Undress Me Anywhere!

Four bosomy Barbie dolls, faces frozen into ingratiating grins, feet in permanent tiptoe, stalk the stage in a Barbie Beauty contest. My companion, aged 12, immediately scribbled some words on her program and showed me: “I’m a Barbie girl in a Barbie world. Life in plastic, it’s fantastic, you can brush my hair, undress me anywhere!” Apparently, these are the words Barbie sings to Ken in a commercial and YouTube video well-known to the Barbie-buying demographic. Whether Jane Comfort, the choreographer of “Beauty,” which had its premier at Jacob’s Pillow last week, knew those words or not, she certainly understood the power of Barbie and the other images of female beauty that control and torment women, and used them effectively, if didactically, in “Beauty.” Comfort weaves together word and song, and the dancers, who participated in the creation of the piece, tell of their own evolving relationship with beauty — being a tomboy, eschewing makeup, dyeing their hair blonde. The four dancers endure aerobics class, a lesson in walking like a beauty queen (“let’s see your vacant stare!”) and, for extended periods, walking like Barbie on stiff relevé, with thumbs extended (one Barbie, explaining why she’s the best, says that her thumb is always at the perfect angle to her fingers.) When Barbie finally gets it on with Ken, it’s an awkward proposition: When your back doesn’t bend, and your arms are frozen in a 90-degree position, intimacy has its challenges. The soundtrack here, of giggles and apologies, is hilarious. Throughout the hour-long piece, a fifth woman, Lisa Niedermeyer, sits at a dressing table, beautifying herself with a detached ferocity. Cleansing her pores, plucking, moisturizing, concealing, shaping — every beauty-aisle verb is engaged in her ritual. If the lesson is obvious, it’s no less true, and I was struck by how little has changed from generation to generation. The women to my right in the audience were a generation older than I, and nodded in recognition when a 20-something dancer said, about her upbringing, that, “My mother had a saying that she used whenever I got too loud: “Don’t be ugly.” My companion was transfixed by the image projected on a screen of a Photoshop transformation: a photo of dancer Leslie Cuyjet, an African-American woman, who was slimmed, stretched, lightened and carved until the magazine art director (Sean Donovan, who played multiple roles) declared that she was, at last, “sexy.” When audience members were asked to vote for the most beautiful Barbie, I froze: What to do? Pick one? Write “I will not participate in this patriarchal ritual?” In the end, I voted for Lucie Baker, who had, I thought, endured the greatest humiliation: standing in bra and panties while Donovan, as a plastic surgeon, drew black triangles over her breasts, thighs, bottom and belly to indicate where procedures might eliminate “problem areas.” (See how easily such phrases roll off the tongue, as though having thighs was a problem?) Less obvious and more hauntingly beautiful, the second piece on the program, “Underground River,” showed the inner life of a girl in a coma. Four dancers played, sang, (the songs, by turns lovely and discordant, were by Toshi Reagon) and manipulated a puppet made of rags, while on the soundtrack, worried parents and a kind but no-nonsense doctor begged the child to blink or squeeze a hand. The recurring theme was birds — bird song, flash cards that turned to flapping birds, and a little rag puppet, flying away — all in counterpoint to the unseen child, whose body lies motionless while her mind flies free. Comfort’s choreography isn’t highly technical — simple phrases may be repeated with variations, and the simplicity was echoed by the white nightdresses and bare stage. It was a lovely piece, and though the birds flew away, the images remained. For tickets and information on programs at Jacob’s Pillow in Becket, MA, call 413-243-0745 or go to www.jacobspillow.org.