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Clear Pale Skin
Year of Premiere: 2002
Premiere Season
Credits
Performers
Creative Personnel
Production Team
- Production & Operations Manager: Donna
Aston
- Stage Manager: Annette Dale
- Assistant Stage Manager: Philip Peck aka 'Frog'
(on secondment from the Victorian College of the Arts)
Artistic
Director’s
Notes
In developing the idea of striving for physical perfection, Clear Pale
Skin began as a few simple scenes involving people measuring and comparing
their own bodies to others, and people manipulating another person’s
body to extend that person’s movement. A scene also developed about
a relationship between a woman who perceived herself as being grossly
inadequate and another who she considered to be perfect in every way.
It was set within a context of dance training, an environment where students
often develop extreme and distorted views in terms of how they see themselves
in comparison to others around them.
A colleague who viewed the early beginnings of this work in late 2001
commented on how the relationship between the two characters was reminiscent
of a tragic real-life case involving one woman taking the life of another
with a wish to assume her identity. Intrigued by this strange chance where
the fiction we were creating was actually not so dissimilar to an actual
incident, the work began to focus more on this relationship and its fatal
outcome.
Media Response
"…Friday’s premiere of Wanted, a double bill of Wanted:
ballet for a contemporary democracy and Clear Pale Skin, was, artistically
and socially, one of the happiest dance occasions in Melbourne in a long
time.... in Clear Pale Skin, Obarzanek explores schoolgirls’ obsession
with perfection in dance and the potential to flip from emulating another’s
persona to adopting it. In her most acute and detailed performance to
date, Fiona Cameron moves inexorably from Nicole Johnston’s companion
to murderous inhabiter. Cameron measures her target minutely, with rising
anger; small twists reconfigure her face as she observes, then mirrors,
Johnston’s elegant phrasing, balletic extensions and gentle self-absorption,” THE
AUSTRALIAN.
“Clear Pale Skin takes the world of opinion polls and mass consumption
into the personal realm of the body. A young woman is obsessed by the
apparent perfection of another woman’s body. It so incapacitates
and demoralises her that she is driven to kill this paragon and take on
her identity,” THE AGE.
“… visits familiar choreographic and design territory complete
with the shock value and macabre sexuality that have come to define Chunky’s
reputation,” HERALD SUN.
“Clear Pale Skin centres on numbers… with an ‘ugly duckling’
dancer measuring and comparing her body’s features against her model
of perfection, another dancer, whom she later murders in a fit of jealousy
and assumes her identity. Of particular eeriness is the scene where the
ugly duckling removes her dress of distortion and clinically lays bare
the perfect girl’s corpse, poking and prodding to compare breast
size, hand span etc…” BEAT MAGAZINE.
Performance History
For details of Clear Pale Skin’s performance history, please click
here
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