The surface of the female body is something people may see everyday some more than others. But in the new play Figuring Form, writer/director Pamela Christian takes a look beneath the woman’s flesh and bone to see what environmental forces shape the feminine physique in the art world.

It looks at how a woman’s body is physically constructed in fine art, Christian said. If you look at the different cultural images of what beauty is today, you see that the media and other outside forces say, This is what is beautiful. This is what women should aspire to.’ Christian, a graduate student in speech communications, uses four different fine art areas in Figuring Form, which continues performances tonight and Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Kleinau Theater, that illustrate how specific systems create a certain body type.

If you look at opera, there is an artistic system that typically produces the large opera diva, Christian said. There are thin opera singers, too, but I’m making a comment on the bigger body and the way the diva has this huge temperament to go along with the huge body.

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But then she always ends up dead at the end of the opera. I’m looking at how strange that is that you have this powerful woman who we go to watch in her death scene over and over.

Along with opera, the four fine art areas covered in the play’s five acts are music, theater and dance.

For the dance aspect of the play, Christian shows the audience what ballet dancers have to go through in order to retain their agility. The toe shoes the dancers must where are damaging to their feet, and the pre-pubescent bodies they are required to have are very strenuous to maintain.

While the male ballet dancer holds up the nymphet body of the female dancer like an ornament, the idea of what is beautiful carries over to other art and society aspects that influence the youth to consider it as the body they must have.

But Christian is not trying to teach people so much about the fine arts by offering a different look at opera or ballet. The connections and illustrations being made are to show the audience that the human body is not something that is earned but something that is in any given situation influenced by the environment.

Whether it’s culturally, economically, socially or politically, we see our bodies in certain ways, Christian said. For example, the people that go to the theater that night are in a political situation. They’re going to be in their seats, and there are certain roles that a scripted society gives us that says this is how we’re going to be an audience.

You’re not going to go to the theater and pull up a lawn chair and guzzle a beer. And if you do, it would be taboo, but the script is still there.

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Gabriella Rodriguez, a junior in speech communications from Sterling and an actor in the play, said Figuring Form may bring out the way female bodies are oppressed in distinctive roles, but it does so in a way that does not slap anybody in the face.

Instead, the play takes subtle paths to give the audience an impression of what the role of women in fine arts is really like.

The play is not done in a way that says Oh, that’s suppression.’ she said. In acting, it shows the way women are put in certain positions that aren’t very respectable to their bodies like being put on their knees or sitting on a man’s lap, just having them do things that men would not do.

Rodriguez said she got interested in the play because she had enjoyed one of Christian’s earlier works and wanted the chance to work with her. Rodriguez said the script was well written and the topic was something she wanted to work with.

I knew that this play was going to be well crafted and have a lot to say about women because it’s very intelligently put together and the script is very beautiful, she said. I just like shedding some light on the way art suppresses the female body.

Christian began working on the play, which is her first full-length project with a full cast, three years ago, but she really began sitting down and writing it last summer.

As the writer and the director, Christian has complete control over what she thinks the final project should be like. Being able to switch lines between characters or even taking lines out is an option she has never had before.

You really can’t do that with someone else’s script unless you don’t have any ethics, Christian said.

One thing Christian wants people to understand is that she is not pointing her finger at men saying that they are the ones suppressing the female body.

I’m not saying we women have to band together because we have to fight back against the things men are handing down to us, she said. Women are doing this to other women too. It’s not just women speaking about the female body. It’s men talking about it as well.

And because Figuring Form is not a battle of the sexes, Rodriguez said no one is going to be a target during the performance.

The way Pamela has put it together, there is no way anyone could be offended by it, she said. I think men definitely need to see it, but so do women. It’s a step in becoming aware of the problem.

People don’t think about suppression so that’s why it continues.

FACTOID:Ticket prices are $3 for students and $5 general admission. For information, call 453-5618.