THE POPE’S TOE
As you might expect from its title, The Pope’s Toe capers irreverently around its sacred subject. But anyone who knows the dance-theater work of Xsight! Performance Group would expect nothing less. All You Can Eat and Other Human Weaknesses, the group’s premiere performance last spring, ranged brilliantly and abrasively over some far-flung territories. The Pope’s Toe has a more confined subject and a more coherent shape–and a more sober attitude. The free- ranging hostility of All You Can Eat has lost its hysterical edge in The Pope’s Toe and been directed full-force against the Catholic church.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The Pope’s Toe has four sections–“The Confessional,” “The Church,” “The Rectory,” and “The Streets”–each “directed” by one of the three Xsight members. Though the piece is pointedly not a narrative, these three play distinct roles. Timothy O’Slynne is a high priest, perhaps a bishop; Jeffery is an altar boy or junior priest; and Mary Ward is an everywoman of the church–Eve, Mary Magdalene, whatever beaten-down sinner you can name. Ten additional dancers round out the cast.
The two middle sections shift the focus back to the clergy, though the woman reappears in interludes in which she eats an orange and, later, dances ringed by fetuses in jars. “The Church,” directed by Jeffery, lays bare the supposed masochistic underpinnings of religious ecstasy. The priest reviewing his troops–the choir–performs a kicking jump somewhere between a cheerleader’s leap and a goose step. Jeffery, as a choirboy in see-through red chiffon, sprinkles himself overliberally with holy water in a giggly, sensual sign of the cross and rhapsodizes about suffering. Later the priest puts him through his sacrificial paces.
The Pope’s Toe is nothing if not ambitious, and it’s loaded with vivid visual metaphors. It may seem hard, then, to complain that it’s not bigger: less schematic, more compassionate. The priests may be hypocrites, they may glory in their maleness and privilege, but in some sense they’re as much victims of their own physical natures as the woman is of hers. I saw little sympathy for the priests’ humanity, however. One exception is the trio’s bow, when O’Slynne runs like an eager boy to pick up his bishop’s cape and drape it over Ward’s shoulders. Just that simple motion, almost an afterthought, goes a long way toward restoring the equilibrium.
