Review by Linus Mulherin • Halifax • 2025-04-25
To begin Bad Poetry, Sara Porter, the creator of this uncategorizable dance piece, addresses the audience and offers a brief explanation of its origins. It’s far from a comprehensive explanation, and somewhere during, Porter steps deftly into dance, complaining that she hates it when people say dance is a language. She stops halfway through her sentence, interrupted by something. Is it what she’s saying that’s holding her back, or is it something in her movement? She tries again and gets hung up in the same place. She tries once more and pushes through this time, into a kaleidoscope of speech and movement, poetry and dance, as over the course of an hour the mediums are blended and examined lovingly by Porter and her co-performer Jessie Garon.
Discipline mixes with freedom, seriousness with silliness and verse with uninhibited dance.
At times Porter’s movements punctuate her words as repeated motifs that start to suggest a system, the linguistics of a body’s language. Then the dance will soar away from the poetry, breaking free into not just an extension of speech but something distinct, untouchable. Puns on feet ground the dance in the solid foundation of poetic metre right after Porter says that “technique is something I eschew. I recommend that you do, too.” Discipline mixes with freedom, seriousness with silliness and verse with uninhibited dance. Garon allows words to dictate movement exactly, calling numbered steps during a passive-aggressive tiff before a dancing riff on sex transforms movement directly into readable metaphor. Lines of verse become the lines of limbs as double entendres playfully spill over from speech into dance. Words become movements and movements words, destabilizing the search for proper expression. “I just want to know where we stand!” pleads Porter at one point.
It’s a difficult thing to portray in a written review all the qualities of Bad Poetry, a piece that does so much to explain itself but adds so much more in the negative space the words leave. When what can’t be said is just as important as what can it seems inadequate to try and drag it back into the verbal realm. Bad Poetry is play, an exploration of the qualities of its mediums, each one transcending the other’s abilities and complementing them at the same time. Sometimes the words and the dance cleave closely together and sometimes they fly apart, spelling out their differences. “I’m not dancing, I’m being a poem,” Porter repeats several times. Sometimes that line seems facetious. Sometimes sincere. And sometimes, very true.
Written, created and performed by: Sara Porter, with Jessie Garon
Performances Wednesday, April 23 @ 8:00pm, Saturday, April 26th @ 6:00pm, Sunday, April 27th @ 12:15pm. Get tickets here.
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