Clara Delorme: Clinical reclamation of the body at play

Still, white body on the edge of a large white block, Clara Delorme perches on the very edge of the platform like matter yet to be moulded. She is almost immobile, her breath like the razor edge of a knife.

With the poise of a trapped animal, or a person on the edge of a great unknown, her gaze flicks to scrutinise us, flicking to every creak of a chair, every muffled cough, holding us trapped.

At the National Arts Festival in the double bill titled by her name, Clara Delorme is the artwork. The first piece is L’albâtre (Alabaster), followed by a work in response to a sexual harassment case where a man named Justin posted images from L’albâtre on porn sites under the heading: ‘Clara Delorme lift her leg to make her vagina lip come out’.

In L’albâtre, we still ourselves beneath her gaze, like flies being pinned on a board. Finally, her left foot lifts and she flexes her toes. There is a sense of relief. The contained energy, the hyper-presence of the performer, and the sense of the us being equally watched creates a vital tension.

If alabaster, the soft, white rock that has become symbolic of its potential rather than its own presence is part of how we understand Delorme’s act, then our expectation of alabaster to be carved into a new form becomes part of what is being analysed. Delorme puts the audience’s desire for movement on this cold white table, above these harsh white lights, her naked figure on the slab a manifestation of potential.

When she does move, she frustrates every expectation of dance. Seemingly lost in a reverie of self discovery, taking us along as we see the body anew; limbs dissociated and attaining a life almost independent.

She becomes both the first person in the world, born out of the foam into a new world, and a child at play, inadvertently revealing secrets of our own physicality we’ve forgotten.

The play ends, abruptly as a disturbed daydream, and she shifts across the light, hips lifted to become a physical manifestation of Gustave Courbet’s famous painting L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World) before this first captivating performance ends.

We exit as seating and technical arrangements are shuffled, returning to see Clara Delorme lift her leg to make her vagina lip come out. With chairs removed leaving fewer seats than there are audience members, we are told to sit wherever we choose. This invites intimacy, but Delorme is detached, staring into a laptop screen placed on the floor.

We become voyeurs, separated from her work. Wearing only an oversized white t-shirt, she removes her spectacles before carefully pulling two white latex gloves over the same hand that was central to the repetitive gesture in L’abâtre. Her right foot, part of a duo of movement in L’abâtre, is also gloved.

Lit only in the in the dim glow of the screen, the gloves initially having resembled crumpled tissues, the detritus of, or preparation for, masturbation. As she shifts beneath the white cotton, performing a dance reminiscent of a striptease as she removes it, we hallucinate in the semi-darkness, her body morphing into sculptural shapes.

This bill is layered with meaning, each gesture a deliberate act refuting the violence enacted by the non-consensual use of her work as pornography; a cleansing. At first perplexing, the performance takes some time to settle.

Slowly the realisation: Clara Delorme lift her leg to make her vagina lip come out is a clinical intellectual fuck you to those who sought to profit by perverting her art.

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