The Brooklyn Rail

She lifted her cold brew with both hands: her right hand completely bare, and on her left, a set of French acrylics. We sat in Mud coffee.

Our original meeting place, B&H Dairy—a kosher East Village relic—was closed for summer vacation, as indicated by a charming flyer featuring challah bread at the beach. I turn to Natalie Palamides, Clown Queen and solo performer in her new show Weer, who doesn’t mind strolling a block or two away. She’s the type of walker who stops and looks at you: completely present and giving her full attention.

As we crossed the street, she stepped a bit quicker: “I was hit by a motorcycle once.”

“You were?” I asked.

“Yeah, but I was only concussed. I still did my show that night.”

That’s just the type of performer Natalie Palamides is. Informed by Jacques Lecoq’s movement method, she comes from a tradition of prioritizing physicality and expressiveness. We sit in a corner booth, and I marvel at how she wears every anecdote, emotion, and inner thought so completely on her face. She widens her eyes and flattens herself against the booth as she discusses romance.

Weer, a romantic tragedy, follows two star-crossed and toxically engrossed lovers, Mark and Christina. Both characters are played by Natalie: Christina, on the left side of her body, with appropriately styled Y2K butterfly hair clips and one half of a pink long-sleeved cardigan with faux fur wrist cuffs, and Mark, on the right side of her body, with brown curly hair and a classically bro blue plaid shirt. It’s New Year’s Eve 1999. There’s a lovers’ quarrel.

In Mud, Natalie is now standing up and reenacting just one of many micro decisions regarding movement in Weer. She murmurs to herself, getting into character—or more accurately, characters. She breaks down the couple’s first meeting scene where Mark grabs Christina’s hand. I watch her angle out as Mark.

“Wait!” Mark says as he looks up, grabbing her other hand. Depending on which moment Christina looks up to meet Mark’s gaze, she’s trying to see which movement will make the joke land.

Dropping both characters, she looks up at me. “You know, in a way, I’m telegraphing to the audience what I want them to see.” Mark, with Christina’s hand in his, faces down as she pivots to Christina. She looks up at Mark, wide-eyed and in love—that’s the movement where the joke lands.

“This is where the economy of movement comes in, in terms of the joke…we only need to see that moment once. And I want it to feel like a shared experience between me and the audience.”

She plays out other iterations of the same scene. Mark looks up, then Christina’s head stays up as she switches—but it doesn’t have the same effect. It’s convoluted; it loses the rhythm the previous version had. “Any small change with the physicality can change how a joke lands.”

The comedy is in Palamides’s hands, literally; in Weer, the hands are everything. “I have a compartment in my head that is just thinking about the hand, what the hand is doing.” Rightfully so—Natalie’s responsibility is to create the invisible with her hands, being that she’s her own scene partner. We see Natalie’s take on the classic rom-com-coffee-spill-meet-cute, which usually gets an uproarious applause from the audience. She admits, “I’m just, you know, hitting a cup of orange juice [in a coffee cup] back and forth between myself, like it’s not [physically] impressive in the least.” But there’s something so comically brilliant that surprises the audience; this quintessentially Charlie Chaplin-esque moment flips the rom-com cliché on its head. It’s through movement that Palamides not only hones her audience’s attention but also challenges herself as a director.

It astonished me: the level of bodily awareness and stage presence she had as a performer, ultimately allowing her to see herself from a director’s perspective.

“Maybe this is some sort of mental illness. But I’m always examining my social experiences, from some other place in my mind’s eye. When I’m doing a piece, there’s another part of my brain that’s also judging it, sometimes in real time.”

Rarely can a performer balance the ability to have a clear vision of her work while joyfully suspending her caution in the pursuit of being present on stage. She devised the piece through a process of workshopping and improvising the show many times.

“I also have kind of … like a weird body memory where I am able to clock something and keep it the exact way every single time if I like how I did it the first time.”

Grinding out the show, endlessly discarding the bits that didn’t work (sadly, one of my favorites, a Lady and the Tramp style spaghetti dinner with herself) and keeping the bits that do, Palamides's process is demanding and thoughtful yet organic and vulnerable. But that doesn’t make the jokes any less gloriously stupid.

Palamides is raising the standards of not just clown but all live performance. She’s not interested in a show that doesn’t challenge her. Weer explodes in front of you like an energetic bomb. Athletic in its quality and fearless in its conception, Weer won Best Show at Edinburgh Fringe from The List and opened Soho Theatre Walthamstow, London’s newest 1,000-seat venue. Weer is coming to New York this Fall in A24’s newly acquired Cherry Lane Theatre and will run through November 9.