes as an institution chose to perform even as some individuals did not. And so it is with other American institutions, even over the objections and efforts of individuals, systems and their racist logic churned on.

“I would simply say, we're celebrating a new president, not necessarily this president.” [5] That Dolan speaks in such vague, evasive ways is not all that surprising, and it shows how the Rockettes are celebrating something much more widespread than just a single president or a single moment.

In putting together a picture of the Christmas Spectacular, it is important to know that members of the Rockettes are a majority white, must be approximately the same height (between 5’6” and 5’10.5”), and must dance in perfect time, with uniform hair, makeup, and nails, all the while smiling. And not by suggestion or preference—a smile is explicitly mandatory for all the Rockettes throughout each performance. In one promotional video for the show, they say, “Just one unpleasant facial expression can ruin the whole performance.” [6]

For all the dance routines these 36 dancers move all together in rigid mesmerizing patterns and then switch to another, and another. As they step and dance and kick, we are left with this bland accumulation of precision and perfection. They achieve a forced perspective through architecture, proportion, and scale, but which ends up feeling like having your eyeballs jammed against a screen door. And outside, seen through that door, all of life’s messiness has been forced away. “Where we see the limitation of a body’s ‘right to range,’ be it at an individual or state level, we see domination.” [7] The Christmas Spectacular and the Rockettes generally perform this limited range. They cultivate and renew narrow ideas about bodies, acceptable facial expressions, emotion, and this implied domination sends shockwaves at the audience, constricting what is believed possible and what is celebrated. What their Santa thinks, “should never change.” Or as a failure in imagination, “What other choices do we have? What else would you suggest?”

To accept the Christmas Spectacular as it sees itself is to deny lived realities for so many of us, to actively forget American history, to fail our imagination, to deny our bodies and their wisdom. To not even try to imagine a different way. To celebrate new presidents at the same time as that president. It is to practice believing in American myths, a melting puddle of soothing stories white people like to tell themselves about themselves. Fantasies about how things came to be and how the gifts of the day arrived, gifts that come wrapped even, obscuring what is inside.

Midway through the performance is an ornate sequence with all the Rockettes dressed as nutcrackers. The scene ends with them shot by a cannon and all falling down one by one, arms interlocked, dominoes in slow motion. It is a trust fall that is as spectacular as it is cartoonishly violent—the linked arms of whiteness and America, asking for our trust, and then dragging us down.

A different routine involves a metastatic dance sequence in which white Santas endlessly multiply, flooding the stage. They fill our visual field, both as dancers dressed in the red suit and beard and their digitally projected counterparts. They fill every corner in view as they move across the stage and project onto the walls and screens of the theater.

These Santas echo each other, and they illustrate something about the Christmas Spectacular and its relationship to whiteness and everyday racist violence in America. They spread out and multiply in a vast web. “The vast web of racism [which] has been a constant, yet dynamic, feature of our national life. Whiteness is knotted up in our deepest history, but it is also, and of necessity, constantly being remade.” [8]

And so the Christmas Spectacular, and every annual remake, is presented as an ordinary story about Christmas in New York where children go on an adventure to find the perfect gift for a parent, about Christmas, and holiday cheer. But Christmas as it is practiced is a celebration of consumption and thus inextricably linked to American racial capitalism. (This term is in some sense redundant, because of how inextricable racism is with capitalism, but for extra clarity I think in this case it is useful as a term.) Racial capitalism that lands on bodies, the physical embodied experience, “that dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth.” [9] 

The Christmas stories function as evasive, as a way to avoid any accountability. “But it is just wholesome family entertainment,” “It is just a dance performance,” “You just lack heart and are made of stone and evil.” [10]

Or as the performance melts and leaks off of the stage and into the broader world: “I would simply say, we're celebrating a new president, not necessarily this president.” 

In Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (Verso, 2020), Legacy Russell writes that gender (and its accompanying white supremacist patriarchal violence), “is so big it becomes invisible. This is where the problem lies: in the invisibility that becomes seemingly organic. This ‘normative ordinary’ is a violence, suggesting natural order in lieu of a most unnatural system of control.”[12]

We see the same evasion and suspicion of change, the glacier beneath the ocean, when Santa talks about “The way things used to be”, “the way things ought to be”, “some things shouldn’t change”. The Rockettes, in this ambient way, contribute to the idea of an imagined past and an amnesia of what that past was and what it means.

In an oppressive system, leaving things frozen as they are, or going back to how they were (what was called normal pre-COVID), is a violent act. This system that is built around whiteness and an idea of humanity “which is so tangled in separation and domination that it is consistently making our lives incompatible with the planet.”[13] Violent white supremacy—and the version of which the Rockettes partake and aestheticize—freezes how we relate to our bodies, how we relate to each other, and how we move through space. In the current moment of particularly looming global catastrophe, this all takes on another edge. 

All that is to say again, Who cares really about the Rockettes? 

- - - - -

[1] Kathryn Fleishman, “The statue and the veil: post-critique in the age of trump,” www.post45.org (January 16, 2019)

[2] ibid.

[3] Rockettes Perform at Trump Inaugural Ball, www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmSI-dc50-0,(January 23, 2017)

[4] Rockette Management tells Dancers to ‘Tolerate Intolerance,” https://www.marieclaire.com/politics/a24518/rockette-donald-trump-inauguration-james-dolan/

[5] ibid.

[6] 20 Strict Rules The Rockettes Dancers Have To Follow, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNF_4CNTX48, (December 14, 2019)

[7] Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism, (New York, Verso Books, 2020), 21

[8] Kathryn Fleishman, “The statue and the veil: post-critique in the age of trump,” www.post45.org (January 16, 2019)

[9] Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Between the world and Me”, (New York, Spiegel and Grau, 2015), 10

[10] Yelp Reviews of the Christmas Spectacular, https://www.yelp.com/biz/christmas-spectacular-starring-the-radio-city-rockettes-new-york

[11] Rockette Management tells Dancers to ‘Tolerate Intolerance,’ https://www.marieclaire.com/politics/a24518/rockette-donald-trump-inauguration-james-dolan/

[12] Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism, (New York, Verso Books, 2020), 83

[13] Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals”, (Chico, Edinburg: AK Press 2020), 8