![\"Sara](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/AJ-Sara-Jinks-in-Girl-Gods_4.jpg\")
<\/a>Sara Jinks in Pat Graney’s Girl Gods<\/em>. Photo: Marina Levitskaya<\/p><\/div>\n The 1960s weren\u2019t all about Beatles, sit-ins, marches, pot, and communes. For many women, the post-war 1940s and the 1950s lingered on in spirit. Some of these women may have worn go-go boots and very short dresses, but they belonged to the unspoken club of wives who greeted their hard-working husbands at the door with a martini in hand and perfume on their ear lobes. Occasionally husbands boasted about their cooking prowess (i.e. throw a steak on the barbecue); some could change diapers. These too are cultural stereotypes, ready to be dissected.<\/p>\n Girl Gods<\/em> is the second piece in a projected triptych created by the Seattle choreographer Pat Graney. Montclair University\u2019s Peak Performances series did us a favor by bringing us its East coast premiere. Graney\u2019s subject is women of a generation or two ago\u2014women who were advised to bottle up their rage, to defer to their husbands, and to be capable and attractive on the home front at all times. Girl Gods<\/em> is dedicated to Graney\u2019s mother, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer\u2019s, and I believe it is her recorded voice that we hear in snatches, recalling her married life and sometimes marveling at her own passivity.<\/p>\n The piece\u2019s opening image is alarming. A woman in a short black dress and matching high heels attempts to carry a presumably full teacup across the stage. She (Sara Jinks) walks slowly and unsteadily, focusing on her task with the nervous tension of someone carrying an explosive that mustn\u2019t be jostled. The audience in the Kasser Theater can hear the cup quake in its saucer.<\/p>\n With her free hand, Jinks helps herself along by touching the \u201cwall\u201d that stretches along the back of the stage. Amiya Brown\u2019s lighting makes her blurry shadow grow and distort against it. Will this woman make it to her destination no matter how debilitating her condition?<\/p>\n Jody Kuehner (L) and Jenny Peterson in Pat Graney’s Girl Gods<\/em>. Photo: Marina Levitskaya<\/p><\/div>\n The wall, designed by Holly Batt, is a marvelous thing, and John DeShazo\u2019s engineering enables surprising effects. The nearly ceiling-high set is constructed of boxy white shapes\u2014square or rectangular, vertical and horizontal. But the five women in Girl Gods<\/em> are familiar with this wall; it\u2019s their kitchen. One box opens like an oven; another holds trash. Jenny Peterson surreptitiously leaves a tea party, at which the hostess doles out tiny portions of a very small cake, and pulls out a whole section of the wall, as if it were an enormous drawer. Then she clambers up the stairway that results, retrieves a big, gooey-looking dessert from a high cupboard, and devours it.<\/p>\n Graney\u2019s choreography takes several basic forms. At times, the women move through seductive poses and gestures, wooing us with \u201ccute\u201d and \u201csexy.\u201d When their anger erupts, it either does so in tantrums or in controlled physical ordeals in a surreal gym. Our hearts sink when a very small girl appears and copies Cheryl Delostrino\u2019s gestures\u2014half aggression, half seduction, and, sure enough, Delostrino, Peterson, Jinks, Jody Kuehner, and Sruti Desai later appear in outrageous, fluffy, little-girl party dresses with bows in their hair. Thus accoutered, they smile and mince about like the \u201cladies\u201d they\u2019re being groomed to be.<\/p>\n Sruti Desai (L) and Cheryl Delostrinos in Girl Gods<\/em>. Photo: Marina Levitskaya<\/p><\/div>\n Desai and Delostrino appear at one point in red dresses (costumes by Frances Kenny), with their copious black hair unbound; they hurl themselves around\u2014thrashing, spinning, falling, rolling\u2014for a punishingly long time. Their misshapen shadows echo them on the wall. Once Desai screams in rage. However, Graney\u2019s social and political insights are most vivid in the vignettes she devises. The aproned Jinks takes a raw chicken out of a \u201crefrigerator,\u201d sets it on a table and proceeds to stuff it viciously with far more than it can hold. In another illustration of repressed rage, Desai, wearing a white dress sits on the floor and starts pushing Hot Tamales into her mouth. She chews and chews these cinnamon candies that she probes out of a small box, but doesn\u2019t swallow them; her pretty face distorts; her cheeks distend; red syrup starts to pour from her mouth. It\u2019s a horrifying sight. She\u2019s about to start on a second box when the lights, mercifully, go out.