Some storytellers amble into their tales. Oona Doherty cuts right to the pain.
At the start of this Belfast choreographer’s “Specky Clark,” a narrator gives the bare facts about Edward James Doherty: He was born in Glasgow and sent to Belfast on his own at age 10. Then we see why. A woman, presumably his mother, keels over at the dinner table, and the boy locks into a looping scream. Figures in Halloween masks creep in to take away his mom’s body and dress him for his journey.
It’s immediately clear that “Specky Clark,” in a U.S. premiere run at the Irish Arts Center, is told from the perspective of a traumatized child. The next scene is just the boy (in the performance I saw, Zoé Lecorgne), standing with a suitcase in the mist, shaking for minutes on end. When we meet his foster parents, the Clark sisters, they are cigarette-wielding grotesques, almost like puppets from Jim Henson’s “The Dark Crystal.” Except for the boy’s mother, all adults are viewed through this lens.
The boy’s spectacles attract a nickname, and he gets a job in an abattoir, where his first task is to shoot a pig. Aiming the gun, he imagines the pig in person form, embracing him, but he has to pull the trigger anyway.
It’s not just that the kid’s life is a nightmare. The story is set on Halloween, or Samhain, which — as is explained twice — is the Gaelic festival marking a time when the curtain between the living and the dead is lifted. When the boy is left alone to lock up the abattoir, the pig he shot starts chatting, asking to be escorted to the local pub. More spirits soon join the party.
Since Doherty rocketed onto the international dance scene about a decade ago, she has been interested in the kinetic effects of trauma: how pain is expressed in gestures and movement; how, as in the title of a previous work, it’s “Hard to Be Soft.” Especially when embodied by Doherty, this mode has conveyed an emotional frankness that has been fresh, funny and affecting in its exactitude.
Doherty doesn’t appear in the hourlong “Specky Clark,” and this time she is equally focused on the sublimation and dark humor in verbal storytelling. Even the dancier sections are often accompanied by talk. The narrator recounts tales in which the death of a parent is explained or cushioned by invoking naughty twin fairies or a mythical pig with “a need for speed.” The boy’s most prized possession seems to be a book, maybe of stories like those we are hearing, which teach him how to process his loss.
“Specky Clark” is enriched by these stories, as well as by its music: drone heavy, industrially distorted songs by the folk band Lankum and the track “Necessary Genius,” a tribute to “dreamers, misfits, radicals, outcasts” by the DJ-turned-composer David Holmes. It’s the physical storytelling that falls short.
Doherty empathizes with Specky Clark, a character based on her great-great-grandfather, but in a way that reduces him to his trauma. The boy is little more than a mute victim, manhandled by the Clark sisters as they dress and undress him. It’s sad that the anthropomorphized pig (the amiable Gerard Headley) is the most rounded, the most fully human character. The moments when we might learn more about the boy through movement, as when he is alone in the abattoir, dancing like nobody is watching, are thin and sketchy.
This is especially true of the climax, a long Walpurgisnacht segment that fails to whip up any real frenzy. Amid circling, spinning and club-ready freestyling, the visitors from the Otherworld resort to more of a tired slow-mo that plagues “Specky Clark” all the way through. It’s clever how the spirits reprise Specky’s anachronistic dance moves, like the floss — his idea of dance — but the child’s view ultimately becomes too choreographically restricting.
This nightmare is also a fantasy: of having special access to the spirit world, of being reunited with a lost loved one. But the figure who seems to be missing from “Specky Clark” is the Doherty who charged her earlier works. In her direction and choreography here, the precision of her performances remains on the other side of a semitransparent curtain.
“Specky Clark”
Through Nov. 15 at Irish Arts Center; irishartscenter.org
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