Pink Hair Affair's "Take It Off!'

Pink Hair Affair's Take It Off! purports to blend burlesque and modern dance, although its pieces rarely achieve a mix of either. Instead, with few exceptions, director Laura Jenkins fashioned what might best be described as a burlesque show as imagined by someone who'd never been to one.

The most egregious example occurs in Kaleigh Jones's "Sensual," where she and Danielle McGilligan donned pink corsets and leotards to dance around, astride or atop a white cube. Sometimes in sync, they gyrated their hips or outstretched an arm before strutting quickly toward the audience and elaborating on these prior movements. No bawdy stripping, no mocking humor, and nothing I haven't seen better executed in any Beyoncé music video.

Nevertheless, the evening offered a promising beginning in "Satisfaction," in which the ensemble's seven dancers sported their signature pink wigs and entered in a line like pneumatic robots. Their vapid expressions betrayed the sultriness of the mood, one both enhanced and broken by their stone-faced lip-synching of Ben Benassi's electronic lyrics.

Erotic electronics

Satisfaction dovetailed nicely into Ashley Wood's "Oh Cum On," where three dancers, dressed in layers of frilly granny panties, ill-fitting bras and stockings, played on the floor with Play Station controllers and electric toothbrushes. They awkwardly stripped out of these layers— as if to poke fun at our expectations— and drank PBR beer while rubbing these devices on themselves and one another like vibrators, a laughingly erotic fetishization of consumer electronics.

A short interlude later, Jenkins and Lauren Mathis reappeared in "Unchained Shadows," their negligees and thigh-high nylons enrobed inside trench coats. Behind backlit floor-to-ceiling paper banners, we watched their silhouettes disrobe one arm-length glove or stocking at a time, while in between each discarded covering, they would reappear briefly to level the audience with a glance. Despite Mathis's stolid expression, the piece crackled and snapped like an erotic live wire, and at least peered into the evening's potential spirit.

Writhing in mud

But just when I started getting into the evening's mood, Jenkins destroyed it by inserting a crudely enacted dance-video piece featuring Rachel Slater (a Pink Hair member who now lives on the West Coast) and set to the grunge band Nirvana. This series of uninventive close-ups and cutaways forced us to watch Slater cry, dance and writhe in the rain-soaked mud.

This unfortunate visual intrusion blindsided Annie Wilson's "Lovertits," the evening's only piece to skillfully blend the sensibilities of both modern dance and burlesque. Here three dancers wriggled out on their backs, pinned to the ground by overstuffed chests. Moving in a staggered line, they poked fun at Jane Fonda exercise videos before stripping off their tops to reveal sacks filled with mashed potatoes, gravy and creamed vegetables.

Christina Gesualdi provided virtually all of the evening's laughs as she struggled to stand up (slipping on the gravy?), while Christine Steigerwald and Ashley Wood emptied the contents of their chests to accompany a steaming steak brought out by an aproned Wilson— a raucously mocking lampoon of what happens when a woman serves herself up as a dish.

Swimming on bicycles

The evening never achieved a similar sensibility. Jenkins's "Slow Ride," a sort of synchronized swimming on bicycles, merely felt cute and underdeveloped. In "My Box," Jenkins popped out of the aforementioned cube to dance around in a pink bra and panties. She was surely watchable, but how this piece embodied burlesque or modern dance any more than a woman bursting out of a cake at a bachelor party is beyond me.

Between each work, Wilson told jokes or recited limericks and sex facts, but her poorly rehearsed emceeing only mirrored the sometimes-shoddy execution of the dances themselves.

In assembling this program, did the Pink Hair women hope to present their friends and families with a somewhat enjoyable, albeit disjointed evening of catcalls, booze, and mild laughs? In that case, mission accomplished. But what did the night mean for them artistically?