Feminine Mystique

Dresses, domestic chores, grief. A community of women more feral than feminine. Five performers wear a changing selection of 40 dresses that serve as both costume and prop. The flowered dresses, slips, and silky animal prints represent female identity, perhaps deriving from the idea of children playing dress up. In “Maldonne” (bad deal, in French), presented at New York Live Arts as part of the Dance Reflections Van Cleef & Arpels Festival, choreographer Leïla Ka delivers a complex and raw state of womanhood that has me reflecting for days.

Performance

“Maldonne” by Leïla Ka

Place

Dance Reflections Festival by Van Cleef & Arpels, New York Live Arts, New York, NY, February 27, 2026

Words

Karen Hildebrand

“Maldonne” by Leïla Ka. Photograph by Maria Baranova

In the powerful opening scene, the five stand shoulder to shoulder in house dresses that hearken to the 1950s. In silence they gesture, sometimes in unison, sometimes alternating in a kind of canon: raising a hand to a cheek or forehead as if to brush back a stand of hair or wipe away a tear. They solemnly cup a palm at the ribcage. Sharp elbows and furrowed brows activate to a syncopated rhythm. Their heightened breath is an a capella chorus. One falls to the floor then stands back up. Then another. The shifting gaps that occur in their line-up remind me of a manual typewriter with a couple of broken keys.

From France, Ka initially came to dance via urban hip hop, and began choreographing her own work after performing with Maguy Marin. Her solos and duets have won awards and “Maldonne,” her first group work, was considered for the International Dance Prize 2025 at Sadler Wells. Tonight is the US debut. As I watch, “Maldonne” brings to mind precision drill team work, police line-ups, Pina Bausch dance halls, Graham-esque falls practiced in dance class, and the creepy robot women in the Stepford Wives from the 1970s. Ka’s cast expresses grief, exhaustion, persistence, distress, strength, resilience, pain—all channeled into crisp gesture, military precise. The dresses anchor the piece to a domestic realm. The work of women is never done. On their knees, these women scoop an invisible pile of laundry. They squat, tip over, roll across their backs from one side to the other—first their butts in the air, then their knees. Faster and faster. Wait, is that a flash of bare ass? Cheeky.

The dance could easily have ended here, so arresting is this opening portrait. But Ka is only getting started. Things begin to escalate when the women change into floor length animal print dresses. On their knees, they scrub the floor with their skirts. Gripping the corner of a hem between their teeth, they stamp and pound rhythmically. They pretty much beat the heck out of these dresses—twisting the fabric and tossing lengths of it like a jump rope, slapping it against their hips and thighs, slamming it to the floor like a wet towel. The outrage seems justifiable, given news of the day: sex trafficking, rape, repeal of abortion rights. Yet I’m struggling to accept that Ka’s dresses, which speak so fluently as a symbol of female identity, are now objects of women’s rage. Maybe I’m over-thinking, but after a while of this, the women themselves seem to have second thoughts. They stop to pull themselves together, adjust a collar and sleeve, fix their skirts.

“Maldonne” by Leïla Ka. Photograph by Maria Baranova

In a third section, the performers whisk off jewel-toned party dresses and hang them on S-hooks that dangle on chains from the overhead boom. Now clad in matching tiered black ruffles—the kind you might see on flamenco dancers—the women twirl and fall; recover and fall; rollover and recover, while a vocalist sings a lilting lyric, “dancing to the end of love.” Ka, of course, is not the first choreographer to topple her dancers. Though perhaps not metaphorically fresh, the falling does seem an appropriate response, given a long history of abuse and subjugation of women. The stage gradually clears, leaving one dancer collapsed on the floor. From the wings, a performer in a white slip enters to empty a cup on the reclining performer. The hanging dresses drop to the floor like little pillars of salt.

In a fourth section, the women are exaggeratedly distressed. They cry with manic intensity. One has stuffed fabric inside the bodice of her dress. A heavy bosom, or is she pregnant? The others grab her and the fabric unfurls from between her legs, as if birthing. The performers wad it up and toss it around like they’re playing a game of keep away. Sometimes the wad is a pile of laundry, sometimes it’s a swaddled infant. They punch it, throw it on the floor, stomp on it. I’m not sure how to feel about this. I think about actions we are provoked to take, those we are helpless to prevent.

At the end, the movement returns to where “Maldonne” began—the same drill team of pained women has come full circle to emerge as fierce warriors. Dressed in multiple layers, they gradually remove items and hang the garments over their outstretched arms like battle regalia, dramatic music and a cloud of fog rising behind. Stripped down to white slips, they whip and fling the removed dresses like signal flags, yelling, hey!

Karen Hildebrand

Karen Hildebrand is former editorial director for Dance Magazine and served as editor in chief for Dance Teacher for a decade. An advocate for dance education, she was honored with the Dance Teacher Award in 2020. She follows in the tradition of dance writers who are also poets (Edwin Denby, Jack Anderson), with poetry published in many literary journals and in her book, Crossing Pleasure Avenue (Indolent Books). She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Originally from Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn.

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