Girl Girls Girls is packed with balloons, frilly knickers and the perks and pitfalls of being a girl. Everything from PMS to plastic surgery and even millennial dietary requirements are poked fun at in this half dance/ half theatre performance satire piece.

As a girl who has spent many years perfecting my signature pout, hip pop, head tilt pose, there was a lot for me to relate to. And you know what, the truth [or how it is portrayed in Girls Girls Girls] is funny … but also quite confronting and cringe inducing … is that really how I look taking a photo???

The seven “girls”, both as dancers and performers, are engaging and entertaining. They do well to flick between the movement and spoken word acting. Although some words without the microphone are hard to hear both in volume and pace (not helped by the fact one of them was blessed to be wearing a horse head mask thanks to an audience member – there is some audience participation).

I particularly enjoy how each new theme of the performance is introduced with a gimmick by a solo performer be it a girl crying stuffing her face with chocolate or a plastic surgery addict picking her balloon breast size. These are then expanded as a group with more fully realised choreography.  

Helping the girls through the performance is the blonde bombshell MC Scott. He does his job to kill time between costume changes adequately, however, I wish the soundscape had continued throughout these moments to keep up the energy levels. There was also a lack of atmosphere during the beauty pageant scene; I couldn’t help but feel a touch of music would have elevated the good work happening on stage. 

The final dance sequence was the standout and ended the show with a bang.  

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Dance is a beautiful medium that can do a lot of the things theatre can’t; and vice versa. GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS from Bonnie Curtis Projects feels like an awkward marriage of theatre and dance that leaves me disappointed.  

The show starts off strong with the six dancers in individual spotlights on stage in typical mannequin poses. The audience are encouraged to dress the dancers on top of their long-sleeved, cropped white tops, purple skirt, and over-the-knee white stockings held up with garters: a sort of school-girl-on-mufti-day look.

As the show begins, they each say a line such as “avoid a low angle”, “stare off into the distance as if you’re looking for your prince charming,” and “stick your chin out and down.” Soon I realise this is advice for beginner models, an industry I personally know nothing about and would have liked to see more explored.

GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS is primarily a series of dances with intermittent smatterings of theatre which feels too on-the-nose to be seen as effectively driving home a message. One such moment is when a dancer melodramatically cries, pausing to ask, “What? Have you never seen a girl cry before?” and then eventually walks off stage into the audience.  

The dancers are clearly talented but their moves are repetitive, limited and quite standard. I see no amazing feats of the body or dance moves I want to steal for the party on Saturday. I hope that the too loud music that often peaks is an opening night tech issue not to be repeated for future unsuspecting audience members.

Each dance has a particular message, about desire, marriage, predatory behaviour, children, body image, and just as I am about to perhaps grasp what the show wants to comment on, it is over. These ephemeral moments make it feel as though the show is afraid to get into the deeper messages it is trying to convey.

The energy is completely lost at the ‘pageant’ sequence, which leans more on the theatre side of this theatre-dance show, and, to be frank, is a cop-out way of dealing with women’s beauty standards. The MC host, a man in a Marilyn Monroe-style wig and red lipstick, has no stage presence nor charisma, to the point where the dancers can’t even bounce off him for their answers. Having a man half-dressed as a woman also detracts from the show’s core message, bringing questions of gender in general rather than focusing on the gender of women. Comments by him and the choreographer after the show imply they see marriage equality and gender as flippant, insincere and a joke.

There have been many feminist shows about woman-ness and how (quite frankly) f***ed up the world is, particularly in regards to women’s ‘number one best asset’ being her appearance, ranging from her face, her body, even down to her smell: “A woman who does not wear perfume has no future.”

Because these are stories that have been brought to light again and again in recent years, it’s important to bring a fresh perspective to the world. GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS tries to be satirical but lacks depth to do so. It presents stereotypical, superficial, cliché elements of femininity, standard and limiting dance moves, and does not let the audience sit in any particular moment for long enough for us to develop any kind of life-changing thoughts. 

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