“I’m a Barbie girl, in a barbie world. Life is plastic”…is not so fantastic. Or at least this is what Jane Comfort suggests in her work Beauty (2012), a dance/theatre work that “explores the American notion of female beauty through the lens of Barbie.”
Concerned with “push[ing] the intersection of movement and language to a new form of theatre” that is “socially conscious,” Comfort choreographed the dazzling spectacles of her two works, Beauty (2012) and Underground River (1998). Both works blend choreography, voice-overs and moments of interaction with the audience. This interdisciplinary approach, when paired with the expressiveness of the dancers and the subtleness of their movements, takes all viewers on an intimate journey of self-discovery. This self-discovery is only achieved by exposing the inner biases and beliefs her audience subconsciously holds.
In “Beauty,” her dancers, as Barbies, are manifestations of the danger of feeding into a white, anorexic, blonde, happy-go-lucky concept of beauty. Eerily, her Barbies come to life on stage. The bright lights reflect off of the sequined leotards. Their skin-tone tights make their legs look like plastic. They have huge boobs, smiles that are almost grimaces, high heels, long ponytails, and stiff movements. Their arms are bent at the elbows and their feet fixed in an arched position — to fit their heels of course. In a particularly unforgettable scene, Comfort makes a spectacle of this rigidity, choreographing Ken and Barbie making love. This encounter is anything but sensual or even enjoyable (in a voyeuristic sense); both dancers bend only in ways Barbies could.
It was breathtaking to see Comfort’s negotiation of the rigidity of a Barbie’s body and the fluidity of a sexual encounter. For Jumatatu Poe ‘04, Modern Dance Professor and Mentor in the “Making Moves” Project at Swarthmore, this moment was one of true choreographic genius. Being most interested in “movement investigation,” — namely, imagining “new ways of moving beyond codified, recognized vocabularies [of movement]” — Jumatatu found himself questioning, “what can this Barbie really do? What can this Ken do?”
For Juma, the abnormality of the movement, coupled with the integrity it maintained to the anatomy of Barbie, was a bit uncomfortable. In creepily showing what happens when “beauty becomes a paralysis,” Juma was struck by the tension established between being close in proximity but not being able to “experience closeness.”
In the course of the 45 minute piece, Comfort covers the many sources of female insecurity (and the ways in which women feed into it), staging extreme workouts and dieting, a provocative clubbing scene where the dancers are scantily clad and shaking their backsides, a live photoshopping of a dancer’s picture, and even a live and disturbing marking of a dancer’s body by a “surgeon” who plans to nip and tuck any problem areas. Arguably, what makes Comfort’s construction of the female experience so riveting is her juxtaposition of her choreography with another dancer, who sits on the side of the stage, completely ignorant of the activity onstage. She sits at a desk, lit by a lamp, complete with bottles of hairspray, makeup, a mirror and face products. At various points within the performance, the stage goes black, and we are directed to the girl seated at her desk. What is so creepy about her presence is that she spends the 45 minutes getting ready to go out with friends. She begins by blow drying her short hair, then she shaves, then she takes off her robe, puts on a bra, puts on a girdle, adds hair extensions, puts on a short black dress and heels. At the end of the piece, she simply gets up and walks across the stage to apparently go out with friends. Comfort, in deciding to represent two worlds, and in essence two narratives, contextualizes her work. That is to say, on the stage we see a meditation on this notion of beauty and sadly, on the side, we see a woman who is completely engulfed in it, and suffers from it. This choreographic choice makes her message that much more poignant.
While it can be argued that Comfort’s approach is rather heteronormative — male dancers are almost always the voice overs that shout insults or promote the mutilation of the female image — there is room to see her work as a commentary on the fluidity of sexuality and gender. While Poe is of the opinion that Jane Comfort could have taken her exploration of beauty a step further and tackled “how the idea of beauty really impacts a psychology and how they become embedded” and how the “really affect humanity at a very physical, instinctual, and even impulsive level,” he appreciates how the piece was “liberated in terms of one’s relationship to gender, sexual orientation.” The subversive potential of the piece then is how, using gender identity, it exploring looked at ‘the way things function now in society, asking what’s wrong and what can be better.” In this context, what “can be better” are the fixed boxes women and men are meant to occupy.
