Presented by the Vancouver International Dance Festival. At the Roundhouse Community Arts a
nd Recreation Centre on Saturday, March 8. No remaining performances

“Brevity,” William Shakespeare once opined, “is the soul of wit.” Sarah Williams, take note. In a late-night, cabaret-style show at the Roundhouse Community Centre, the former Vancouverite, now resident in Montreal, took about an hour and a half to deliver maybe 15 minutes’ worth of compelling material. The construction of gender can be a fascinating topic, but not this time around.

Of course, blaming Williams, normally a skilled and charismatic performer, for this long and numbing excursion into cliché comes close to shooting the messenger. Still, these were messages that she willingly chose to deliver.

The problem is that too many artists are still mining ideas about gender that were radical in the 1970s and ’80s, but that have become banal through repetition. Simply mocking porn-star conventions, for instance, is no substitute for undertaking the kind of analysis that might explain their enduring allure in our supposedly liberated culture.

That’s my beef with Nathalie Claude’s Glossy Poupée Says Can She, the last piece in Saturday’s three-part program. Clad in a spangly butterfly-shaped top, black-vinyl hot pants, and a long blond wig, Williams takes on the role of a catatonically vapid singer-dancer-model-actress. She’s disconcertingly adept at the gymnastic and gynecological staples of budget porn, but the point being made—that conventional depictions of female sexuality degrade and objectify women—is generally accepted by the contemporary-dance audience. It doesn’t have to be driven home with a hammer—or, in this case, a 14-inch Homelite chain saw.

The program opener, George Stamos’s croque-monsieur, opened with an attention-getting, if static, image: Williams, clad in a codpiece-like undergarment and a tangled, feral wig that obscured her face, watching Bugs Bunny cartoons projected on a large, white balloon. In them, that wascally wabbit masqueraded as a Wagnerian soprano, Abraham Lincoln, and Yosemite Sam, and Williams soon effected some tricksterish transformations of her own: from Minotaur to Playboy bunny to rock-star satyr. Despite a hilarious scene in which she unwrapped her “package” to pull out a pink, see-through slip, this skit also outstayed its welcome—as did Eddie Ladd’s Patty.Tania.Paige, a thinly theatrical take on the Patty Hearst story.