Hi.
The second chapter sneaks upon a conversation on her work among some of her peers.
Enjoy.
_______
No one but she could diagnose the problem. It seemed to be, for the uninformed viewer,
most of it, or perhaps the entirety of it, a lack of sync between the
synthesized music and the entrance of the first dancers on the stage, something
that snowballed, in a sneaky manner, into a serious mess within just several beats,
quite obvious to most of those present in the rehearsal hall as a rupture of
some kind in the flow of the ballet and thus doubly scarring to her nerves, as
it was she who was the choreographer in charge of the show in the works.
A forest of small pyramids, all
white, in plastic, lay about the stage, temporary guides for the dancers,
indicative, together with some lines in chalk on the black-painted wooden
floor, of some of the main intended paths as marked in her motional diagrams,
as cones in a driver’s course would be, and several of them were turned over, a
sign that some of her charges were still lacking control or focus, or were putting
impetuousness before precision, a major gaffe,
as she had learned from cool Mr. B in New York City. The diagrams sat unrolled in apparent
disarray on a desk standing skewed in the corner, as old papyruses would
— awating grander plans and poetry for the Pharaoh.
The dancers had to execute a
rush of serpentine movements, crossing each other sometimes at elbow’s
distance, and there was no telling what would
happen until they got it into their systems — the set trajectories
of their bodies moving over the floor, and the appropriate calibrated energy to
be injected into it all at any given strobe in time — with bumping each
other the major risk, some of them already displaying on their bodies the
traces of such unhappy encounters, in
bruises on the outside of their upper arms, or in dark purple she knew hidden
by their tops on their ribs. The
movements had to come in swooshes and spurts of energy as the music was pitched
uncomfortably higher, while more volume gradually and sometimes surprisingly
pushed out of the loudspeakers too. There
was drama in the screeching intensity with which they had to suddenly turn at
some imaginary crossroads marked by some of the cones, and Yvonne had
encouraged the dancers not to avoid sliding on the floor at such short
direction changes. “Losing balance and
‘skating’ a bit — she made air quotes sign — looks good if you don’t
mess up too much, say by falling or bumping into others head-first like a
train,” she argued, shouting out at them, hoarse voice and all.
She decided she needed some height
in order to have a better view of the action, while still being close to the
dancers, so she took a cafeteria table, yanked the oilcloth off it, clambered,
or, in fact, jumped over the edge of it, crouch-pushed from legs and arms up
and away from the surface of the table and stood up over them all.
“Please replace the cones along
the chalk lines, everyone,” she asked,
raising her voice to be heard through the subdued jabbering among the dancers
and the shuffling of ballet shoes over the floor. “We need to restore some order to this place,
as it’s begun to look like an untended stable.”
After five minutes, the markers
again in their places, she told them, “Listen, guys, while running around, I
want you to keep sighting your designated partners, so the public would see you
all looking for your loved ones among your crowd, searching for them. I don’t want you to just run ahead on
automatic pilot, without looking left and right. I need the drama of searching in your eyes. Crowd them and the rest of your faces with
longing, desire, whatever, just don’t behave like robots. All the same, you’re entitled to look now and
then at others, sexually spying on them, checking them out. You’re tied and you aren’t tied to your
designated halves, hope the message is understood. Everything right? Take your places, then, please. Second part, first movement, all right?” She nodded to the audio guy to start the
tape, pointing right away to the ceiling with her forefinger that she wanted
more output from the loudspeaker, then making a short horizontal slash of the
air with the palm down when that was reached to her satisfaction. After ten bars, she pushed her hand straight
ahead, finger pointed, as if lancing someone — “Go!”
From four corners of the room
the dancers came, from two of them, in one diagonal, the men, in white, from
the other two the women, in red, one after the other. They ran in four spirals converging in the
same point, the center of the stage, which was supposed to crowd them in something
similar, perhaps, to some, to one moment in Béjart’s mise-en-scène for Sacre du
Printemps. Then, when they had converged, they would
immediately separate with the pulsing-in-pulsing-out motion of a heart, out and
away diverging in four spiralate strings again, most of them now however in
pairs, hand-in-hand, mostly heterosexual couples, but not all of them, and some
singles interspersed here and there. The
tempo of music accelerated with the start of the pulsing out, and slowed toward
its end. The four trajectories spiraling
out didn’t however end in the corners of the room but threw all the players out
at different points on its periphery, where they disappeared, except those
facing the proscenium and the public, who froze in caressing and adoring
stances, gazing towards undefined points in space as if transported by the
prospect of the future, its hopes and its pleasures within.