Karim Sariahmed ‘ 13, a dancer, choreographer, and member of the “Making Moves” Project, however, found the blatant intentionality of the images and voice-overs subversive. While it was “easy to identify…a lot of the reference to cultural things that particularly women do to beauty themselves both literally and figuratively,” the exaggerated expression of these actions “revealed how ridiculous they are and how arbitrary performative gender identity, and how beauty is defined within that identity, is.”
For Sariahmed, the use of voice-overs was integral in the exaggeration of these ideas. “I guess people a lot of the times value subtlety in art ‘if you are writing a poem about love you don’t use the word love’ but the point is that these things are not subtle at all but are overbearing and overwhelmingly present in everyday life,” he said.
In her second piece, Underground River (1998), Comfort took a very distinct approach to storytelling. While the voice-overs were still important, this piece was much more of a visual spectacle. The dancers’ bodies become the vehicle through which Comfort builds the “rich fantasy life of an unconscious girl.” Much like the workshops Comfort held at Swarthmore on Thursday and Saturday, this piece utilizes voice and the ways in which chanting, humming and harmonizing can communicate emotion and narrative.
It is important to note that these songs often did not feature words, but rather, much resembled scatting. These vocalizations also resembled the “folk” tradition, having a tone of storytelling and mysticism. This choice gave meaning to the imagination of the young girl. She sings in her mind only in a way that she can understand. However, these senseless song, when coupled with the voice-overs that were also cryptic in meaning, often made the piece hard to follow. “It was harder for me to follow…I didn’t get that they were representing her fantasy world…and maybe I would have appreciated it more if I knew the context,” Sariahmed said.
Unlike Beauty, where the message was pretty much force-fed to its viewers, Comfort wanted Underground River to be a dive into the more obscure. Comfort suggests then, that the imagination of this young girl, and her limited interactions with the “real” world is something that cannot be communicated accurately with words.
Arguably the most impactful moment of the piece was the puppet scene. To visually represent the freedom the young girl experiences in her own mind, Comfort paired up with Basil Twist to create a fabric puppet that the dancers assemble onstage. Each of the four dancers grabs a stick which controls a different part of the puppet’s body, including its arms, legs and torso. Then, the puppet comes to life, at first waking up, then dancing, and finally soaring through the sky as the chant “hee yaw uh huh huh” in a happy, light tone. This puppet is graceful and beautiful as it is manipulated by the dancers who also incorporate it in their own movements. At the end, they float him down to the ground, as if asleep again. The puppet’s journey, then, is one not marked by gravity or impossibilities. Instead, the puppet dances and flies and sleeps effortlessly.
For Sariahmed, Comfort’s use of this puppet is very reflective of her dedication to breaking from the mold of choreographic expression. As she expressed in her workshops, “people tend to have natural rules and go-tos and almost biases…assumptions that they make when thinking about how you should do a certain movement, or how long that movement should go on.” She opts for material that is interesting and charged. In other words, Comfort attempts to identify her own “go-to”s and then invert them, do the unexpected. The puppet was such an effective way to push assumptions about what choreography can or should be. It is almost uncanny how much the small puppet, a frail, 10-inch tall piece of silk, was able to draw an affective reaction from the viewers because it was so alive with symbolism.
After this manipulation of the puppet, the dancers perform one last routine to the sound of dripping water and a woman’s voice asking for “Kara” to respond to her touch. It becomes clear Kara’s parents are losing faith in her recovery. It ends with feathers falling from the top of the stage, lit by a frosty pink overhead lighting cue. Kara is dead it seems. And even though we didn’t know much about her, we mourn her and the beauty of the underground river of her imagination.
In bringing Jane Comfort to Swarthmore, the Cooper Foundation succeeded in “enriching” the college with “guest speakers and performers in music, film, dance, and theatre who show promise of distinguished achievement.” While much could be said of the superficiality of “Beauty” or the ambiguity in “Underground River,” both are innovative negotiations of dance, theatre and digital media with the ultimate goal of making a social critique. Both pieces make strong statements about the things we take for granted and explore the tension between freedom in and enslavement to our minds and our societies.
