As an art student at Columbia University seven years ago, Wendy Clinard visited a dance studio to sketch a friend who was practicing. She picked up her charcoal and positioned her sketch pad in her lap as the strains of flamenco guitar filled the studio. The dancer’s feet began to move: bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp.
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Those two worlds, ancient Greek mythology and flamenco, have never been seen together onstage in Chicago. “When I was living and studying in Spain I saw the Ballet Nacional do Medea,” she says. “But it was more a theater piece with dance added. In New York I saw people doing experimental things with flamenco, but I never saw masks. I’ve seen storytelling with flamenco, never puppetry.”
Clinard focused all her energy on the idea. “It was just there, around me, so completely I couldn’t ignore it,” she says. “It was blind. Even when I started choreographing, I still didn’t know what the end of the piece would be. The end just came one day. Things fell into place. It was like a puzzle; we were putting things next to each other, the costumes, the theater itself, space and shape and line. Those pieces created the whole.”
Clinard settled on the myth of Theseus after she dreamed of a scene in which Pasiphae, hoping to seduce the white bull, hides in a transparent cow. In the show Clinard remains absolutely motionless inside the cow, yet she is blazing with energy. When she dances her duet with Karen Stelling as the white bull, they are a study in contrasts. Clinard is in complete control of every part of her body. Her fingertips are positioned just so, her hair and even her eyelashes seem to move in sync with her swoops and stomps. She is intense, her brow furrowed; a sensual seriousness envelops her. Stelling is a sprite, her physique less chiseled than Clinard’s, her movements seemingly conjured ad lib. While Clinard struts boldly, her rib cage thrust forward, Stelling leads with her belly and hips.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Nathan Mandell.
