Poet Puzzles in ‘Namely, Muscles’

The solitary aquamarine chair in the middle of the bare, black Harvard Dance Studio did not know what was coming to it when nationally touring dancer and poet Claire Porter took the stage on Saturday night—and neither did the audience. For the subsequent hour and half, Porter performed “Namely, Muscles,” an original piece in which she danced while reading aloud over 30 poems about muscles. Porter’s performance was often eccentric, but presented a profound and creative work of mixed media.

The work consisted of Porter’s portrayal of Dr. Nickie Nom, a “Forensic Orthopedic Autopsy Muscular Anatomical Surgical Specialist.” Porter recited the doctor’s latest work, the eponymous collection of poems about muscles, while moving her own muscles in interpretive dances of the poems. The performance was imaginative, creative, and a bit beyond the pale.

Claire Porter’s poetry dives into the mundane names of over 68 different muscles, describing their respective functions and etymological origins. With titles such as “Psoas—The Tender Bender,” and “Gluteus to my Ears,” you couldn’t help but feel like you were a fifth-grader learning the parts of the body—or in medical school, attending a particularly eccentric extracurricular performance.

Either way, the audience should have been notified of the prerequisite for attending the performance—a knowledge of muscular anatomy. Such knowledge would have been the only way to make sense of the extensive nomenclature that was thrown at the audience during the performance. But the alien-sounding names ended up not being too much of a problem.

Porter’s poetry is a close reading of the muscles that move us. It pays attention to the detail of these organs’ functions and the beauty of their synchronized relationships. In her performance, Porter often emphasized this theme to make a statement about the importance of working and moving together and being able to understand one another in the greater scheme of things.

The poems also bring to center stage the importance of naming not only muscles, but also other aspects of our life. Nomenclature and identification turn out to be an important underlying theme in the collection, sub-textually posing the age-old question of “What’s in a name?”

Judging from Porter’s performance, her answer is, “A lot.” Her poetry proves to be comical, interpretive, and sporadic. It is also quirky, as can be expected about a work devoted entirely to the muscles. However, Porter’s accompanying dance truly made the poems come to life.

While speaking the poems aloud, Porter skipped, twirled, ran, rotated, lay, jumped, crunched, and curled all over the stage, using that single chair as a point of refocus and occasional music as a mood intensifier. All other aspects of the stage and set were empty, giving the performance a raw, bare-bones aesthetic.

Just as Shakespeare’s plays are meant to be performed, not merely read, “Namely, Muscles” asks to be interpreted through movement and dance. Porter seemed to explore the world of the poems naturally and with great pleasure. However, the poet faced greater difficulty in communicating that internal world through her performance. Porter seems to offer the suggestion in “Namely Muscles” that randomness is art—but in reality, art is not always random.

There were clear moments of artistic depth in Porter’s performance, but they came in the middle of very sporadic and unclear movements and diction. At one moment, Dr. Nikki Nom was sitting down patiently to begin the next poem; in the next, she had twisted herself on the chair, hugging it for dear life; in yet another, she twirled on stage to a background of classical music before running from one side of the stage to the other.

The eccentric definitely outweighed the conventional in “Namely, Muscles,” for better or worse. Porter took the figurative to be the literal as she interpreted her own words through the actions they suggested—and the result, although esoteric, was also profound. Porter’s unique performance embodied the ability of poems and muscles to move the audience.