The Pittsburgh Tatler: If you are familiar with Beth Corning’s sensibility, then you probably don’t need to be told that the title to this piece is ironic; irony is, after all, her stock in trade. The subject of Happily Ever After is the nightmare inside the fairytale of heteronormative romance – namely, the gender roles and expectations that shore up and enable cycles of domestic violence. The dynamic of abuse, and the way that cultural definitions of gender and gender roles help establish the psychological patterns of both abusers and victims, is investigated here through roughly a dozen evocative dance vignettes.
2 comments:
I’m so sad that this closed yesterday and I didn’t get to see it. It isn’t a huge part of my practice anymore, but I fell in love with storytelling through the lense of classic fairytales and much of my earliest work was retellings of these stories as I shifted perspective, mashed plots together, or twisted the classical morals and lessons of the stories. Of course, it's a stretch to call this “work” as it's the writing of a middle schooler. Anyway, this dance piece sounds like it would fascinate me, and I would love to reach out to the dramaturg if they had one or else the director, I think they came up with a very interesting lens to frame this piece as fairytales notoriously wrong and remove the agency from female characters or portray them as evil for having goals. I hope this company does more work like this that I can check out in the future.
One of my professors recently suggested that we think about how materiality can inspire the narrative in a work, and this really reminds me of that. The principle of clothing and how we present ourselves to the world is at the heart of this piece, and serves as a meaningful and often visceral metaphor. The show itself seems to have been truly moving, I regret not knowing about it or attending. I have learned recently that it is sometimes very difficult to portray such dark themes of violence and abuse without it being graphic and gruesome. There are a large amount of emotional triggers that may be present, but by reframing this and moving it to a medium that is a bit more abstracted, it becomes more emotionally digestible. To me, it also engages the audience better, because they have to contribute more personal thought to achieve an accurate understanding of the meaning.
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