Who knew dancing out of your pants in front of a crowd could be so inspiring?

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This article was published 20/07/2015 (3741 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A defining moment — a humiliating Grade 5 talent show performance — in the development of actress Claire Patton still reverberates through her stage work decades later.

“The first thing I thought was, ‘I am never going onstage again,’” says Patton, who grew up in Irving, Texas. “The second thing was, ‘Wow I really have to keep track of my underwear in the future.’”

She managed to keep one of those promises. After her unforgettable stage debut as a 11-year-old wannabe dance star, Patton, 37, not only went onstage again but has made it her professional career, which brings her to the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival for the first time this year.

What was once a painful memory is now a bracing inspiration for her solo comedy A Girl’s Guide to War, about a middle schooler whose talent-show partner abandons her just before curtain time.

“As an artist, you go to where the juice is, where there is emotional resonance,” Patton says in a telephone interview. “These painful and awkward moments are really interesting to me, particularly for this piece, because at that age you have a lot of moments like that, where you think you failed, blew it and you will never be a success.

“Thematically, it’s informed my work a lot.”

What still burns in her is the memory of joining three other friends in performing a dance for her elementary school talent show. They painted faces on pillow cases, which they wore over their heads as costumes. Being able to see what they were doing didn’t seem important at the time. Arms were attached to the pillow cases that hung down at the dancers’ sides.

“I remember thinking this was going to be the most brilliant thing that anyone had ever seen, that this was going to kill,” recalls Patton, the daughter of an actress, who is now based in Boulder, Colo.

Before leaving for her debut, she had to fill out the arms of her costume with some material — all she could think of was jamming a pile of her underwear in the sleeves, which were pinned shut with a glove at the end.

“This little alarm bell went off in my head, saying that maybe this is not a good idea because you are in fifth grade and underwear is the most intimate thing I own,” she says, with a laugh. “But in Texas we are taught to ignore our instincts.”

The foursome started dancing, or at least bobbing up and down in random directions. The laughter from the audience of students, parents and teachers grew louder but the young hoofers had no idea what was happening.

When they removed their costumes to take a bow, Patton noticed a clump of cotton that looked vaguely familiar and realized, to her horror, that it was her panties. They had fallen out of her sleeves and were all over the stage. And everyone in the school knew who they belonged to.

“Parents said we did a great job but you know they were lying,” she says. “You know it’s a total nightmare and you’ll never recover, you’ll never be OK again.”

Such a devastating event can either defeat the victim or become a building block of personal redemption. A Girl’s Guide to War, which debuted in Boulder in February, borrows that bad time and put it to good use. Like Patton, Millicent Gulch is a Grade 5 student whose best friend stands her up at a talent show. Her response is to hijack the event and declare war on her former pal, while recruiting the audience as her army.

“It wasn’t intentional, but I think somewhere talent show was speaking to me,” she says. “Yes, Millicent is an exaggerated version of parts of me.”

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Millicent has studied world domination, says Patton, but she is waging emotional warfare. Her objective is to reclaim her power and stand up for herself.

A positive benefit of her early stage debacle is that she has become devoted to over-preparing. Of course, she has also become a stickler for keeping track of her undies onstage.

“The only underwear in the show are the ones on my butt. There are no underwear moments in the show. I don’t think there is any way my underwear can end up on the stage floor.”

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca