Sparklingly danced hymn to the vagina, the vulva, the clitoris, in other words: the ‘woman flower’ ★★★★☆

Perhaps a few among the Parade audience in Utrecht will still recognize dancer and actress Gina van Os from the adolescent film Dancing on the volcano (2014). In any case, her first name is playfully exploited in the bustling dance performance V by the Poetic Disasters Club, the junior company of Club Guy & Roni in Groningen. As she introduces herself, the other dancers tease her. ‘Va-va-va-va!’ the seven chants, writhing wide-legged over a red couch. The tone is set, V is an ode to the vagina, the vulva, the clitoris and everything that can be associated with the female genitalia, here sung with nicknames like scrambled eggs between the legs.

Choreographer Cecilia Moisio is letting her own dancers tour this fall with the similar Pink Portal. The most powerful dance scenes from that more educational performance are now performed by eight wonderfully challenging performers. The fact that three men also participate, with printed wombs on their panties, only makes the danced hymn more universal. They throw themselves with abandon into a split dance or wildly writhing contractions and menstrual moans. A crying baby hints at why the Poetic Disasters Club honors the ‘woman flower’ and ‘fish lips’: everyone was born from it. Hence the somewhat obvious background with an image of Gustave Courbet’s painting L’Origine du Monde.

The public does not always know what the correct answer is to the chanted questions; the pounding bass drowns out the text of Eva Maria de Wit too often for that. But the catwalk parade with colorful costumes in heels is hilarious. All the pleats, ponytails, tulle and frills in this swinging fashion show are indeed reminiscent of a variable series of representations of ‘the notorious Va Gina’.