Though Label: Beauty is a fun, lighthearted ballet, its message is profoundly theological, and every aspect of its production is steeped in a scriptural imagination. The ballet employs the distinctive capacities of movement and performing arts to generate new expressions of biblical ideas. I invite you, the audience, to notice what theological ideas are evoked and to return to those ideas where they are found in Scripture for further reflection. Before the curtain rises, I’ll offer a few potential starting points.

Being a story-ballet, Label: Beauty overlaps with the art of theater–specifically, comedy–in its meaning-making capacities. A biblical story like Esther, which has comic potential, employs features like caricature, coincidence and dramatic reversals to make its point. Similarly, in Label: Beauty you’ll find a touch of melodrama coming from characters who embody extremes of relatable experiences and temptations. In those moments you might laugh, but you might also ask yourself, “Is that what I look like when…?”

For an example of how biblical comedy uses these devices, let’s look more closely at Esther. The young woman is taken into the Persian king’s harem (Esther 2:8), and at her cousin Mordecai’s instruction she remains silent about her cultural identity as a Jew (Esther 2:10). Up to this point in the story, Esther is largely a passive character, “controlled by her circumstances” (Jobes 138). She does what she must according to the law of the land and according to her guardian’s sensibilities regarding personal security. Though Esther does rise to a position of widespread favor (Esther 2:9, 15, 17) and royal stature (Esther 2:17), she does so by being acted upon and by deferring to the direction of others–both Mordecai and Hegai, the eunuch who oversees the harem (Esther 2:15)–rather than by making active choices about how to conduct herself.

Mordecai challenges Esther’s passivity when he comes with a new instruction in Esther 4. The king’s advisor Haman has convinced the impressionable monarch to decree death for all Jews in the empire, and Esther alone among the Jews is in a position to approach the king concerning this impending calamity. Through a palace servant acting as intermediary, Mordecai instructs Esther “to come to the king to implore his favor and to entreat him on behalf of her people” (Esther 4:8). Thoroughly reversing his earlier instruction, “You will not tell” (Esther 2:10), Mordecai’s new instruction requires Esther to present herself to the king in solidarity with the Jewish people by speaking on their behalf.

Esther replies, 

Esther 4:11 “All the king’s servants and the king’s provincial people know 

     that any man or woman who comes to the king, to the inner court, whom he has not called–

     his only decree is to put them to death, 

     unless the king extends to him the golden scepter, then he will live; 

but as for me, I have not been called to come to the king these thirty days.”

Maintaining continuity with her earlier characterization as one subject to the king’s laws, Esther identifies herself with the people under the king’s authority and implies that if she takes this course of action, her life is not in her own hands. By pointing out the risk of going before the king, Esther also heightens the stakes of Mordecai’s request; not only are she and the other Jews at risk because of Haman’s decree of death, but she is even at risk if she undertakes to reverse the decree in this manner. It seems as though Esther is without options, consigned to remain passive in the face of unfavorable circumstances.

But Mordecai responds,

13 …“Don’t silently think to yourself

          you’ll slip away in the king’s palace out of all the Jews.

14 For if you persist in keeping silent in this time,

          respite and deliverance will rise up for the Jews from another place,

          but you and your father’s house will perish.

     But who knows

          if for just a time like this you attained royalty?”

Mordecai’s positive instruction to speak becomes a negative admonition not to remain silent, further entrenching the reversal of his earlier instruction that Esther hide her Jewish heritage. Mordecai agrees with Esther that the most likely outcome of the king’s decrees is death, whether because of the present threat or as a consequence of refusing to speak up. Yet Mordecai doesn’t budge from his initial purpose, instead pointing to the opportunity posed by their implausible situation, that a Jewish woman holds a position in the Persian court at this critical moment when the Jews need a political voice. This coincidence may set the stage for a reversal of fortune, but that reversal depends also on a reversal in Esther’s characterization. Esther may have gained her royal position through passivity, but to make use of it she will have to engage in active confrontation.