Then the lights dimmed, the
music slowed to a virtual stop, and all the dancers discreetly filed toward the
periphery of the stage.
They all emerged, separate
again, the heart had another half-cycle and they emerged paired up once more.
Three full cycles — that
was all Yvonne had thought it necessary to drill into the consciousness of the
viewers the eternal searching for partners, the pairing; she thought that in
art themes should always be powerfully issued.
Burning the spectators by
overexposure was a small risk she was quite willing to take to carry them along
on the journey, and she intended to offer no excuses for it. She had also had the music rewritten just to
show more recognizable themes.
***
The chalk is here, written in the heart too, and I feel it
rasping over what they call the inner cockles of it, as a file. John and Laura are set to emerge the first
from the corners. I know whatever is wrong there happens during the crowding in the
center, in the helter-skelter of finding the exact partner and emerging in the
designated pairs. For heavens’, it so
simple! Everyone should follow the small marks in chalk on the floor. What is it they do to mess it?
It must be something in the
pairing, the music is at its peak then, and one can easily lose focus, crowded from all sides by other people
reorganizing and repositioning themselves while running — jogging in
effect, as things are still not that fast — also, to boot, the sound sharp
banging in your ears.
Still, there’s something much
deeper that bothers the heck out of me, and I haven’t told them anything, as I
may seem undecisive, should I open my sweet mouth before finding a solution to
this one — it’s the feeling that there’s too much of a mechanism and
straining about it and not enough sentiment, and I don’t want to be called just
an ordinary amanuensis of the hieratic priest of teamwork, Mr. B, that’s how some have called him, God
keep him in his airs and graces.
There’s this too with many of
these and other dancers — their classical training, it shows
— they’re too disciplined and perhaps rigid-looking to the modern viewer,
a bit programmed in their motions, too wooden in their embedded care for attitude to let off enough of their own
steam. I need to take care of it
somehow, inject a healthy dose of natural in their moves. Rethink them from scratch, even.
***
There was some method in her locating the problem though. She watched the dancers’ feet and carefully
listened to the sharpening music, she knew those tripping had to fall out of
sync with it some time during a sequence of critical beats, overmatched by it. Everything had to start from the base, from
the feet. She suddenly became aware the
music was just a huge swoosh at the
time of the trouble occuring, no local rhythm to it — no damn beat in it, but this is
how I wanted it — just the overall progression, the feeling of an
absorbing black hole in full suction mode.
***
It must be this, the lack of beat, of punch, of clear tempi,
the amorphousness in the music, this gets them into trouble, as there’s no
compass anymore to hang on to it. Still,
I don’t want it changed, I’ve already bothered John no end about it and, in
fact, the music is fine now, it’s just difficult to sync with it at that
particular time. I’d better think about
something else, no doubt. Give them other reference points to look at a
parallel music or sound tape, running independently of the main one, heard only by them. OK, feasible, but I don’t want them loaded
with headphones or gear like that. A
light signal, glimmering on-off on the intended beat? That would give them a good enough clue. Right, a strobed light would do fine, I
think, flashing right above our group, high enough not to be visible even from
the seats closest to the stage, strong enough to be distinguished by the boys
and girls, still, weak enough not to create any shadows on them. That could be it — a hidden lantern.
***
One hour and twenty minutes later, the lights manager has
bricolaged an improvisation: a gray lamp, hung above the dancers, a long cable
leading to a nifty push-button switch in her hand, while she was still standing
on the cafeteria table. “You barely need
to touch it and it’s going to switch off and on. You should be fine,” he said.
Now, with everything literally in her hands, she tried the switch
several times, then spoke up.
