La MaMa, New York, NY.
October 25, 2025.
Drop Dead…Gorgeous, the multi-media dance-theater production from Tamar Rogoff, takes the audience on a trip through a deranged TV show as it offers women (presumably men, too, although there were no male contestants) the opportunities to change anything they want about their body. There is a great absurdity to the premise that someone could and would switch out the legs they have for a new set or purchase back the 40 previous years to be youthful again – except there isn’t. The notion of body augmentation is as old as humanity itself, but at some point in history, we’ve gone off the rails in how we think about the body we inhibit and some seek extraordinary measures to find an inner peace via outward appearance. Perhaps sometimes it works? Spoiler alert: in this show, it does not.
It’s a show within a show. We are the studio audience, sort of. But we also see behind the scenes. We watch as the contestants compete for fantastical perfection: first, they try to oust each other in a thrilling round of freeze dance and then they perform their special talents…the latter reveals deep artistic reverence, the value of which is dismissed when pit against the atrocities of bodily imperfection.
A great deal of symbolism permeates the production, keeping the audience on our toes: the host displayed his extreme height via stilts, towering over the women, perhaps a representation of the patriarchal overloads who demand and determine the worth of women; there is also the apathy of the stagehand to the whole torrid affair, perhaps representing the apathy of the general population to how women are treated; and finally, the shared meal between the three female contestants once they join together and resist the vapid advances of consumerism and beauty at all costs – a meal symbolizing true nourishment and care.
Eventually, the women decide they hold value as they are, and come together as a trio in peace. The last part of the show transitions into a calm dance with the three women, a salve from the unequivocal madness of the story. After the short, punchy scenes from the rest of the show, however, the dance at the end felt a bit long and took away from the strong points made throughout the piece – although it resolved the jarring and uncomfortable aspects of the story in a pleasant way. The relationships we have with our bodies are complex recipes filled with the ingredients from our past, of our dreams, but rarely from our sense of oneness with our spirit. Drop Dead…Gorgeous asks us to unite our physical forms with the inherent purity of our souls, and to remember that kindness to ourselves is always the winning prize.
By Emily Sarkissian of Dance Informa.
