Surrealism and Magic (Patreon)

There's this weird thing about theater, it's magic. Like, literally. Magic. The superstition that a bad dress rehearsal means you'll have a good opening isn't just a thing that people say to make themselves feel better. It's based on experience. Because, very often, a show will seem like an utter disaster just days, sometimes hours, before it opens. But then you get in front of an audience, *literal magic happens,* and the show is great. It doesn't happen all the time. Sometimes you do Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark. Sometimes you just do a show that's ok. But sometimes, way too many times to make any sense, everything falls into place and you've done something great. That's how I feel about last night's act. A couple months ago I, very uncharacteristicly, pitched Clara on an idea that was maybe too vague to even call an idea. I had a painting and a song and I thought it should be a duet. I usually have a story in mind, or at least a character or gimmick. But this time I had just a visceral feeling; sticky, confining, the feeling of being wrapped in something that gets tighter the more you struggle, but also the body horror that's in so much of Dali's painting. The helpless feeling you have in dreams where your teeth fall out or your bones melt away. Sexy, right? Obviously the perfect beginning of a burlesque act. But I pitched it anyway. Just the "I want to do a duet to this song, based on this painting" bit, not the weird stuff. I half expected to not get picked but then we did. And the idea didn't get any less vague. Usually I get basic choreography after listening to the song about a dozen times but this time, just a couple weird visuals here and there. Things like "I don't think we should have faces," or "I think my arms should get really long,' or "what if we end with everything covered *except* for our genitals?" But that... didn't add up to an act. I tried doing contact improv with Johnny and found out that, for non-theater people, contact improv is just slightly odd foreplay. It was getting perilously close to show time so I just started putting together costumes. I went through my costumes pulling out things that felt like they might work. I started thinking about *how* we might do an act without faces or make my arms get really long. I looked for more influences like Mcqueen's fashion design, and Francis Bacon's paintings. I knew that I didn't want Johnny to end up in boring old underwear but he didn't want to go full monty so I'd have to come up with a suitably unique, naked-ish, masculine final look. There's just not enough sexy underwear options for men so I looked into harnesses and came across this insane Yammamoto Blazer Harness and the beginnings of a costume began. So I made costumes and hoped they became an act. This was my most intuitive act creation. I didn't really know what I was doing or why I was doing it, just kind of blindly feeling my way along, making choices based purely on what felt right. It was an appropriate approach for a surrealist piece, but it was damn scary. There were many times that I thought about just canceling. Just saying "Sorry, I thought I had an act but I didn't. I can't do the show." But I kept going and managed to finish the costumes by the day before the show. Yikes. Johnny was pretty freaked out by this point. I have a tendency to get ambitious with choreography and forget that he doesn't have the movement training that I do. So he was really worried that I would ask too much and we would have no time to rehearse and the whole thing would be impossible. Lucky for him, I still didn't know what this act was! I had no choreography or expectations. I just said "Let's put these costumes on and see how they come off." We didn't use music or any dancing, we just figured out the basic logistics of getting naked. Because we weren't wearing normal human clothes. We were wearing a tube of fabric that connected our faces and a dress without a front and a half jacket harness with a ripaway half shirt and shrug with five foot long sleeves that ended in gloves. I was really worried we'd run out of song just getting our clothes off. So we just did a practice strip and then I had to go do another show. But that show was in Coney Island so I had a lot of time to think about the act. I listened to the music and thought about how things came off, how they felt and what order they logistically had to come off. And suddenly I had an act. And Johnny got to have a face. "So you take off this hood that connects us," I told him. "And then you have a face but I don't. So this whole act is about you trying to find my humanity. And I take off your clothes in retaliation, to make you more vulnerable." I don't know if that makes sense to anyone else but it made sense to me and Johnny. Instead of choreography we had an objective and an order in which to take off clothes and, to be honest, that's usually all I have. And it really worked! It was simple enough that Johnny could just stand there and I could dance around him. But we got onstage and he started improvising, dancing just as much as I was. People LOVED it. Multiple people said it was their favorite act of the night. That theater magic just kicked in and it all just *worked.* It's scary to work intuitively but it's been giving me really good results. Sadly, no one took video of the act but I think it's good enough that we're going to rent a studio and video the act.