McLane writes: “The ladies performing were Indian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese rather than “mostly Caucasian”, and the company is most certainly not comprised of my students. Rather, they are performers with extensive professional performance background coming from ballet, modern, and Georgian dance companies, and we perform regularly for corporate, embassy, and special events. I am loath to categorize these women as students performing in a recital (ouch). Finally, the majority of the choreography is a far cry from “belly dance”, but rather a fuller fusion of many dance forms.”

I stand by my initial assessment that it looked like a recital (though not a bad one: In my review I wrote, “the costumes are exquisite, the performers are elegant and seductive, and the dancing is very, very good.”) I also stand by my criticism that it lacked a compelling narrative or sense of plot, to which McLane also responded in her comment.

Dancing to Ancient Rhythms

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 25 @ 2:30 p.m.

They say: “Visually stunning vignettes of the sacred and profane, the transcendent and mundane. Theatrical dance inspired by the wisdom of the East in a captivating first Fringe Festival performance by the critically acclaimed Ancient Rhythms Dance Company.”

Mike says: Before I rip into this show as a terrible, terrible fit for Fringe, let me just say that the costumes are exquisite, the performers are elegant and seductive, and the dancing is very, very good. Despite all that, this show is the worst Fringe has to offer.

Why? Because Dancing to Ancient Rhythms is an hour of belly dances performed by students of the Ancient Rhythms Dance Company, some of whom are still in high school. In other words, it’s a dance recital. On top of that, it’s located in the Apothecary, which is poorly insulated for temperature and sound—the latter so much so that last night’s dance routines were frequently interrupted by what sounded like a much more interesting show next door.

The dances, though well executed on the individual level, didn’t tell a story. (A narrator introduced each dance with a sentence or two about priestesses, the cosmos, purity, etc. This hardly counts as storytelling.) In fact, the only thing each number communicated is just how popular belly dancing is with suburban teenage girls. Ergo, the show falls flat even from a theatrical perspective.

See it if: You don’t mind sitting on musty church pews in a stifling hot building while a line of young, mostly white women stand in a line and belly dance while making Xena noises.

Skip it if: You do mind the above, or have medium-to-high standards for interpretative dance performances.

Bare Breasted Women Sword Fighting

Remaining Performances:
Jul 17th at 10:30 p.m.
Jul 18th at 10:30 p.m.
Jul 19th at 8 p.m.
Jul 22nd at 8 p.m.
Jul 23rd at 8 p.m.
Jul 24th at 10:30 p.m.
Jul 25th at 10:30 p.m.
Jul 26th at 6 p.m.

They say: “A scintillating spectacular, this vaudeville unleashes the feminine mystique in a whirl of petticoats and a dazzling display of strength, swords, and skin. Behold brutal buxom beauties! Take in tantalizing ta-ta titans! Look-don’t touch-the titillating, tangoing Bare Breasted Women.”

Mike says: I stayed up past my bedtime last night,  pondering what Dog & Pony DC’s cabaret-cum-cotton-candied-snuff show owes Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. The production felt like a visual and textual celebration of negative female stereotypes: The tough warrior princess vs. the over-sexed, daddy-issue-riddled damsel in distress; the “Amazing Rubber Woman” who can bounce back from (see: rationalize and forgive) countless acts of domestic violence; androgynous and uncivilized Amazons who battle for their mistress’ pleasure while hunched over and smeared with chocolate syrup; the beautiful but modestly dressed mute helpers who close the show by playing strip Tango with rapiers instead of playing cards.

After much thought, I’ve decided the show isn’t some fucked reading of Friedan’s second-wave feminism. Rather, the allusion in the show description is a signal to paranoid, guilty men like myself that everything is not as it seems. That the entire production, while claiming and appearing to appeal to US, is actually a subtle criticism of our piggery. Hell, maybe it was the drugs that kept me from getting off while the damsel in distress dry-humped the warrior princess’ leg. The other men in the audience sure seemed to like it, and looked like goddamn professional leerers from where I was sitting. Or maybe I was reacting to the show’s clairvoyant capacity for depicting an amalgamation of what straight men really want from the opposite sex: Magical women who are both whores and virgins; big butch gals with dangerous-looking anatomy and perfectly-proportioned daisies; women programmed to entertain our fantasies, forgive us our every sin, and play mommy when necessary.

