Dance of the Conchord

Jemaine Clement
Jemaine ClementIllustration by Tom Bachtell

Jemaine Clement was early for the dance in the church basement. The gap-toothed actor and mainstay of the tongue-in-cheek band Flight of the Conchords had put on a loose shirt and shorts and grown a broody, two-day beard in preparation for the unlit “No Lights, No Lycra” jam at a Lutheran church in Greenpoint. But the door—posted with rules that included “No watching,” “No breakdancing,” “No cell phones,” and “Sh-h-h!”—wouldn’t open till 8:15 p.m.

The “No Lights, No Lycra” craze originated in Australia, in 2009, and soon migrated to Clement’s native New Zealand, where he heard about it from two friends. “One loved it,” he reported. “One said it made her feel dizzy.” In L.A., he’d sought out the Cimmerian revels but failed to pinpoint the appeal, so now he was trying again. “Why is it different from dancing in your house, where no one can see you?” he wondered. “Maybe it’s the smell.” On cue, a passing young woman explained, “In the dark, you can dance however you feel in your heart.”

Deciding, after some bashful waffling, to work up to baring his heart, Clement repaired to a local dive bar. Noting its mock-Tudor timbering and the bartender’s head kerchief, he murmured, “This looks like a pirate bar.” His request for a lemonade elicited a scowl. “Are you British?” the bartender asked. “Because British people ask for lemonade when they mean Sprite.” “I meant lemonade,” Clement said, not quite audibly.

He accepted a warm glass of water. Then he demonstrated his favorite dance move: the prancing horse, where you kick up one foot and canter forward. “You can add reins if you choose,” he noted. After a moment, he clarified: “It’s more for dancing in lit areas.”

Clement has none of the overconfidence of the Playboy Mansion screen persona he sometimes affects, and all of the quizzicality of his more usual persona. A lot of lacerating thoughts seem to go unsaid. In the film “People Places Things,” which opened last week, he plays a graphic novelist named Will Henry, who lives in Brooklyn and feels generally put upon—particularly after he discovers his girlfriend, Charlie, the mother of his five-year-old twins, having sex with a tubby monologist named Gary. After Charlie leaves Will and begins taking improv classes, she explains to him that “Gary thinks I have a lot of unexplored talent.” “Does he?” Will replies—a rejoinder that Clement freights with sarcasm and longing. But Clement said that while his Jemaine character on the bygone HBO show “Flight of the Conchords” could be passive-aggressive—“He was a bit of a wimp”—Will is simply passive: “He’s entertaining himself, by insulting two people at once, and thinking no one’s listening. Unlike almost every other character in films, who takes decisive action by a certain page in the script, Will feels like a slice of real life, because he doesn’t have the power to change.”

Seeing a block of posters for Gary’s latest monologue finally inspires Will to act: he pulls out a chisel-tipped pen. “I actually drew the vandalism you see myself,” Clement said, proudly. “The ones of Gary as bin Laden and Hitler were in the script, but I added the vomit, and an eyeball coming out—the gross-out stuff. And if Gary’s image hadn’t been cut off here”—he indicated his chest—“it would have been nice to put a tiny penis on him.”

Nursing his water, he explained that he’d never sought to be the center of attention: “When I was twenty, I was a writer for a New Zealand sketch show called ‘Skitz’ that wasn’t very good. We’d get told off a lot by our producer and then we’d sit together at dinner, silent. I realized that if I wrote a part I could play—a nerd, or someone I could do an impression of, like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mick Jagger or Prince—it would give me a day out of the writing room. So I guess I’m still amused now that I’m doing acting. It’s just a funny thing to do as an adult—it’s silly!”

He walked back to the church. Inside, some forty people, most of them women in shorts and T-shirts, were dancing beneath a laser display that spotlit the ceiling with green stars. It was sweaty and intimate, communal yet solitary. Invoking the rule against merely watching, Clement adjured his companion to “at least wave your arms!” Then he danced off. As far as could be determined in the gloaming, he did not unleash the prancing horse. After ten minutes, he confided, over the music, “I just realized you’re going to use dancing in the dark as a metaphor for a shy performer! It’s what I would do!” Drawing away, he called out a qualifying “Probably!” ♦