Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes takes us beyond the showgirl’s feathers and frills
- Written by: Will Visconti, Teacher and Researcher, Art History, University of Sydney
While Taylor Swift has been breaking records with the release of her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, a more compelling heir to the showgirl tradition offers audiences a glimpse into the world behind the feathers and frills.
Directed by Kate Champion, Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes is her latest interpretation of a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale, following The Little Match Girl (2012) and The Little Mermaid (2016). Here she asks what happens with the passage of time to women who are, in Meow Meow’s words, “wrong, forgotten, gone astray”.
For the opening number, Meow Meow has to be dragged into the spotlight in dishevelled undergarments. She is propped up until she can rouse herself.
She soon dons a dress and matching feathered headdress. In true showgirl style, Meow Meow has multiple costume changes (designed by Dann Barber). Or, rather, there are additions and subtractions, with outfits layered as her quest for the perfect red shoes continues and then reaches its tragic conclusion.
Vegas-style plumed headgear is complemented by moments of kleptomania as bags or scarves are taken from audience members. It’s a necessary redistribution of wealth, she reasons, as she loads herself up with items that catch her eye.
Dancing the red shoes
In Hans Christian Andersen’s original 1845 story, an orphan named Karen is adopted and given a pair of red shoes which she refuses to replace with a more sombre pair to wear to church. She is then cursed to never stop dancing. Her feet continue to dance even after their amputation, until Karen is redeemed through death and contrition.
Meow Meow’s interpretation of Karen (though she says the name matters little) is of someone pushed by necessity and seeking respite from hardship, but who is punished all the same.
Just as Meow Meow has questioned the need for the Little Mermaid to give up her voice or the Little Match Girl to be left in the cold while others celebrate, she launches her critique of double standards and unjust punishment at Andersen himself in a comically rapid-fire barrage of questions.
The show’s meaning and its accoutrements are sometimes the object of fun, as Meow Meow clambers over a pile of debris in the corner of the stage including odd shoes, an old fridge and late-night online impulse purchases, musing aloud whether it’s “too early” in the show to be too profound.
She melds ballet and kickline steps in her choreography, all while balancing on one solitary shoe. Initially she wears a boot similar to those worn by the Moulin Rouge dance troupe today, in her nod to “the cans and the can-cans”, later changing it for one stiletto heel and one ballet slipper.
Not just for pleasure
Joining Meow Meow in various guises, Kanen Breen is by turns the embodiment of Meow’s ideas (if “a bit sketchy”), a faun to embody bacchanalian joy, or Hans Christian Andersen himself.
He provides a resounding and accomplished tenor voice as accompaniment alongside the trio of musicians (Mark Jones, Dan Witton and Jethro Woodward). Towards the end of the show, the musicians wear tutus under coat-tails in homage to the “delirious burlesque” of a 1900 Moulin Rouge revue or to a chorus of balletic swans.
Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes dances back and forth over different centuries and styles, reinforcing her reputation as a thoroughly postmodern diva.
Meow Meow is always aware of the lineage of which she is a part. She recalls other women who have preceded her. References range from Byzantium and Empress Theodora’s pearl-strewn act to Anna Pavlova and the ballet sylph.
Meow also acknowledges the cancan’s transgressive power as an act of agency by the working-class women who made it famous, and evokes a young Marlene Dietrich perched on a piano while auditioning for The Blue Angel.
Over the stage hangs a Danish saying, used as the motto of the Royal Danish Theatre, Ei blot til lyst, meaning “Not just for pleasure”. This saying is a reminder of the deeper function of the arts: a remedy and rebellion against a world awash with ignorance, conflict and the increased reliance on artificial intelligence at the cost of human connection.
All of these issues, part of the inescapable “noise of the world”, are skewered in both original songs and poignant renditions of material by Fiona Apple and Paul Anka, among others.
While no firm answers are provided for any of the multifarious themes addressed – indeed, how can one solve the ills of the world in a 75-minute show? – The Red Shoes cleaves to the aims of cabaret, defined by Meow Meow as “rigorous and instructive theatre”, and the civic duty of the artiste to resuscitate the art of catharsis.
This way, Meow Meow and her co-conspirators onstage are able to help the audience to “cathart” for themselves.
Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes is at Belvoir, Sydney, until November 9.
Authors: Will Visconti, Teacher and Researcher, Art History, University of Sydney
