Barbenheimer and the Dancer
Not every dancer can claim a Barbenheimer in their career…
It’s the ultimate summer portmanteau and the trendy juxtaposition activity this summer of 2023 — combining the lightness and the darkness of the Barbie and Oppenheimer movies by either seeing them as a double-feature or by somehow combining the two experiences. After seeing Oppenheimer, I realized it was time to come clean about my dance Barbenheimer that was years in the making.
Inspired (and disgusted) by the talking Barbie who declared that “math is hard” in the mid-1990s, I created a dance that commented both on the ridiculousness of the competitive female drive to emulate Barbie and the notion that a pink-clad doll could discourage girls from pursuing STEM. The result was a humorous group piece, The Mattel Trilogy, with dancers racing to the hot pink finish line, where they would transform into Barbie clones and physically demonstrate the extreme limitations of her plastic body. Further transmogrifying into twisted Barbie personalities — Horny Barbie, Stalker Barbie, and Puking Barbie — they would either destroy each other or self-destruct and slough off their pink Barbie-ness to be literally swept away by one of the theatre techs working the show — which always got a separate laugh. Once the stage was completely clean and the dancers released from their plastic prisons, there was rejoicing in all three dimensions.
So how does this tie in with Oppenheimer, or Barbenheimer, for that matter?
Well, about 10+ years later, I had a thrilling conversation with academic Alex Wellerstein, author of Restricted Data — The Nuclear Secrecy Blog and creator of the popular and frightening NUKEMAP, when he was still a graduate student at Harvard. It seems he came across an odd photo of a dancer in pointe shoes posing with a mushroom cloud as if it were a hand fan and he hoped I could either identify her or help to make sense of the photo. I gave him my professional opinion about her training, based on what I saw in the still photo, and mused at how it was possible that these two fields could overlap.
In 2012, I was pleased to learn that Alex blogged about our exchange in his post “The Dixie Showgirl (1953)”, and honored to be included in the larger conversation connecting the dancer in the photo to nearby nuclear testing. His initial post inspired me (and others, as it turns out) to conduct more research, and Alex came up with some fascinating conclusions based on our efforts. It was a fun and frantic few days and we all loved reading his humorous updates. If you want to know more about the “Dixie Showgirl” and view for yourself the photo that inspired our conversation, click on the link at the top of this paragraph.
Next I need to see the Barbie movie so my Barbenheimer experience can be complete. Meanwhile, I’m going to the mall with Skipper and Ken.
Check out the Human Kinetics publication Dance Appreciation, by Dawn Davis Loring and co-authored by Julie L. Pentz, also available from Amazon and other booksellers, and go see what dancer shares your birthday at the Today in Dance project: www.dawndavisloring.com/todayindance.
You can also tune in to the Today in Dance podcast and learn more about exciting dance services, meet creative artists working today, and listen to some of my favorite articles.
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Photo by Sandra Gabriel on Unsplash
