A solo show from Meg Chizek, How To Give Up on Your Dreams, ran at Edinburgh Fringe this year. It is about dance, drama, and giving up on your dreams, with a heavy dose of fun.
Young Meg had aspirations to be a dancer, and finds herself inside the toxic culture at dance/theatre schools. She was a tall girl, physically larger than the others in her class. Perhaps she could be a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall!
This show is about expectations, social norms, synchronization, and competition. The little comments that affect the body image of impressionable youngsters.
Chizek is lively, active, and expressive. This helps with rather dark undertone of her attempts to train and find fame, as this is her own story of her own childhood search for the magic behind the footlights.
You get dance moves and poses alongside an easy comedy here, as Chizek tells of how “doing everything they say” at dance college will allow her to find her dream.
The uniformity of rules about hair, shoes, lipstick, leotards, and weight. Yet, “I would rather be in a Macy’s Thanksgiving parade than spend time with my family.”
This is a show which brings in troubling topics in a really interesting way. How dancers are encouraged to count calories and basically do anything to stop eating, to attain the right weight and the right measurements.
It’s a damning indictment of what may be behind the talent and the smiles on many stages, or what might have been endured to get there. Of course this might be an extreme example of indoctrination or coercive control, in other words, a cult.
Utilising some music we know, like the finale of Oklahoma and Sinatra’s “New York, New York” (which was the tune of choice to kick us out of the school disco in the 80s), Chizek taps into musical theatre tropes while showing some enviable kicks and tap dancing movements.
Auditions and open calls that “smell of hairspray and broken dreams” in a room of bendy dancers who have 15 seconds to wow the producers after “four years of being rejected on a daily basis”.
And how being in the ensemble might not be the culmination of dancer dream when it often involves “picking up loose props and dancing them off.”
Facing depression, Chizek acts it out for us against the backdrop of “Crazy”, but in a way that really hits home. It isn’t all about hiding in a corner, but sometimes it is about pushing the limits and boundaries, or engaging with life in a slightly twisted way.
Not perfect. Not graceful. That describes the show Meg Chizek has created, but it is one which leaves you wondering about the stories of those who engage with the mantra of what a woman in the chorus line should be.
At 50 minutes I felt the material was a little thin at times, and occasionally repetitive, but this is a show which deserves a wider audience with a writer/performer who can connect with her past, present and future and communicate it with ease.
***.5