<\/p>\n Sruti Desai gorging on sweets she cannot eat. Photo: Marina Levitskaya<\/p><\/div>\n Much of the women\u2019s buttoned-up anger focuses on the images inflicted on them, or ones in which they\u2019ve been trained. And on the cruelty that some of them accept as part of their lives. Once, a song emerges in Amy Denio\u2019s sensitive, responsive sound score; the words accompany a side-by-side, aggressively cute number performed by Delostrinos and Kuehner: \u201cHe hit me, and it felt like a kiss.\u201d<\/p>\n Tall Kuehner patiently dresses herself in clothes sized for a ten-year-old, with results both hilarious and extremely sad. Peterson lays a small pad on the floor beside the wall and stands on her head; maintaining that uncomfortable position, she undresses herself down to her underwear. Make of it what you will (self-punishment, self-mastery, kinky sex ahead?); it too is as disturbing as it is laugh-producing. It\u2019s also disturbing to watch Jinks and Delostrinos get hold of a doll that the little girl has dressed and make it walk toward the front of the stage. The doll becomes increasingly violent\u2014small arms waving, feet kicking out. The two women get her where they want her, and she stands alone for the rest of Girl Gods<\/em>, staring out at us; in the end, she\u2019s in her own spotlight.<\/p>\n Little dolls and the big girls they grow into. Jody Kuehner and role model. Photo: Marina Levitskaya<\/p><\/div>\n Watching Graney\u2019s piece and processing the often visceral sensations it awakened, I became surprised that, until the end, the five vibrant performers rarely acknowledged, never helped one another. Is it Graney\u2019s point that they concealed their rage even from one another? Finally, however, when Peterson doesn\u2019t recover from an exhausting fit of writhing and screaming, the others rise and lay her out. They undress her, and, two of them dip pieces of paper in a basin of water, and place them over her. Their gentleness and deliberateness give the scene the air of a ritual bath. Yet when they finish and set Peterson on her feet, we can see that her naked body is covered with writing. Maybe she is clothed in all the strictures her mother and her grandmothers passed down to her. They look like bruises. She lies down again, and the women circle her, making rings of dirt and dropping flowers into it as they walk around and around and around. A memorial for sure, but also, perhaps, a new beginning.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Colleen Thomas’s Her(e) Repetitive Blueprint<\/em>. (L to R): Thomas (hidden), Jenna Riegel, and Jessica Stroh. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n A day later, I\u2019m in Buttenweiser Hall where the 92nd<\/sup> Street Y Harkness Dance Center\u2019s Dig Dance! Series is happening. I haven\u2019t looked closely at the program for Colleen Thomas\u2019s new Her(e) Repetitive Blueprint.<\/em> As the work begins, and on the basis of its startling first moments, I assume it\u2019s a dance for women. The only man in sight is the composer-musician John McGrew. He\u2019s singing softly and holding slightly open a curtain that conceals a window; he looks out. Thomas herself is dancing, sometimes gazing upward toward a corner of the space. A side door opens, releasing a beam of light, and she reaches into the room beyond and pulls out another woman (Samantha Allen). Allen, thrashing as if loath to leave her lair, breaks loose. As she travels on her own wild path, two other women (Jenna Riegel and Jessica Stroh) emerge one at a time from that same room and stand behind Thomas. They\u2019re wearing loosely cut dresses in different colors (costumes by Rachel Jones Bellas). Side by side, the three fall to the floor face down, squirming a little, shaking their heads. There\u2019s a sound of rattling, of thunder; an echoing female voice sings.<\/p>\n Tricia Toliver\u2019s lighting is both imaginative and, I suspect, partly make-do. Sometimes the fine old room\u2019s several chandeliers provide the light, but when the four women line up, the smartly dressed Tamara Joy Clark, who acts as a hostess-helper-performer, switches on a lamp for each dancer (these lights sit right at the feet of front-row spectators). In that illumination, the women, rubbing their bellies vigorously\u2014perhaps trying to cleanse themselves of something\u2014look almost spectral.<\/p>\n They may use those light paths, moving along them, say, or, their backs to us, jumping many times in their own bright areas. Their movements have a certain looseness; they fling their arms and legs as they leap; they swing their bodies. They divide into two-part counterpoint. Falling is a major ingredient of the choreography. And those risen keep helping others up, only to fall themselves. Sometimes McGrew\u2019s music stops; at other times it\u2019s strong, almost abrasively loud and\/or insistently rhythmic, but it\u2019s always geared to what the dancers do.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>