Kristin Wagner’s ‘For you, I dream of me’ reclaims female agency from the confines of fairy tales
For Lunenburg choreographer Kristin Wagner, conceptualizing “For you, I dream of me” has been a decade-long journey that began while choreographing for a group of Boston University students.
“I was in a bit of a feminist renaissance for myself at the time,” Wagner explained. “I spent a lot of time writing stories about the men I had dated and started pulling quotes from each story to create this dance that combined text and movement.”
The work inspired Wagner to continue exploring facets of female autonomy, producing many iterations centered on these themes, including one production slated for the stage at the Brick Box Theater of the Jean McDonough Arts Center in Worcester this weekend.
In 2021, Wagner created Bodies Moving, a local collective that fuses her passion for dance, yoga, and other forms of movement. She continued developing her choreography, procuring inspiration from various narratives, including Hans Christian Andersen’s version of “The Little Mermaid,” J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” stories of the Hindu goddess Kali, and biblical references to Eve. While these stories may seem worlds apart, the overarching theme of female confinement — and the desire to break free — pervades each.
The dances in “For you, I dream of me” are interpretations of the original narratives. Aliza Franz, originally from Winchester, is one of the featured dancers and described how deeply embedded the source material has been during rehearsals. “We had time to read and engage with materials and have conversations about them,” they said. “We were given space to improv based off of the verbal and written processing we’d done and we really got an understanding of the movement, vocabulary, and language altogether.”
Wagner revealed how this process helped the solo inspired by “The Little Mermaid” come to life. “In Hans Christian Anderson’s version, he talks about how she will look as if she’s the most graceful person on earth, but the way it feels is that with every step, there’s a million daggers stabbing through her legs,” she said. “So one of the improvisational prompts was ‘If you were in that body, and you looked graceful, but you felt horrid, show me what that would look and feel like.’ And then, I videoed all the improvisations and took little parts to create phrase material.” Wagner said this process helped develop the visceral reactions of the dancers to their associated female characters, which are then displayed in abstract ways.
Claire Lane, originally from Greenfield, dances a solo inspired by Tinker Bell in “Peter Pan” and imbues the piece with frenetic energy. “You see these motifs in the movement where I’m vibrating through my fingertips, or vibrating through my chest and it starts to radiate outward,” she said. “And then simmering beneath that there’s this sense of anxiety of, Am I enough? Am I doing enough? Am I worthy enough?” In Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” Tinker Bell needs people to clap for her in order to stay alive and Lane portrays this reliance on external validation through impressive leaps that hold the audience’s attention.
Each dance in the show is an attempt to get to the heart of the female experience. “A commonality through all of the pieces is vulnerability, and a sense of tenderness and ferocity. We’re showing the more complicated aspects of femininity and the experience of being a woman in this world,” Lane said.
The production’s unifying themes are the vastness of what womanhood can look like and the challenges of being a woman within a patriarchal society. “It’s everything from microaggressions to experiences of sexual violence, to a lack of safety, and everyone has their own version of that story, but it is an overwhelmingly pervasive female experience,” Wagner said. “I wanted to lean into that and find ways to have these conversations more openly and honestly with the women around me.”
Wagner also wanted to portray her female characters as multidimensional beings. “When I think of meeting these characters,” she explained, “I don’t want to just meet them in their darkness, I also want to see them in their light. I’m trying to shed some of the emotional arc of each piece on when these characters are extremely empowered, in addition to when they’re feeling bogged down or repressed.”
Moments of empowerment are expressed through broad, sweeping movements, countered by moments of softness and fragility. The coexistence of these emotions shows audiences that women can be both maternal figures and warriors, beautiful and in pain, and more complex than fairy tales have historically allowed them to be.
Placing these narratives into conversation with each other helps demonstrate the implications of some of our most beloved childhood stories. “I feel like some people scoff at the idea of rereading fairy tales,” Franz explained, “But these are launching points for really important conversations that should be happening outside of dance studios.”
“For you, I dream of me” by Kristin Wagner/Bodies Moving, Dec. 15-16, 8 p.m., The Brick Box Theater of the Jean McDonough Arts Center, 20B Franklin St., Worcester. 877-571-SHOW. Tickets start at $19, tickets.thehanovertheatre.org/brickbox.