LONG GONE: A Poetry Sideshow by Karrie Waarala
REVIEW BY PATRICK MANNING
Admittedly, I was running a bit late to the Saturday performance of LONG GONE: A Poetry Sideshow by Karrie Waarala. It had just started drizzling, and as I presented my ticket and brushed the water from my jacket, a man dressed as a ring-master called to me if you’re in line, you’re on time. I entered the theater at the Riverside Arts Center in Ypsilanti, Michigan; the ring-master followed me in and yelled to the woman on the stage, who was leaning back in her chair sipping from a flask, It’s show time, Tess. As I made my way to an open seat, the woman – Karrie Waarala’s tattooed lady, Tess – stood up and walked across the stage, revealing her inked arms. This is a person you cannot take your eyes off of: the click of the heels on the stage, the strong walk, the canvas skin, and, then, the booming voice as she intuits the first question we’re all dying to ask: “Yes, they hurt.”
The opening poem “The Tattooed Lady Answers the Marks” assumes the questions asked by “the marks” – the carnival spectators. From the beginning, the audience is implicated in the narrative, becoming at once the audience at this performance and the marks – asking the implied questions Were you born with them? Do they come off? Do you have them everywhere. Even…down there? Can I see? And the
tattooed lady, already knowing the questions, responds,
No, I wasn’t born this way.
No, they don’t rub off.
No, you cannot touch them.
Yes, even there.
Yes, for an extra dollar.
The implied exchange between the audience and the performer, the spectator and the spectacle, figures as a central theme of the show: is the freak the tattooed lady or the person who lines up to see her? Who is watching whom? At the end of the first poem, the tattooed lady asks the crowd “when the carnival has yanked up stakes / and we’re nothing but taillights… / where will you be? / What will you be?” From that opening, you know this isn’t a performance just about sideshow freaks. It’s about all of us; and all of us are freaks.
Framed as a series of lessons on carnie speak, the performance initiates the audience into the language of the sideshow. In this subtle way, the sideshow takes center stage. Mark, possum belly, working freak and made freak: these become our vocabulary lesson. At the beginning of each lesson, the carnie word flashes on the screen at center stage as Tess says, “Lesson number 1 in carnie-speak, folks.” This narrative frame not only assimilates the audience into the carnival, but its performativity highlights the interaction between audience and performer. This is perhaps most emphatically demonstrated in the poem “Three Shots for a Dollar.” In it, Tess confronts the pain of living as a spectacle:
Some days I want to bury this carnival,
lions and all. Leave nothing but bones.
I’ve done my time in the jail of this skin,
my senseless collage of wretched mistakes
From this pain grows a fury that demands – with her arms wide and voice both powerful and vulnerable – that the audience “Watch.” And we cannot help but watch.
If the only theme the show tackled was the interplay between audience and performer, it would still be impressive. But Waarala’s performance goes even further to explore the psychology of her character. Bally, we learn during one of the carnie-speak lessons, is the ringleader’s build-up – not merely convincing people to do something, but, as Waarala explains, to actually convince people they want to do something. Tess wants to return home, but even more, she wants to be wanted at her home. In one of the most poignant moments, the audience hears alternating stanzas, first from Tess and then from her father. This dialogic performance is done smoothly, with the black and white image of a farmer taking center stage on the screen. Tess describes her journey back to Indiana; her father’s voice hopes for her return. When his voice is heard through the speakers, Tess is silent and still in the shadows. Almost there, she remembers her mother’s disdain and realizes “there wasn’t a lick of bally / would turn the tip in that woman’s eyes.” Unable to take the final step toward her father – either afraid of rejection or afraid her mother will ostracize her father on Tess’s account, we don’t know for sure – she “turned around” with her thumb “pointed south / and went home” – home, back to the carnival.
Instead of being simply melancholy and rejected, though, the tattooed lady is simultaneously powerful and provocative. The performance goes beyond the psychology of the single woman and interrogates broader social questions, specifically questions of gender. Rejecting any tired dichotomies of femininity as either vulnerable or strong, Waarala’s character inhabits both spaces completely. “Hunting” explores this duality: Tess looks in a bar for “a man who will fuck the way he fells trees.” But instead, the lumberjack she seduces “stares at my arms / like they are open wounds” and “takes me down / the way he would put an injured deer out of its misery.” Her own sexual desire, her hunter instinct, is unfulfilled; instead, she is reminded of her own skin – of her vulnerability.
The many layers of Waarala’s performance culminate in questions about the meaning of art itself. The tattooed lady’s body is a canvas, a prayer book, a map. “Meditation” returns to the opening’s emphatic reminder that traditional, judgmental prayer is “not how I pray.” Here, the tattooed lady confesses that “The pain is where I pray.” She continues
I find elusive peace here in the hurt,
the needle-sharp surrender into art.
In many ways, this admission is a culmination of the various themes throughout LONG GONE: performativity, gender definition, pain. Her body becomes an easel, but also the palette – the art and the medium. This blurs the very distinction between the two and asks the audience to watch and to respond.
It was still raining when I left the theater, contemplating the richness and texture of Waarala’s performance. Over and over, the space of borders and boundaries – between home and the road, strength and vulnerability, femininity and masculinity, audience and performer, freak and mark – are not just questioned, but crushed. When the sideshow takes center stage, the places we occupy comfortably every day – our routines and desire for sameness, where our “calendar blanches / back into empty ” – are no longer comforting. Karrie Waarala’s performance of LONG GONE demands that we consider the other possibility, the one that just might hurt.
