Ariel Clarke

If you’ve watched or so much as seen the trailer for “Too Hot to Handle,” it might be time to step away from the computer in your Zoom room (that’s not a thing) and let your body move how it needs to move. That’s what Ariel Clark is doing anyway. The choreographer from Orlando,FL is getting into her feels and her body to manifest something as simple as an instinct. Clarke’s movements are vivid with rich nuanced expressions that indicate the depth and landscape of her emotional world. While it’s tempting to binge watch one’s way through this shelter-in-place, Clarke is offering us a new way to get through this pandemic, by looking inward and moving outward:

I’ve been reflecting on different areas in my life, as one does in the midst of the time and space that quarantine creates. Particularly how, over the past nine years of my life, I’ve isolated myself from certain experiences and possibilities, how I’ve placed myself in a defensive posture out of fear to protect myself from encountering more possible pain.

Earlier this week, I was heavily revisiting my favorite artist’s latest album, Angel Olsen’s “All Mirrors”, as Monday, I would have been in Athens to see her live. The more I listen to her, the more I understand how the subject matter and way she writes is the verbal expression of almost all my experiences. Being that I’m not much of a verbal communicator(my body is my means), hearing my experiences out loud is really powerful and evocative.

Hearing her song, “Spring”, with these new lenses of reflection established a different emotional attachment, which I knew I had to act on immediately. I created this in perhaps thirty minutes or so (it poured right out of me). I tried my best to express the themes of my heart and Angel’s words; of how isolation and betrayal taints one’s lenses, how distance created over time between two people can make one unrecognizable, how the more one ages, the more admittance of shortcoming and humility one expresses, how, despite deep pain and fear, and thus isolation, one (she) still somehow holds the tiniest spark of hope that something exists out there that is pure and good and just for her. All together, it is an expression of love, of loss, of regret and appreciation for past presences that no longer exist, and of admitting weak and wishful thinking.

Get into your feels and your body and see what happens.