Denise Clarke’s wag offers a tinglingly full mind-body experience
By Denise Clarke. A One Yellow Rabbit Performance Theatre production, presented by the Firehall Arts Centre. At the Firehall Arts Centre on Tuesday, October 21. Continues until October 25
Denise Clarke is so charismatic that it almost doesn’t matter that there are big holes in wag.
For a long time, Clarke’s latest solo show is splendid. She enters wearing a heavy parka and backpack, crosses in front of a black-and-white projected image of a wintery park, and tells us—quietly, intimately (there’s a mike hidden under her hood)—that she’s on her way to work, where’s she’s building a solo show: “I’m lonely. There’s an empty theatre waiting for me and there’s nothing lonelier than an empty theatre two days before Christmas.”
It’s been a bad year. Death has visited her family and Clarke is aware of her mortality. An artist with Calgary’s One Yellow Rabbit Performance Theatre since the early ’80s, Clarke blends text and choreography. As she dances in the icy park, she stands on one leg and drops her face to that knee while the other leg extends to the sky. “This is the part,” she says, “where I find out how fucking old I am.”
But wag is about the solace, the sensual invitation to presence, that art offers—much like a friendly dog. “You can’t feel sad when you’re listening to George Gershwin playing his own music in 1924,” she says. And it’s hard to argue.
At its best, wag offers a tinglingly full mind-body experience. The embodiment, in Clarke, of the tensions between words and dance, between serious inquiry and offhand expression, is charged, almost erotic. Shedding the parka, which reads as a metaphor for depression, she remembers dancing in a different park one stoned summer night. This passage is reviving—and goofy. The air, she remembers, is “like the temperature of an unsweaty armpit”.
Clarke’s verbal phrasing is often arresting: “Death arrives and unpacks its valise,” and worry is “squeezing my brain into a martyr’s crown”.
But as wag moves further away from text and deeper into dance, it weakens. There’s a sequence in which Clarke assigns physical images to all of the books she once had on her bookshelf. Because the images are mostly obvious—she assumes a pugnacious pose for The Grapes of Wrath, for instance—the passage is unrewarding and feels long. When this imagery repeats in the dance she does to Rhapsody in Blue, the layering feels more like an abstract idea than a charged inspiration. And while Rhapsody in Blue sustains its energy, the zip leaks out of the dance. Similarly, although the piece offers a sweet surprise at the beginning, the twirling, gesturing choreography that Clarke has set to The Blue Danube waltz is too simplistic to hold interest.
In the coda, Clarke returns to her parka and her words, and wag is so good again that it’s almost possible to forget the boring bits.
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