The Great Mother may be
loving and wise, but there are plenty of kick-ass goddesses in global
mythology—and in "Eternally Bad," San Diego Ballet's camp, rowdy, and
sometimes annoying takeoff on mythology's bad girls that debuted last weekend
at the San Diego Museum of Art's Copley Auditorium. So packed with stimuli it
was like diving into a teenager's brain, the show featured four lively
narrators reading excerpts from Eternally Bad: Goddesses with Attitude
by feminist comic book artist Trina Robbins, while slides of multiple
generations of Hollywood deities (Jane Russell, Charlie's Angels, Brad Pitt)
flashed on a central screen, surrounded on the busy stage by some 20 cartoon
goddesses painted by students at Chula Vista High School of Creative and
Performing Arts. The terrifically fey score opened with the Singing Nun's 1963
hit, "Dominique" and peaked when one of the narrators, Devlin, belted out "Wild
Women Don't Get the Blues." Along the way, it passed such vintage milestones as
(groan) "Sukiyaki" and "Pipeline."Speaking of the Singing Nun... But I'm forgetting, this is a dance review. Not that it's easy to remember, since the dancers often just mimed the story the narrators were reading, with a lot of strutting, vamping, and hip wiggling, for instance when Hawaaian goddess Pele (Rachel Sebastian) competed with a rival for god Paoa (Pali Udvarheli). Even when the dancers got to break out a little, the choreography didn't demand much beyond a few attitudes and extensions (all in ballet slippers rather than on pointe); it came as a shock when Gabriela Ley as the Aztec goddess Coatlique actually did some nice fouettés. On the other hand, SD Ballet creative director Javier Velasco—who multitasked, doing the script (from Robbins' book), choreography, sound score, and slides—clearly was going for total impact here.
With cheerful bad taste, the stories run to flatulence, lethal snot, severed body parts (yes, that body part), and a celestial striptease (Noriko Maruzoe as Japanese goddess Uzume). The Finnish Osmotar invents beer by inserting various objects "down there," a tale mimed with strong angular gestures by guest artist Andrea Feier. Feier, a Paul Taylor alumna, gave one of the more memorable performances, as did classical Indian dancer Uma Suresh, her feet slapping the floor as the Indian goddess Kannaki. And narrator Dana Hooley stepped out from her lectern to play a snarling Native American Grizzly Woman, eliminating her female competition by devouring them. Feier and Suresh, with their earth-driven modern and Indian dance backgrounds respectively, and Hooley with a powerful, thick physique, made far more credible goddesses than the young, whisper-thin SD Ballet dancers, though that may be because the choreography gave their fluttering eyelashes more work than their feet.
Narrative dominated the production, which was a problem not only because of the lack of balance. Most of the stories went on too long, and despite the verve of narrators Devlin, Hooley, Ka'imi Kuoha, and Steve Gunderson, Velasco's direction had them yelling most of their lines, sometimes over-miked to a shriek. And forget political correctness, what's the aesthetic rationale for a broken-English version of Japanese or a pseudo-Indian accent? Still, no one could accuse Velasco of lacking a sense of fun, and the enthusiastic audience response on Sunday suggested that "Eternally Bad" might be just the kind of silliness people need in these troubled times.