GIRL DINNER

In the past two years kelly langeslay has been about prolific as a dance artist can be in Seattle, with their solo works appearing everywhere: Velocity’s Bridge Project, Co– Show 6, Washington Ensembles Theatre’s ReSET (twice), work in progress showings, installations, and more. In each iteration they have been honing their specific point of view—a poetic mix of early 2000s nostalgia, queer theory, durational ideas, and ballet moves delivered with an exalted self consciousness. With all that research, it was about time for a show all their own, and their first evening length work girl dinner served up as memorable and intentionally crafted experience as any five star restaurant (but likely with a lot more food additives).

A curtained off corner of Base Experimental Arts becomes the intimate setting for girl dinner. About 40 seats face the (normally backstage) kitchenette and bathroom, but the space has received a significant glow up with a pink and white checkerboard tile floor and pink counter and knobs frosting the white cabinets. Trevor Cushman’s lighting design further cocoons the space. With the audience gathered around this Barbie kitchen, Kesha’s Die Young blasts as langeslay emerges in blue wig and cupcake bra, jumping up and down continuously as they monologue over the music.

We have to pause here and talk about how langeslay uses language. A great deal of their work is talking. Now whether something is or isn’t dance is a boring and useless dialogue I refuse to engage with, but what I will say is that the way langeslay uses words is choreographic. A sort of inner monologue that switches rapid fire between autobiographical confessions, academic theorizing, and poetic second person narratives. Though they must have memorized a vast amount of text, they never say lines like lines in a play, but like the words are tumbling out of them, an unstoppable torrent rife with charming self-deprecating humor, and often radical transparency. “I couldn’t do anything until I finished this show,” admits langeslay, “so I haven’t been grocery shopping in months and all I’ve been eating is tuna salad so I think I have mercury poisoning.”

Mercury poisoning is a running gag throughout the show, showing how langeslay employs theme and variation. It comes back many times in a durational (with original lyrics) version of the “cup song” featured in Pitch Perfect and summer camps across America. Each time, new facets of langeslay’s health and personality get attributed to their tuna habit. “You said I’m paranoid, but paranoia is one of the symptoms of mercury poisoning,” langeslay sings, comedically squeezing the syllables unnaturally into the rhythmic framework of the cup tapping. Each recurrence layers in new meaning, and langeslay employs a similar strategy with many thematic threads of the piece; we pick up bits and pieces of the story along the way.

The titular “girl dinner” appears to be the staple of children’s birthday parties, Pillsbury Funfetti cake. With a box of mix, langeslay crawls almost entirely into a kitchen cabinet, jean shorts and dirty feet displayed to the audience. langeslay then makes the cake, but their head is still stuck in the cabinet, hands and feet searching blindly (but competently) for the necessary supplies. They are simultaneously putting a shirt on and cracking open a Rainier (some goes in the cake mix), and then they sit on the stove and oil the pan with their bare hand. All trash gets tossed in a cupboard. The sequence is awkward comedy gold, but also the kind of uncomfortable sadness of watching someone do an ostensibly simple task without the necessary resources, and with unnecessary complication. It seems langeslay likes to complicate things, or more likely, can’t help themselves.

While the batter bakes, filling the space with familiar funfetti scent, a fully cooked and cooled cake emerges from the fridge. langeslay sits on the floor, opens Funfetti brand frosting, and mixes in red food coloring with fingers that plunge and emerge, smothered in goopy pink. They try to frost the cake with their hands. It’s a mess. The cake falls apart. Moving to the sill of a window that bridges the stage and the front row, they write on the pane in icing:

gone to soon

fly high

rip

Many of langeslay’s recent works reference the queer avant-garde dancer Freddie Herko, a founding member of the groundbreaking Judson Dance Theater in 60s New York. Extended spinning and one-footed rollerskating featured in langeslay’s repertoire pay homage to Herko’s performance career, and girl dinner appears to reference his final and most infamous performance, leaping naked from his friend’s fifth story window at age 28. It is unknown if he meant to fall, or if he believed he could fly.

It is here langeslay leads us into the work’s heart of darkness. Folded up on the sill, they ask to hold the hand of the nearest audience member (frosting and all) and look directly and unrelentingly into the person’s eyes as words spill forth with a new urgency. Ideas emerge and emerge and just as I feel on the brink of comprehension, langeslay changes topics rapid fire and I must drop my train of thought to keep up. They pause to ask, Are you following me? Their captive audience member nods and langeslay dives back in. Listening is an experience of over-saturation, almost to the point of meaninglessness, the text folding in on itself, circling back, chasing its own tail. Etymology, memory, nintendo references. I have no time to write notes, because if I look away I will lose the thread entirely, but I remember langeslay mentioning the “queer refusal to let go” set against the two clutched hands, slippery with frosting. Am I losing you? They check in again. 

The physical counterpoint to this fever pitch is a section soon after, where langeslay tips off their perch on the window sill, crashing down the 3 or 4 feet to land directly atop their failed cake. From there begins a circular game of the-floor-is-hot-lava, pulling their head into the running kitchen sink, rolling across counter, then top of fridge, making their way to the windowsill to fall again and again. Along the way they grasp at nobs, opening cabinets to reveal box after box of funfetti mix, water dripping, frosting smearing. With each pass everything becomes slipperier and slipperier, their body on the edge of control (or loss thereof) as they slide and crash. The running sink continues to fill, as they tip fully upside down into the basin, ass up, sloshing water out onto the floor, feet reaching for purchase langeslay kicks on a stove burner—a rolling, colliding, catastrophic resignation into destruction. Finally this tumbling, sliding, desperate dance culminates into a twirl of lightness that delivers us out of this cyclone, surrounded by the wreckage.

Matter of factly, langeslay invites their previous audience participant to join them in the bathroom for seven minutes (in heaven?), and invites the rest of the audience to clean up. The bathroom door shut behind them, and there’s only a brief moment of shock before about ten audience members roll up their sleeves, find supplies in the cabinets, and start in on the complete disaster of a kitchen. Miraculously, it is reasonably clean by the time the bathroom door opens (revealing a disco ball and party decorations) and the two emerge in prom dresses to perform a nostalgic and awkward slow dance to Brittany Spears. With the audience member returned to their seat, a mini cake descends on a string from the ceiling. This time, langeslay is prepared. Pulling out a tube of frosting hidden in their dress, they ice and finally eat their cake as the audience cheers.

So much of girl dinner seems to straddle expectation versus reality, perfection versus execution, girlhood fantasies crashing into the messiness of young adulthood. Contained within that is an intimate portrait of one person’s neurosis that is at once extremely specific and altogether relatable. Like everyone, langeslay is working with what they have, trying to make sense of the world, sometimes spinning out of control. Like all my favorite works, I cannot decide if it is a comedy, or a tragedy.

​​You asked me what I’m hiding behind this overintellectualization of queer experience langeslay says at one point. 

You are not hiding behind anything, kelly. You have invited us in, and we are following you.

kelly langeslay’s girl dinner ran June 5-7 2025 at Base Experimental Arts.