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Not Yet and Elsewhere: Locating Lesbian Identity in Performance Archives, as Performance Archives

In 1955, soon-to-be dance critic, later-to-become lesbian provocateur, Jill Johnston began what would be a ten-month-long job at the New York Public Library’s Dance Collection, one of the US’s largest collection of archived dance materials. A recently broken foot served as catalyst for Johnston to move away from life as a dancer; she had just left the school of foundational modern dance figure José Limón, where she had been studying post-college. Also at the Limón school Johnston had been – secretly, she thought – falling in love with women in the Limón company. Attraction to women, even dancing women, was not entirely new for Johnston in 1955 (as she would state decades later in her first book-length autobiography), but otherwise dance and lesbian desire seemed to be co-occurring but not related. At the Library, a place where Johnston found the presence of men and patriarchy omnipresent, the career that would make Johnston famous (or maybe infamous) took hold: she became a poignant, sensual, humorous critic of bodies in motion – in dance, and then, later, in feminist activism. This work included her cutting-edge column in New York’s alternative weekly, The Village Voice. In 1960 she began writing about dance, initiating the work that would eventually make her the most prominent voice to chronicle what eventually became known as ‘postmodern dance’. By the end of the sixties, however, the column’s focus had shifted from dance to her burgeoning life as an out lesbian, and then a lesbian feminist activist. Dance and lesbian desire and activism were often more entangled in Johnston’s life than a chronology of her column’s development might suggest. Whether privately, as was the case at the Limón school, or more Contemporary Theatre Review, 2021 Vol. 31, Nos. 1–2, 34–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1878504