“Come on, everyone, break’s
over. Let’s get into it once again. Now, please listen carefully. We’ll use this lamp for syncing. For the time being, just manual mode, thus
pray I’ll be right and that my fingers are still fast enough. Putting in a second track with music to sync
the light will definitely take some time, so I’ll try to fix our mess this way
for now. So, please run forward, or
better, move in general on the approximate beats or strobes of the light. Approximate, as I don’t want us to look too
regimented. Thus allow yourselves some
tolerance with respect to your neighbours, don’t strike or step too strictly
with the music, at the same time as them.
“And think again through Auden’s words ‘Body and soul (Not-Me and Me) can have no independent existence, yet they are distinct, and an attempt to make one into the other destroys,’ the motto for this piece. You hear me? Destroys. That’s what we want to show, this unity inside the human being, sought after all our lives, which we can’t escape either all our lives, which in the end is still a fight of opposites. We would on some days, if we could, live and play just for and through our body, on others just for the, ethereal or not, pleasures of the soul, just for imagination. But we can’t. This seeking and escaping is all we want to show, the recovery, the loss of oneness. Seeking, escaping, oneness in one and in the couple, it’s all. Our flow and movement should tell ebb and flow, flow and ebb, you know, attraction and rejection, loss that is. The very short happiness of oneness, of meeting the match.
“And think again through Auden’s words ‘Body and soul (Not-Me and Me) can have no independent existence, yet they are distinct, and an attempt to make one into the other destroys,’ the motto for this piece. You hear me? Destroys. That’s what we want to show, this unity inside the human being, sought after all our lives, which we can’t escape either all our lives, which in the end is still a fight of opposites. We would on some days, if we could, live and play just for and through our body, on others just for the, ethereal or not, pleasures of the soul, just for imagination. But we can’t. This seeking and escaping is all we want to show, the recovery, the loss of oneness. Seeking, escaping, oneness in one and in the couple, it’s all. Our flow and movement should tell ebb and flow, flow and ebb, you know, attraction and rejection, loss that is. The very short happiness of oneness, of meeting the match.
“OK, enough pep talk on my
part, let’s get going. Sync with the
light, everyone. And on!”
The music rolled out of the
loudspeakers. Keenly she observed them,
oh, yes, and waited for any signs of confusion.
However, there was no more bumping, the whole of it much smoother,
focused and hotter on the part of the dancers.
***
I might have just moved Pavlov’s dog to react … Heavens,
great to be past this snag. Still, there
doesn’t seem to be enough visual contact and searching between them. It’s as though I had to go among them to
provoke some real eye and hand holding as they do in kindergarden to pair kids
up. Good to have three weeks still till
the premiere. They need to visibly
search for partners and, when finding one, to lock in on them — caught you! I
mean, visible for the parties of interest, and those, modesty makes me play
this tack, are only the spectactors, and we really need to snag their interest
or this will be a short run. The eyes,
the arms, the facing of the body, its momentary tilt while in motion, must all
show that — and — Passion! Burn! Told and re-told them that maintes fois but they must be thinking
of tonight’s tumble in the hay with Miss Margaret or Mr. Faust, or whomever, I
don’t know.
The props, that crowd of huge
eggs breaking up on the stage right at the beginning, to reveal yolks and egg
whites, function well enough, can’t complain, I mean they open gracefully and
gradually enough, as flowers would, as I had wanted. A lunar lake with crackling eggs. Still, something must be done about the
lights, there must be some graduation in the way the dancers assume their final
colors, the women the red, the men the white.
The drift from the yellow of yolks to the red which is carried most of
the time by women on their tight, thin body suits — they do look like
divers, that critic whom I invited at the rehearsals, Rebecca Dubbs, was right
— isn’t helped by the illumination.