In short, the play runs circles around what men want, what women are, and what men are if they really want women as the show presents them.

See it if: You aren’t afraid of your own demons (men)/like comedy, breasts, or French accents (women).
Skip it if: You talk to your mother once a day or more (men)/have a significant other with a drooling problem (women).

Headscarf and the Angry Bitch by Zehra Fazal

Remaining Performances:
Jul 17th at 8:30 p.m.
Jul 18th at 3:30 p.m.

They say: “Join Zed Headscarf on a tongue-in-cheek romp through faith and growing up Muslim in America. Featuring hits like ‘The Only Thing I’ll Do Five Times a Day is You’ and ‘I Lost My Virginity During Ramadan.’ This beef ain’t halal!”

Mike’s take: The future of American-Islamic relations could hinge on this one-woman show. Before Muslim folk-rocker Zed Headscarf (Zehra Fazal) got involved, America’s most memorable depictions of Islam were a.) Lil Kim sporting a hijab and not much else on the cover of One World and b.) that episode of Southpark wherein the boys travel to Afghanistan to return a mail-order goat to its starving family. (And to kill Osama bin Laden, who, in the words of Cartman, “has a small penis.”) No wonder those pious clerics up and declared America’s objectification of women and obsession with dick jokes as deserving of–dare I say it?–jihad! Zed Headscarf, infidel-licking lesbian though she be, really could change all that.

After strummbling through a spotlit ballad about the displeasures of navigating airport security in Muslim garb, Headscarf introduces herself to her fake/real audience as the new employee of a generic-sounding Islamic cultural group whose job it is to talk up the Good Kitab on a tri-county lecture circuit (her first!). Lesson no. 1 is that Fazal, who disappears offstage after her introduction and returns with a dusty Koran that she blows off to nervous laughter, has no intentions of skirting the controversy that defined her 2007 show, My Friend Hitler.

Lesson no. 2 introduces the tension that Fazal whips out whenever Headscarf’s Inside Islam jokes fall flat: Haraam vs. Halal, the bizarre dichotomy that continues to frame the experiences of so many Muslim-American women.

Headscarf defines haraam as something bad, sinful, or unclean, and contextualizes it thusly: “Dude, it wasn’t kosher when you gave my mom a rimjob–that was haraam.” She defines halal as something appropriate, or prepared in accordance with Islamic law, though in all fairness, it’s really just a catch-all for the fun things that would make a jihadist happy if only he could get his mind–and mouth–around a fuzzy navel. (The use-it-in-a-sentence example for halal is much better when Headscarf says it.)

The show is broken up into lectures, at the end of which Headscarf invites her audience to return to the next lecture, and the stage goes dark. When the lights come up seconds later, Headscarf has the look of well, a Muslim woman who has just been scolded by her imam for talking about how much she loves eating pussy. The pattern of apology, diversion, song, and escalation to obscenity provides an easy and enjoyable sense of structure. Due to the close quarters of the Warehouse and my propensity for sweating, however, I can say that 55 minutes may have been 10 minutes too long for me. It’s tight in there, after all, and an hour is just long enough to recognize, applaud, and then tire of Fazal’s affinity for repetition.

Fans of dramatic one-person shows be warned: Headscarf and the Angry Bitch borrows liberally from narrative standup comedy, and much less so from, uh, people who do really serious one-person plays–almost to the point that I forgot I was watching theatre. If she could only trim some of the dead weight from her script and learn how to play that acoustic guitar that she’s always wailing on, Fazal and her show–dark and stormy social commentary included–wouldn’t be out of place on Comedy Central. Like Maria Bamford without the pugs or Zach Galifianakis without the leotard.

See it if: You want to hear someone sing about Pakistani papas bemoaning their daughter’s sexual orientation to the tune of Smooth Criminal.

Skip it if: You are a terrorist.