A show begins: Carla goes behind a door, emerges, in a bit, in the outfit of the moment, which is linked to a piece of music, which is linked to particular steps. The item revealed, coming to life as her body occupies it and steps into a position, then another. Then the scene’s over, back behind the door, another outfit, soon the pieces strewn everywhere. Martha out in the hallway: “Miss Carla, are you in those clothes? You know your mother wants you to take good care of those.” No response from Carla except that she goes to draw another suite of fabrics from the dark; Martha moves away, mumbling.

Why does it seem cruel? The show’s somehow about titillation—not sexual, exactly, but a display of wealth and of possession. It demonstrates, for Carla, her power over the adults who’ve bought her this dragon hoard of glitter. For me her impromptu pageant is about the oddly potent associations of the stuff, and how she’s transformed by it. Does she recognize in me some fascination or longing, a puzzled rapture in what she possesses? I sit on the edge of her bed, in thrall, powerless. The show continues, the chef d’oeuvre an extravaganza à la Josephine Baker: Carla emerges as a night sky, her black outfit the empyrean between the little lights of heaven. Bits of glimmer comprise a shifting disorder of constellations. Stiff black feathered cloche, black sequins, noir sparkle that rustles with a faint iridescence, prismatic gleam emerging from a rhapsody of gloom; Queen of the Night, Mistress of Devils, body of the Snow Queen, so milky she looks blue, especially in her shadowed armpits, the hollows of her legs as she spins then bolts across the room in near jetés, so long, angular, and black that she’s a black swan, her long neck strained and undulant. No, better: a black flamingo.