*** Lists of Promise

This high-flying dance piece captures millennia of iffy feminist progress

Rebecca Magazin, Elisabeth Foster, Lisa Giobbi, and corps. Photo: Judith Sipos

As the Far Right threatens to send women’s rights back to the Dark Ages and beyond, it’s fascinating — and sobering — to see how far we’ve come: Clearly, not far enough.

Co-creators Ildiko Nemeth (director) and Lisa Giobbi (choreographer) found inspiration for this performance piece in Merlin Stone’s influential 1976 study When God Was a Woman, which examined “the Sacred Feminine” throughout human history. Idolized, then denigrated, women have long served as a force of change as well as a target for male envy and rage.

After a prelude featuring a lineup of live caryatids (some a bit restless), the script riffles through a grab bag of sources. A narrator (Sarah Lemp, on rollerskates and sporting gold shorts and a white fannypack) reads a giant storybook — the Bible — to a bevy of rapt listeners, as two aerialists (Giobbi and Jacob McKee) portray clever, impetuous Eve and dull, incurious Adam.

Each member of the international corps has a monologue she’s eager to deliver. In the background, hovering above the speakers, are three suspended women (Rebecca Magazin, Elisabeth Foster, and Giobbi) sporting ruffs; their hips are saddled with cage-panniers — bustle-bumpers, in essence. Rapid-fire, they rattle off etiquette pointers for proper ladies.

The amalgam is a visual/verbal potpourri and a feminist feast. Afterwards, emerging from the half-century-old renegade theatre (growing more battered by the year), you might easily imagine yourself thrust into the East Village of old, when the second wave of feminism was roaring. The movement is eminently due for a revival, and productions like this one can help to fire up the next generation.

At Theater for the New City, to March 29