Having those yolks and whites as long light-colored bands of ultralight
transparent silk fluttering up from the broken shells while initially covering
the people hidden in the egg, as well as the fans blowing them up, should make
this all easy, they just need to point the lights to them and gradually change
colors in a very limited area of each egg, as the dancers emerge. They probably need to use more focus and some
filters, I don’t think or pretend to know myself what exactly they need, but
I’ve already told Jacques to look into it for tomorrow and it’s his job to deal
with, together with the set director. I
told them the drift of it, ‘What I want is eggs, eggs, eggs, followed by bands,
bands, bands, then people, people, people, and nothing too damn strictly
synchronized or time-regimented, we want some spread on those events — an
egg cracking here and bursting forth its precious contents, another, doing the
same a bit later in some other place, and so on and so forth — otherwise
it gets all too mechanical and we’re starting to feel as though dropped into a
world of robots, definitely not something we have in mind. Now, how they take care of the lights in this
transition is only their cup of tea and I won’t try to stick my oar in, but I
need my effect.’
***
Two hours later, Antonella Boeru, the stage director for the
production, a Romanian recently arrived to the North-American shores, and this,
she said, after dodging bullets on the border to Yugoslavia over the ploughed
no-man’s land, from her loving, generous fellow-citizens doing the coward thing
for Ceausescu, sat at a huge table in an open-area office behind the stage and
played absent-mindedly with her own model stage sets, in front of Jacques, the
light manager. They were alone, Yvonne
having left them to their own devices with what was her unmistakeable harbinger
of trouble “you need to focus, guys.”
“I wish I knew what she wanted,” she issued, sighing, chin propped in.
“I think I do. She wants something less obvious during that
initial scene, nothing too striking,” Jacques dared to advance, still
mouse-like. New to the team, this Romanian, so Jacques had
decided to play carefully, not to hurt any sensitivities. Can’t show oneself too clever.
“But we’re already there, to my
mind.”
“Not to her, and that’s all
that counts. I know her, she won’t let
herself be convinced when she feels there’s something wrong somewhere. She just hangs on to it and to you like a
bulldog, and something has to give up, and that’s usually you, I’ll tell you. That’s her sixth sense, she argues.”
“Fine, I think I can deal with
that. I’ve never argued for her giving
up on anything, just for telling us what exactly she wants.”
“Well, she has this idea that
you must be empowered to do things your way, thus she won’t give you too
detailed pointers, not to straitlace you, that is.”
“Fine, it’s good to have some
give-and-take, still, I wouldn’t mind more of a framework, you know what I
mean, within which we can play,” Antonella said, looking a bit unsure of herself
and of the whole situation. This is a new,
another continent, for her. Something
she might say wouldn’t be understood the same way as in the old country.
***
Yvonne, she was flying once again. High, and the thoughts were with it too. The
eternal separation intervening at death, souls who couldn’t survive without
their bodies — forget the religions
— except in others, in their fragmented, kaleidoscopic, but not
entire, broken and broken-edged, and worst of all, again time-limited, images
of you.
***
They come in terribly disjunct sets, and if one believes
religion, or poetry for that matter, most of the time it is only the soul who
is immortal, the shelf time of any body out there terribly finite and of
course, this is elementary math now, much shorter, always making its owner
unhappy with his or her contract.
For what we know, they are put
together or, maybe in a more fortunate expression, grown together by parents
and society, and for the duration of a lifetime, they manage to tolerate each
other and shack up. Is this a sexual,
perhaps even an incestuous relationship?
If only they weren’t so unlearned, undecided or secretive about it, the
philosophers or the theologians.
To start with the duet, the
one’s body and soul and to move to the quartet, those of the couple. They emerge from the eggs as the primary
pair, run through childhood and adolescence to young adulthood and there in
that sexual crowding in the centre of the stage the messy quartet, the double
pair, two souls, two bodies, emerges, with its own attractions and rejections,
conflicts much more than squared, perhaps cubed, or whatever power is left in
algebra to show unexpected branching and multiplication in infinite trees,
sometime happy, sometime cancerous, of self and of each other destructive. You have the nuclear adjective at its most
potent as this is the stark, fecundation’s fundamental pair, still nuclear in
its potential boilovers and blowups.
JOHN MARCUSE: I still
remember being paired up by Yvonne with Joanne Skeen for Body and Soul, two years ago or thereabouts. After the first barre class where she met all of us, she told everybody on the cast
that pairs and pairing were to be a big thing in that piece and that we had
better get used to the idea and to our respective partners. She then gave us the pairings, which she
seemingly had eyed and thought about and done during the previous week, while
attending other shows of the company as well as classes.
