Performance / Fund Raiser
University of Victoria Student Union – Michelle Pujol Lounge
January 27, 2011
Reviewed by Arleen Paré

Sheila Norgate’s performance of Charm, Beauty and Poise made me laugh out loud.  On a foggy end-of-January night, that’s a good thing.   I’m her perfect audience demographic, an over-fifty feminist.  The rest of the mainly over-fifty feminist audience was laughing too.   Her conservative set-up, deadpan delivery and behind-the-lectern “lecture,” allowed her selected ad material to skewer itself in solid satire.

Norgate, self-described recovering nice-girl, is a successful Gabriola Island visual artist, well-known in Victoria.  Her paintings have sold in art galleries across the continent.  She’s also a performance artist, and has presented Charm, Beauty and Poise in other venues before bringing it to UVic to help student social justice group, Armed with Understanding, to raise money for women’s groups in Victoria and Vancouver.

Norgate calls herself a feminist (NOT, she warns, a post-feminist), and the largely female audience (I counted three men in the room), seemed onside.  The room was packed, which surprised me in an event organized by student volunteers, with promotion primarily through social media, and held in a SUB meeting room at UVic.   Nor is Charm, Beauty and Poise slick.  Norgate deploys no digital technology, no power point, no lighting effects, nor musical background.  This was old-fashioned feminist activism, live-performance satire, a one-woman send-up of patriarchal values.  Some might find it dated, but not this audience.  With Sheila wearing red taffeta, pill-box hat and boa (although her stodgy shoes were all wrong!), the show’s tongue-in-cheek premise is that women these days eschew much-needed beauty help.  In her role as a Miss Manners sort, Norgate provides “corrective” advice, covering a range of beauty remedies, including chin-straps and exercises to reduce cheek fat.  We guffawed, but several younger women in the audience seemed more outraged than amused, and one later wondered why Norgate hadn’t addressed the issue of next steps.   I wondered too at the difficult issues of the “all-whiteness” of the images she used, the lack of biting feminism, and of how feminist and/or lesbian fashionistas might react to the show.

With the use of a slide-projector, Norgate displayed image after womanly image of archival ads.  She paired the images with historical text of pre-feminist beauty etiquette in those not-so-distant times.  While slides bore dates, helping establish context and authenticity, Norgate failed to provide their magazine origins.  As she showed one slide depicting directional arrows on a woman’s body, Norgate read the official formula for the ideal female figure, which, should you need to know, dictates that the width of a woman’s shoulders must be the width of her hips, and her crotch must be half-way between her feet and her head.   A 1961 ad warned that “no face needs sloppy jowls or swinging dewlaps.”

Norgate later explained that she became interested in exposing patriarchal beauty standards after finding an old etiquette book at Toronto’s Hadassah Bazaar in 1994. In 1997, Raincoast published Norgate’s own book, Storm Clouds Over Party Shoes: Etiquette Problems of the Ill Bred Woman, a satirical exposé of former standards.  Norgate’s current aim is to “connect the dots” between early twentieth-century ad material and the current anorexia crisis;

her upcoming book, Dangerous Curves, deals with this issue.  When asked where to buy chin-straps, she answered that she’d seen them for sale in a recent Enroute magazine.  Hmmm – maybe the show isn’t dated after all.

For bookings, contact Norgate by email.  If it’s laughter you need, consider it.