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Musee des Femmes
An out-of-the-box re-imagining of history’s most legendary ladies
Cassandra Siegler as the Snow Queen in a scene from Musee des Femmes (Photo: Dan Gordon-Levitt)
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Archetypal tales of women are thrown around casually in our culture—someone could be called a Jezebel, Medusa or Joan of Arc—but the histories and stories surrounding them are often conflated or hyperbolized to an unrecognizable state. Djahari Clark and her ensemble of dancers, who formed the company Desert Sin in 1999, recreated some of these well-known and long-forgotten stories with Musee des Femmes—Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.
Set up as a sideshow of boxes with a different notorious woman in each, the production blends the company’s groundbreaking Middle Eastern choreography with dramatic retellings. “Originally, every piece was completely made up inside my head,” says Clark. “There were no ‘known’ characters such as St. Joan.” In two performances at the Zipper Factory, Desert Sin performs an abbreviated one-act version of its show featuring the characters Mata Hari, the Snow Queen, the Red Shoes, Kali, the Little Mermaid and St. Joan held together by a central emcee. “I realized the necessity of having a character that carried through the whole show,” says Clark. “Someone who could present these women to the audience.” The role of Ringmaster was born, played by Mee Ae.
Each of the characters is persecuted or punished in some way for their strong ideals and individuality. The Snow Queen, the Red Shoes and the Little Mermaid are adapted from the Hans Christian Andersen tales, while Mata Hari, Kali and St. Joan take their cues from history and religion. And in each case Desert Sin’s dancers exonerate the characters rather than simply replaying each woman’s brutal fate.
The Snow Queen (Cassandra Siegler) is shown sympathy as a tragic event from her past unfolds, while the story of the Red Shoes ends with the young dancer, played by Clark, allowed to find the inner strength to stop her sentence of dancing to death.
And of course these women aren’t any tamer in the afterlife. St. Joan appears, following her date with the flaming stake, and she’s filled with rage and doubt about everything she sacrificed for God. Clark takes the 19-year-old “heretic” through this range of emotions, finally reaching a peace at the end of the performance. This is the overreaching theme of the entire show: women learning to accept their true selves rather than seeing themselves through a lens created by society.