Punch Line: Seamlessness, Solitude, and Saying the Thing

Jessie Rivest reviews a performance at Living Things International Arts Festival in Kelowna Friday, January 30th at 7:30pm

There was a lot of mystery around what Punch Line by Jacques Poulin-Denis at the Living Things International Arts Festival actually was. In the lobby beforehand, I spoke with the “up for anything” types—happy to take a chance on a show without a clear reference point. Still, expectation hovered. We guesstimated “stand-up comedy with…dance and …something else?” We happened to be sitting in front of someone who responded to the jokes in real time, as if we were at a pub on amateur night. Both the person to my left and I turned back with our best ‘can you please be quiet’ eyes—though I’m sure the subtext was more exacting than polite. He eventually walked out mid-performance, and hopefully found his way to a hockey game or somewhere he could shout freely.

That small rupture in audience expectation turned out to be an accidental framing device for the piece itself. What Punch Line ultimately offers is not a category to settle into, but a deliberate evolution to witness. What stood out most was the seamlessness of the work—how it began as what appeared to be straightforward stand-up comedy and then gently, almost imperceptibly, drifted into theatre, pantomime, then dance, and eventually into a kind of abstract inner landscape that was both charming and deeply confessional.

This seamlessness felt especially meaningful in a post-pandemic context. During COVID, artists were circumstantially confined to themselves—to ask what could be made with only their own body, voice, imagination, and endurance. Punch Line feels like a direct descendant of that moment: a one-person, multi-dimensional work that embraces solitude as a creative engine.

Process Over Performance

In the post-artist talk, Neil Cadger, Artistic Director of Living Things, spoke about a through-line of failure. While that is compelling, what I experienced felt less about failure and more about process. Poulin-Denis invites us into the mechanics of showing up: the nerves in the wings where you’re not safely tucked away in the green room, but not yet on stage; the strange liminal space where the air feels sucked out and self-doubt grows loud.

He speaks candidly about the tug-of-war of comedy—being funny or not funny, landing or not landing—and how he keeps going anyway. The inner critic becomes a visible character, and rather than conquering it, Poulin-Denis negotiates with it. One of the most disarming scenes comes when he tells a deliberately silly chihuahua joke simply to cheer himself up enough to try again. It’s tender, self-aware, and oddly brave.

The use for voiceover and sound effects were something that spoke to me. I can appreciate the difficulty of getting the timing exactly right. Following an imaginary bouncing ball and stepping on sound was by no means perfect, and maybe that was on purpose, but it could have been more effective if the section was shorter and the timing was exact. 

Reading his physical vocabulary was enticing: sinking into the floor to diminish himself, or arching the shoulder pads of his blazer in an Igor-like caricature when he was unravelling. These vignettes felt archetypal—like the collapse of the sovereign self, the part of us that wants to be seen, to shine, to hold coherence. Watching this during a Full Moon in Leo only amplified a theme of radical self acceptance, and that was something that did feel exactly right, in a spooky synchronistic kind of way. 

Jacques Poulin-Denis, Andrew Stauffer, Neil Cadger

Revelation and Resilience

Towards the end of the show, Poulin-Denis removes his clothes, during a voiceover monologue on resilience, showing his body, revealing that he has no foot. He puts on his prosthetic, and begins to dance. I was frozen in time as he exuded a layered expression of pride, vulnerability, beauty, and a kind of coming-out energy. 

While not everyone can relate to living with alternative limbs or navigating different mobility, the deeper resonance is universal: revealing something real about how you’ve come through your life. There is pain here, but also joy, honesty, and a refusal to flatten his story into “inspirational triumph” alone. 

The ending monologue complicates the idea of resilience. Poulin-Denis describes himself as “anti-resilient”, naming how resilience can sometimes mean surviving when you don’t want to. And yet, thank goodness he has. In the post-show talk, he shared how he wished he’d had a role model growing up. That longing—to see other modes of creating, other ways of living—felt deeply familiar.

One Thing You Want to Say

My favourite part of the night was during the post-show chat, when Poulin-Denis was discussing his creative process on a project with a variety of elements, being a person with many ideas. He said that when it comes to multidisciplinary work, it doesn’t matter what the discipline is. Don’t get caught up in how to fuse things together, “Just think of one thing you want to say—and find a way to say it.”

That was healing for me, as someone who also hyphenates frequently and sometimes suffers from too many ideas. Starting with one thing can help contain a purpose, and then other elements are allowed to enter and exit as they wish. Punch Line held a container where pain and joy, structure and chaos, humour and exposure coexist far beyond the stage. It invites reflection: about art, about process, and about what we are really doing with the time and stories we have to share with one another. 

Jessie Rivest is a sound artist, creative coach, and local arts supporter living in Kelowna.