The “Kiss and Cry” refers to the area of the figure skating rink where contestants wait for their scores to be announced after their performance is completed. The expectation that women perform their femininity through fragile sentimental gestures is hard-wired into the decorum of the sport; the stunning displays of power and athleticism that go into each routine must be cloaked beneath a veneer of delicacy while the judges deliberate. To perform on ice is to skirt danger with grace, but to prevail in the kiss and cry is to suspend the reality that any effort was involved at all.

Whether on an internationally televised stage or in the confines of a private domestic setting, the specter of failing to live up to the ideal looms over the performance of womanhood. In researching the alumni of her high school, Hanson discovered attempted serial-killer Laurie Dann as an alumnus. Raised in a white-picket-fence suburb of Chicago where the expectation that a woman sit pretty and find a rich husband was pervasive, Dann’s story is a case-study in the corrosive effect of the feminine ideal. On the morning of May 20, 1998, racked with severe OCD and reeling from the divorce from her husband, Dann tried to reap her revenge through a series of twisted plots. That same year, only a few months earlier, Katarina Witt and Debi Thomas competed in “The Battle of the Carmens” at the 1988 Calgary Olympics, an internationally televised moment that saw two figure skaters— one African-American, one Eastern-European—performing to music from the opera ‘Carmen’. The two competing narratives of femininity— one marked by death, the other a carefully composed aversion of it— form the frame of Kiss and Cry, a body of works that asks us to consider the consequences, and silently-born burdens, of the socially-constructed notion of womanhood.

The works in Kiss and Cry contend with the contradictory demands bound up in the stereotype of femininity— frustration that gets couched in pleasantries, the resilience that goes unnoticed behind the perception of elegance. Whether real or enacted, the pressures of the carefully-hewn routine— in the household or on the ice— risks spiraling into tragedy.

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