JOANNE SKEEN: Yeah, and some of us then thought, why not, that
might involve even some more intimate knowledge and some laughed that could
mean even sex. Now, I can tell you now
that in the end I really got to know John better, but in unusual and unexpected
ways. Not that I didn’t know him before:
we were in the same dance company, when all was said and done; nothing unusual
to it. We all knew each other some way
or another, many were involved, shorter or longer term, with someone from the
company, but Yvonne wanted us to get sort of ‘mood- and physically-synced,’
those were her words, by spending meaningful time together during rehearsal, and
I mean just for setup, just to get in the skin of the characters. She was supposed to provide the definition of
“meaningful” to us, and, dear me, it was to be an original one.
ANN DICKSTRA: So, next
time, at the first rehearsal, she brought in twenty five copies of a book with
Auden’s complete poems and told us to be prepared to read from it to each other. What we’d read was supposed to be our choice,
but it had to be longer poems, at least two pages in length, she said, in order
for the right mood to set in, to settle and coalesce in each of us. And that we should switch from one to the
other in the pair after each page, in order to shuffle the meaning and the
involvement between us as in a baton passing in track.
ARMAND DEFERRE: And,
no, it wasn’t only for half an hour that we would to do this, it’d be a full
hour, count on it, she said. And what
would be next off, someone asked. Well,
she said, barre work in couples, for
one thing. Yoga work, again in pairs,
for another. And there’s more to come. She was to direct it all, she said, and I’ll
tell you, when it came on, it was nothing fast.
A lot of supported stances, on both sides, which the ladies found a bit
strange, as we’re normally the supporting party. No, she wanted each of us to feel the weight
of the other, the tension in her or his muscles, his or her flexibility at the
moment, his or her apparent insecurity about a move or, worse, about
themselves, there and then. And, this
part, we needed to do it in complete quiet, to listen to our partner’s exhaling
and inhaling, to weigh and time our support on it, as though she was the lost
petal and I was the wind carrying her a-flutter, or the other way round, you
get me.
LOUISE FINGERMANN: And
there was no music in any of this, but it came in soon enough — Bach and
Handel; a lot of them — in other parts of the ‘unification,’ that’s how she
called all of this. I think now of
Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, same measured
flow to it, that’s exactly how it felt at the time.
JOHN MARCUSE: But the
strangest bit must have appeared the notion of playing chess with each other,
especially as many of us hadn’t moved a chess piece in years, and many others
didn’t know how to play at all. Mind
you, we’re not mental intellectuals, but physical ones. I, at least, sometimes, think of me as a
laborer. (Catcalls from the others “Yes,
you are one, John.”) You too, don’t worry.
But in the end, we got to that too, and you could see the what, the
twenty, thirty pairs of us, sitting akimbo on the parquet floor — wow, I still
feel the pain in my butt — of the rehearsal hall, moving small pieces of
plastic and challenging each other with “check” or “mate.” “Those who don’t know have to teach the
others,” was Yvonne’s short reply to our initial backing off and rearing up in
the face of this challenge.
LOUISE FINGERMANN: No,
that wasn’t the strangest thing. That
was to come when she asked us to prepare for a rehearsal by running in circles,
again in pairs, for half an hour on the stage.
We had to hold the hand of the other; this might have been the toughest
part. Imagine running several miles, it
must have been six or seven, while holding someone’s hand. “Comes with unification, body and soul coming
together, as Auden wanted it, man and wife coming together, as I see it, she
told us.”
ANDY DONGARRA: The
body and soul being paired during the life was a big thing for her. It was
as though at birth they were separate, floating around with no aim, like
separate balloons or what, until education and experience and simply growing-up
put these two entities together — don’t laugh at me, it was her who said
“entities,” I’m not into those words — and now they were one in the same vase,
she said. And it was the same with man
and wife, life put them together, some fumbling through chance again, but in the end the fit is found and kept up for
decades, if it’s a true fit, or otherwise time finds it out and dismisses it,
and another one is tried out, if we’re lucky or we’re left to loneliness. And all this “unification,” I mean strands in
it, must have come to her from Stanislavski, or Stella Adler, or Brando who was
her star pupil, “Method Acting” or something like that, immersion. Now, if any of you laughers have seen “A
Streetcar Named Desire,” I mean the movie, you know that at least for Marlon it
darn worked.