Finally Esther agrees: “…in this manner I’ll go to the king, which is not according to the decree, and which, if I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16). The continued emphasis on the likelihood that Esther will die makes the reversal dramatic, from keeping silent as a strategy for survival in a foreign empire to speaking up at risk of death to save the lives of all her people. Commentator Adele Berlin points out that Esther may have still been summoned to the king’s bed at this time even if she hadn’t been summoned for an audience, but the option she raises with Mordecai is to go to the king “not…as a seductress, but as a dignified woman of royal stature” (48-49). The reversal in Esther’s character is complete, not from passive to subtly manipulative, but from passive to boldly, openly active.

The episode concludes,

17 And Mordecai moved on, and he did all that Esther instructed him.

Whereas earlier Esther follows Mordecai’s instructions (see Esther 2:10), now their roles are reversed and Mordecai follows Esther’s instructions (Berlin 50). Esther’s agency in what happens next seals the dramatic reversal in her once-passive characterization and gives way to a series of reversals that radically transform the fate of the Jews from death to life.

Nehama Aschkenasy, a scholar of biblical and comparative literature, writes that “at its best, comedy has always been serious business, pointing out the absurdities of the human condition, highlighting human frailty and folly, while at the same time delighting us with redemption of a happy ending.” The biblical narrative of Esther is set up to reveal the absurdity of human power exercised without principle, as illustrated in King Ahashverosh governing the world’s largest empire based on his daily whims. Comedic devices like coincidence and reversal permit us to imagine that such absurdities can be overturned in our own reality as easily as in the story. Perhaps it’s amusing to see acquiescent Esther transform before the king’s eyes into the assertive wife he banished in the first chapter of the book, but in truth, the God of Esther’s people is powerful enough to turn the king of a global empire into a hollow facade by comparison.

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Berlin describes Esther herself as a caricature, a “paragon of feminine heroism” (xx), suggesting that we’re allowed to laugh at how thoroughly submissively charming she is at the beginning and how readily she becomes the would-be martyr. Similarly, many of the characters in Label: Beauty are defined by a particular trait or a singular focus, including the central character Sandra. For much of the ballet, Sandra is entirely absorbed in trying to win the approval of fashion model Virginia, and she looks a little ridiculous in her attempts. At the end of Act I, Sandra and her best friend Jean each approach Virginia with a strikingly different attitude. Jean sees how Virginia is troubled and wants her attention so that she can redirect it to the Bible she hands her, but Sandra enters immediately after and tries to draw Virginia’s attention to herself by parading around in her new outfit, to no avail. As a caricature of an image-obsessed teenager, Sandra illustrates the absurdity of looking for meaning in the superficial when genuine relationships satisfy so much more easily.

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At the same time that the characters in Label: Beauty represent limited, exaggerated, or less mature versions of us, they aren’t so far-fetched that their story seems irrelevant. One distinctive capacity of dance as an art form is that it makes its subject matter relatable by putting it into the medium of the human body. Anyone living in a body, of whatever age, shape or ability, has a lens of embodied experience through which to interpret dance. A moment from the ballet that resonates with me is at the conclusion. When Sandra has realized her folly and undergone her dramatic reversal of ideals, she puts on her original costume and dances around the whole stage. Where her earlier movements are staccato and cover a limited space, her dancing now becomes expansive, evoking the sense that she has found greater freedom in her identity as a child of God than she did as a wannabe-fashion model. As a narrative, Label: Beauty employs devices similar to other forms of comic storytelling, and as dance it has a unique capacity to translate those ideas into movement, giving them new dimensions and allowing artists and audiences to understand them in new ways.

As you watch Label: Beauty, which of the dancers’ movements resonate with you? Do they evoke other images or experiences that might be explored in Scripture? Let this ballet move you to dialogue with God as you notice details, ask questions, and watch and wait for response.

Scripture quotations in this post are my own translation.

Secondary references:

The JPS Bible Commentary: Esther, by Adele Berlin (The Jewish Publication Society, 2001).

The NIV Application Commentary: Esther, by Karen H. Jobes (Zondervan, 1999).

“The Book of Ruth as Comedy: Classical and Modern Perspectives,” by Nehama Aschkenazy, in Scrolls of Love, edited by Peter S. Hawkins and Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg (Fordham University Press, 2006).