As the #MeToo movement continues to elicit stories of women abused, objectified and disempowered the timing of Beautiful is spot on. Created in collaboration with five female dancers, Sally Marie’s new work aims to explore the private ways women inhabit their bodies, and how they experience desire and emotion independently of what the world projects on to them.
The performance opens with a classic showgirl routine in which the sequinned, miniskirted dancers shimmy and strut in obedient formations, their smiles primped, their gazes compliantly coquettish. What starts out as a quasi-erotic display turns into something more exhilaratingly disco, as the women seem to forget their audience and plug into a pure collective enjoyment of their raunchy energy, physical sass and expertise.
In her search to discover how women actually feel, Marie works through a catalogue of familiar types and tropes. She turns her dancers into romantic heroines, petty in pink and white net, then allows us to look through the surface allure of their choreography into an interior landscape of sensuous reverie. She has them double up in love duets, then takes them far beyond a stylised dance language of sex into uninhibited realms of smooching, stroking tenderness, jealousy and even rage.
Some of the best sections of the work layer in a sly lampooning of contemporary choreography: one solo parodies and luxuriates in the body-skewering splits and splayed limberness that so routinely denote virtuoso female dancing. And there’s a confessional monologue ( a classic of Bauschian tanztheater) in which Flora Grant delivers a startlingly detailed account of her views on anal sex until she shrugs insouciantly, admits she’s never experienced it herself and says that she’s simply reciting someone else’s story.
In her attempt to choreograph female sexuality, Marie displays a brave, provocative and questioning spirit that is admirable: she digs away in an area that dance doesn’t normally access. But the digging throws out less and less material that an audience can relate to. These fine, committed dancers push their bodies to caving, crunching, panting physical extremes, yet cease to communicate much in the way of identifiable emotions or ideas.
- At the Arts Centre, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, 1 March. Box office:
01695 584480. Then touring until 24 March.
