Philly Fringe 2018: PINK HAIR AFFAIR presents Laura Jenkins’s ‘Heartbreak of a Serial Monogamist'

Choreographer and co-founder of PINK HAIR AFFAIR (PHA), a “collaborative dance company” launched in 2007 by eight UArts grads, Jenkins is a former Eagles cheerleader and Brian Sanders’ JUNK alum, among many other projects. She stars in Heartbreak, PHA’s dance-performance/interactive-art-installation mashup, along with ensemble members Kelly Trevlyn, Elise Mele, and Noel Sarachilli.

Journaling and selfies

The audience enters the white studio space at the Whole Shebang, a small upstairs venue tucked away near 11th Street in East Passyunk, with a range of displays and interactive prompts to choose from. You can write an “affirmation” on a large mirror with lipstick, play with a tarot deck, write your favorite inspirational quote in a shared journal, or add your own doodle to a collaborative painting. Instagramming is encouraged.

Other artworks on display include a 36 x 36-inch canvas of no less than 64 miniature pictures of Jenkins in various modes of distress and sultry looks, titled Selfies of Despair. My favorite is another large, square canvas covered with artfully overlapping pages of Jenkins’s own journal entries from 2012 to the present. There are self-help books, candles, color guides, and The Crystal Bible.

Dancing it out

The lights come up and down throughout the hourlong performance. The ensemble enters and exits for four different dance routines, leaving the audience to wander or sit around the perimeter of the room chatting, looking at their phones, or perusing the Fringe catalog. The starting, stopping, and waiting doesn’t give the performance an effective flow, but then again, dealing with grief or a breakup is hardly a linear process. When you’re in it, you just have to sit with whatever comes, on its own time. And the well-detailed art installations, along with the seltzer and beer provided, help create a comfortable, hospitable hum between performances.

The dancers showcase a range of emotions, with tunes from Lily Allen to Max Richter. Things start when Jenkins busts in to kick down a small pyramid of yoga bricks labeled “me,” “love,” “you,” “babies,” “home,” and “marriage.” Engaging dance routines (including hip-hop, yoga, and languid contemporary stylings) chart familiar stages of spurned love: writhing prostrations, sassy anger, sobbing at the mirror (lots of sobbing), and healing sisterhood.

With matching blonde tresses, the ensemble starts out mirroring Jenkins herself, but then two of them appear with their own darker hair for the last routine. When I asked her afterwards, Jenkins explained that this change symbolizes individuality within solidarity among those experiencing heartbreak or grief — but with matching costumes and unified choreography for each segment, a change in hair color doesn't quite carry the message.

There’s more to heartbreak than this show implies — not everyone copes via journaling, yoga, crystals, lipstick affirmations, Brené Brown, and hair-flipping (lots of hair-flipping). But it might be hard to incorporate furiously unanswered texts, social-media blocking, lonely resentful dinners of cold cereal, and ill-advised but not necessarily detrimental hookups into accessible choreography. With an ambitious but well-scaled combination of installations, art-making, and dance, Jenkins has created a worthwhile Fringe experience.