Admittedly, I was running a bit late to the Saturday performance of LONG GONE: A Poetry Sideshow by Karrie Waarala. It had just started drizzling, and as I presented my ticket and brushed the water from my jacket, a man dressed as a ring-master called to me if you’re in line, you’re on time. I entered the theater at the Riverside Arts Center in Ypsilanti, Michigan; the ring-master followed me in and yelled to the woman on the stage, who was leaning back in her chair sipping from a flask, It’s show time, Tess. As I made my way to an open seat, the woman – Karrie Waarala’s tattooed lady, Tess – stood up and walked across the stage, revealing her inked arms. This is a person you cannot take your eyes off of: the click of the heels on the stage, the strong walk, the canvas skin, and, then, the booming voice as she intuits the first question we’re all dying to ask: “Yes, they hurt.”
The opening poem “The Tattooed Lady Answers the Marks” assumes the questions asked by “the marks” – the carnival spectators. From the beginning, the audience is implicated in the narrative, becoming at once the audience at this performance and the marks – asking the implied questions Were you born with them? Do they come off? Do you have them everywhere. Even…down there? Can I see? And the
tattooed lady, already knowing the questions, responds,
No, I wasn’t born this way.
No, they don’t rub off.
No, you cannot touch them.
Yes, even there.
Yes, for an extra dollar.
The implied exchange between the audience and the performer, the spectator and the spectacle, figures as a central theme of the show: is the freak the tattooed lady or the person who lines up to see her? Who is watching whom? At the end of the first poem, the tattooed lady asks the crowd “when the carnival has yanked up stakes / and we’re nothing but taillights… / where will you be? / What will you be?” From that opening, you know this isn’t a performance just about sideshow freaks. It’s about all of us; and all of us are freaks.
Framed as a series of lessons on carnie speak, the performance initiates the audience into the language of the sideshow. In this subtle way, the sideshow takes center stage. Mark, possum belly, working freak and made freak: these become our vocabulary lesson. At the beginning of each lesson, the carnie word flashes on the screen at center stage as Tess says, “Lesson number 1 in carnie-speak, folks.” This narrative frame not only assimilates the audience into the carnival, but its performativity highlights the interaction between audience and performer. This is perhaps most emphatically demonstrated in the poem “Three Shots for a Dollar.” In it, Tess confronts the pain of living as a spectacle:
Some days I want to bury this carnival,
lions and all. Leave nothing but bones.
I’ve done my time in the jail of this skin,
my senseless collage of wretched mistakes
From this pain grows a fury that demands – with her arms wide and voice both powerful and vulnerable – that the audience “Watch.” And we cannot help but watch.
If the only theme the show tackled was the interplay between audience and performer, it would still be impressive. But Waarala’s performance goes even further to explore the psychology of her character. Bally, we learn during one of the carnie-speak lessons, is the ringleader’s build-up – not merely convincing people to do something, but, as Waarala explains, to actually convince people they want to do something. Tess wants to return home, but even more, she wants to be wanted at her home. In one of the most poignant moments, the audience hears alternating stanzas, first from Tess and then from her father. This dialogic performance is done smoothly, with the black and white image of a farmer taking center stage on the screen. Tess describes her journey back to Indiana; her father’s voice hopes for her return. When his voice is heard through the speakers, Tess is silent and still in the shadows. Almost there, she remembers her mother’s disdain and realizes “there wasn’t a lick of bally / would turn the tip in that woman’s eyes.” Unable to take the final step toward her father – either afraid of rejection or afraid her mother will ostracize her father on Tess’s account, we don’t know for sure – she “turned around” with her thumb “pointed south / and went home” – home, back to the carnival.
Instead of being simply melancholy and rejected, though, the tattooed lady is simultaneously powerful and provocative. The performance goes beyond the psychology of the single woman and interrogates broader social questions, specifically questions of gender. Rejecting any tired dichotomies of femininity as either vulnerable or strong, Waarala’s character inhabits both spaces completely. “Hunting” explores this duality: Tess looks in a bar for “a man who will fuck the way he fells trees.” But instead, the lumberjack she seduces “stares at my arms / like they are open wounds” and “takes me down / the way he would put an injured deer out of its misery.” Her own sexual desire, her hunter instinct, is unfulfilled; instead, she is reminded of her own skin – of her vulnerability.
The many layers of Waarala’s performance culminate in questions about the meaning of art itself. The tattooed lady’s body is a canvas, a prayer book, a map. “Meditation” returns to the opening’s emphatic reminder that traditional, judgmental prayer is “not how I pray.” Here, the tattooed lady confesses that “The pain is where I pray.” She continues
I find elusive peace here in the hurt,
the needle-sharp surrender into art.
In many ways, this admission is a culmination of the various themes throughout LONG GONE: performativity, gender definition, pain. Her body becomes an easel, but also the palette – the art and the medium. This blurs the very distinction between the two and asks the audience to watch and to respond.
It was still raining when I left the theater, contemplating the richness and texture of Waarala’s performance. Over and over, the space of borders and boundaries – between home and the road, strength and vulnerability, femininity and masculinity, audience and performer, freak and mark – are not just questioned, but crushed. When the sideshow takes center stage, the places we occupy comfortably every day – our routines and desire for sameness, where our “calendar blanches / back into empty ” – are no longer comforting. Karrie Waarala’s performance of LONG GONE demands that we consider the other possibility, the one that just might hurt.
PATRICK MANNING likes to explore Michigan and blogs about it at http://handwavemi.wordpress.com. He completed his bachelor’s degree at the University of Pittsburgh. At Eastern Michigan University, he earned Master’s degrees in Literature and American Culture. This fall, he will begin working on his doctorate at McMaster University, where he plans to focus on immigrant and working class literature.