Jennifer Clarke unsettles the score

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      To understand Jennifer Clarke the choreographer, it also helps to understand Jennifer Clarke the electronic composer. The 37-year-old East Vancouver resident is a relative newcomer to musical performance, but the same adventurous spirit she brings to dance animates her inventive drum-machine compositions, which she debuted last fall as part of an EDAM movement showcase.

      “I composed the score, and then I performed live to the music,” Clarke explains, on the line from her home. “I played with [Vancouver audio artist] Lee Hutzulak: he did his musique concrí¨te that he does, with found objects and attaching microphones to them and stuff, and then I had a drum machine. But I didn’t necessarily program patterns. I just programmed arbitrary sounds, and then altered them through a looping pedal. That gave me a ton of choices on how to work with the sound.”

      Sometimes, she adds, she’ll dial out the sound of the drum machine and work exclusively with its digital echo. And sometimes she’ll punch in random patterns, then listen as the machine attempts to fit them into a more conventional four-beat structure. “You can come up with these really interesting sounds,” she says happily.

      In short, anything goes—and that’s the same sort of improvisatory verve Clarke will display when she presents two new pieces at the Scotiabank Dance Centre on Friday and Saturday (April 25 and 26), as part of International Dance Day celebrations.

      “I think I started improvising right off the bat in my dance training, ’cause I didn’t start dancing until I was in university, instead of taking the cookie-cutter path that dancers often do,” she says. “You know, they train in ballet from age four onwards, but I just started dancing in clubs, and then eventually realized that dance spoke to me so strongly that I wanted to pursue it professionally.”

      Of the two works she’ll show at the Dance Centre, Highly Concerned With Unlikely Events is a carefully structured duet for her and Amber Funk Barton, while the second, as-yet-untitled piece is a free-form collaboration between dancers Clarke, Barton, Anne Cooper, Daelik, and Ron Stewart. JP Carter, Andy Dixon, Josh Stevenson, and Rachael Wadham—all key members of Vancouver’s active sonic underground—will contribute the music.

      “Raquel [Alvaro, the Dance Centre’s program coordinator], wanted to present my work, and wanted also to have a big, beautiful, chaotic performance that would focus on contact improv,” Clarke explains, adding that for the second piece, “we’ll have one rehearsal, and then that’s it. JP and Josh are seasoned improvisers; that’s mostly what they’re interested in. Andy Dixon is just an incredible musician in general, and he’s just such an artist that he improvises really beautifully as well, although he’s not known for that. All of us, with the exception of Amber, as far as the dancers go, have had lots of experience improvising, and consider that to be one of our main art forms.”

      The more sculptural Highly Concerned With Unlikely Events, in contrast, has taken several weeks of studio work to develop, with Clarke and Barton sharing information and observations on each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

      “What you do [as an emerging choreographer] in Vancouver is make solos for five years by yourself, because you don’t get any money to make anything bigger,” Clarke notes. “So we’ve made a million solos on ourselves; we really know what we like to do in our own bodies. And it’s really great working with Amber, because I often turn to her to ask, ”˜Does this make sense here?’ or, ”˜This is what I’m interested in—is it worth pursuing?’ And she can answer with some sense of authority, because she’s a choreographer as well.”

      She describes Highly Concerned With Unlikely Events as incorporating some “low-level, sort of hovering-off-the-ground” movement, as well as lots of “quirky patterns”. And if that sounds like a description that could apply equally well to the music Clarke loves, she’s happy to agree.

      “Yeah, exactly,” she says animatedly. “Just imagine kind of a little clicky, glitchy electronic sound. It’s equal to that, only in movement. And then there’s also completely contrasting stuff as well. But in general, the patterns that I hear in electronic music really inform me about how to compose, whether you’re composing sonically or whether you’re composing choreographically. For some reason, that medium informs me more so than movement does, actually. The stories that I hear in music are just more clear.”

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