Untitled Feminist Show (review)

The performers of Untitled Feminist Show were some of the happiest people I have ever seen on-stage. From their slow entrance through the house aisles to the end of the piece, the only thing that the six completely naked female dancers wore as they met the audience's gaze were radiant, welcoming smiles. Considering the title, it seems that Lee and her collaborators wanted to return through unabashed nudity to the roots of modern-day feminism, to a time when the female body in its full presence was vigorously explored. But times have changed. Can an attempt to “strip away” social signifiers from the body still resonate with contemporary audiences, or have we become too jaded for such a gesture to be seen as anything but ironic?

World Famous *BOB*, Hilary Clark, Katy Pyle, Regina Rocke, and Amelia Zirin-Brown (aka Lady Rizo) in Untitled Feminist Show. (Photo: Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company.)

Lee states in her program note that she wanted to create a “feminist utopia” through the piece. Beyond the sparkling euphoria of the performers, Untitled Feminist Show evoked an ideal world by shunning the complications of language and meaning. The hour-long piece was a loosely structured series of dance and mime sequences on a bare stage, wordless except for guttural sounds, humming, and a single song in an unfamiliar language (possibly Gaelic). Although some of the choreography and gestures were recognizable (for example, a classical pastoral scene with nymphs and satyrs, a boxing match, and a comic routine miming oral sex), the performance consciously avoided saying anything. Instead, it seemed that attention was being directed toward the dancers’ physical experience as they skipped and glided over the stage. In the absence of dialogue, the body became the locus of unmediated, not to mention uncensored, self-expression. The piece’s buoyant, whimsical physicality had a pleasantly disarming effect on the audience; a blank stage with six naked dancers may not have looked particularly like a utopian world, but Untitled Feminist Show certainly felt like one.

This choice to let the body happily speak for itself accounts for the adjective “untitled” in the title and resonates with Peggy Phelan’s notion of being “unmarked” through live performance. Lee's piece illustrated how the body, especially the frequently objectified female body, might transcend signification. Conventional gender roles were purged in this celebration of corporeal presence. Each dance sequence dissipated once it was complete, so that the performers played with various roles without those roles being durably inscribed on their bodies.

The piece did not provide any clues as to how we might reach this feminist utopia, however, nor how the gap between the nude performers and the clothed audience might be bridged. Lee’s appeal to feminism in the title was not without ambivalence, especially considering how her previous work has challenged assumptions about politically touchy subjects. In Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and The Shipment, for example, she self-consciously employed theatrical representations of crude racism to shock the audience out of conventional beliefs and attitudes toward issues of race. On the other hand, the dancers in Untitled Feminist Show looked eagerly at all audience members without discrimination, asking us to share their joy and pleasure. But if no dividing lines are drawn, in what sense is this show feminist? Am I, a male spectator, granted entry into Lee’s utopia, or am I tactlessly intruding on someone else’s party? In calling her piece “feminist” while leaving such questions unattended, Lee presented a tantalizing provocation by way of nonprovocation.

That is, until the final shock of the curtain call. Throughout the performance, a narrow screen spanning the width of the theatre loomed overhead, displaying video montages of abstract, vaguely organic images. After the final dance, the screen descended several feet, announcing some kind of visual effect to end the show. The performers reentered fully clothed and dancing to throbbing club...