Girls Gone Wild Review by Phaedra Brown

Set in the “Just Let It Go Anger Management Wellness Retreat for Angry Women”, this work from dance-theatre company Bonnie Curtis Projects explores female rage, toxic positivity, and the design of palatable women through patriarchal oppression. The uncanny day-spa setting alludes to the toxicity of the wellness industry with its perverse product placement and the vague threat of never being “well” enough.

We meet the five retreat guests: “Insecure Girl” played by Hannah Mourin, “Control Freak Girl” played by Tina Moss, “Toxic Positivity Girl” played by Bella Lopes de Oliveira, “Hysterical Girl” played by Sara Moad and “Passive Aggressive Girl” played by Steph Wyburn. The performers each had the utmost commitment to their role and it was great watching them play with the absurdity of the characters.

We also meet the retreat leader, played by choreographer Bonnie Curtis, who appears first as an Orwellian presence, projected above the stage, leading the guests through breathing exercises and placating their anger.

She also introduces the women to some of the products available to help relieve them of their hysteria. For example the “Silencing Helmet” to muffle the screams of any temper tantrum, or “Positivi-tea” to dismantle those pesky negative thoughts.

This faux product placement is clever as it draws our attention to the danger of pursuing wellness to fix all our problems. These products are used throughout the work to highlight and fix the supposed shortcomings of each woman. However, we come to find that their apparent un-wellness has nothing to do with personal failings, but rather is the product of wider societal issues, and so cannot be fixed with any detox tea. The products are witty, absurd, and capture the threat of becoming a ‘good girl’ in a humorous way.

However, the storyline that was so well set up at the start of the work begins to be overpowered by a reliance on props and costuming to create poignant imagery. We see one woman try to dance a sweet, balletic solo while getting weighed down by literal baggage, another gets tangled up in pots and pans, wrapped in a web of domesticity. Toward the end of the work the women change from their prison-like grey jumpsuits into red and pink formal dresses, a conspicuous metaphor for the moment they take back their feminine power.

The movement throughout the work stems mostly from gestural phrases. In some moments, actions corresponded directly to the instructions of the Retreat Leader: “In-hale, self-control, exhale, prettier” each word becoming a gesture and thus building into a repeating phrase. Other times these gestural repetitions are fractured to create patterns or enlarged to move the dancers through the space.

In the later stages of the work the women re-emerge with fingers splayed like claws, hunched over like animals. They whip their hair around and stalk the space. Collapsing, silently screaming, dragging themselves across the floor. A punk song begins and they scream and trash the set. This release was the work’s moment to really pack a punch. Finally the women had broken away from the retreat leader’s grasp. However, the choreography returns to order almost as soon as it is dismantled.

The beauty of dance theatre is that movement can do so much heavy lifting to carry the emotional journey of a work, without having to spell it out through text or literal narrative. However, shows like Girls Gone Wild, that do the difficult job of setting up a narrative alongside a movement language, run the risk that the movement will become overly symbolic, and lose relevance to what the characters, and audience, are meant to be feeling.

In the case of this work, that set up such a strong narrative and character-driven premise, much of the movement became purely representational of these women’s repression, fear, or anger and I was left without a sense of the actual journey that the characters moved through. There were certainly flashes of palpability, but I would have loved to see the work tap further into a visceral portrayal of the women’s’ journey. What was the emotional or somatic transformation that took place to allow them, in the end, to fight back?

The exploration into the wellness industry as a site for patriarchal control is an important and timely one. While these ‘Girls Gone Wild’ weren’t as totally wild as I had yearned to see, Curtis and all of the performers did an excellent job of amplifying the increasingly absurd ways in which we ask women to be less angry on a daily basis.

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Phaedra Brown attended GIRLS GONE WILD at PACT on Wednesday 23 September.