LOUISE FINGERMANN: Still,
now that I’ve mentioned the running, I’ll have to say that about her, she was
running herself the full monty with us.
JOHN MARCUSE: And
damned if she was any tired by the end of half an hour. I mean, no breathing any harder, no sweating
— at all.
LOUISE FINGERMANN: Well,
that’s no big news, she was known for this from times when she was active as
ballerina. Partners said it — no sweat
from her. Big plus for any partner, as
all of us know. You don’t get messed up
by the other, you’re not his or her occasional towel. I, for me, I know I can’t offer this
advantage and I’ll use this opportunity to apologize to all present, heh, heh.
ANDY DONGARRA: You
serious? Most of us do it, I mean the
sweating. Why do they keep those towels
in the sides in performances? Natural
urge of the body, or secretion, to call it straight. But yeah, Yvonne was that way in those
rehearsals. No sign whatsoever of being
tired at any time. Gosh.
JOHN MARKOFF: And yes,
it was at roughly at that time, that in theatre, not in ballet, in Leningrad, I
mean old Saint Petersburg, Russia, they brought Lev Dodin in back from the
cold, or was it Siberia, into directing, and I’ve heard he too was into a lot
of immersing into the role and long rehearsals.
So, here you are, different strings to different folks, but Yvonne was
into something both old — as Stanislavski was what, turn of the century, way
back — and new.
ANN DICKSTRA: Still,
us is us, I mean dancers, but the thing to watch for me in all that was her
secretary cum assistant, her amanuensis, what was her name?
JOHN MARKOFF: I think
it was Sarah.
ANN DICKSTRA: That’s
right. Sarah. I mean, she had been a dancer herself, back
in Yvonne’s times, certainly less distinguished and all, still, a dancer. And it was a sight, I mean her face, watching
what her boss, Yvonne, was getting into.
It was as though what she was watching were the travails of a fool, who
was doing things not to be comprehended, and for no practical purpose. She must have meant, like we all did at the
beginning, I mean, chess and running? What
for, Yvonne? But we got our answer in
the act, the performance itself, the feel, the energy and the smoothness in it
all, and mostly the being-into-it, while she seemingly was left with just the
writing down of everything, without, I thought from her face, the best of
understanding or effort.
JOHN MARKOFF: Nah,
Ann, you ladies are too tough on each other.
Fact is, at times Yvonne looks to me to be a great choreographer, at
times bordering on genius. You think I
should take a hike on this genius thing.
Fine. Anyway, any times you have
a person like her, it’s bound to face some lack of understanding from her peers. This talk here is just proof of our initial,
or even current, misunderstanding of her.
So, why fry Sarah more for it than what we should ourselves deserve? All right, I see where you are coming from:
she’s her day-to-day assistant, she should be familiar with her manner of doing
things and thoughts, and so on and so forth.
Yeah, that’s right, but you know that?
Familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed understanding, as you may be
bumping against your inner limits or on your old thought reflexes.
AURORA PARASCHIV: Surely,
those two were and still are — as they are yet together, as far as I know — as
fire to water. I remember Yvonne having
somehow clambered up under the lights at center-stage, during the rehearsals of
Body and Soul, on some perch up there
known only to the techies, only to see the effect from above of the light
strobe she had arranged with the light-master to sync us, all this while Sarah
was sitting quiet on a stool underneath, taking notes, but so cold to the
progress so obvious to all of us after that move.
JOHN MARKOFF: I’m
older than most of you guys, so perhaps Yvonne tells me more. Once, she mentioned to me that at the
beginning of the eighties, eighty-three, eighty-four, she kind of bottomed out
and then gradually figured out the only way to keep the light on in her life,
some fullness to it, and I think I’m close to her words here, was to go into
choreography. I’ll tell you, when you
think that way, you’re doing things with some swing, you feel at times that
you’re the arrow in the bow. And, just for myself, I can still remember
what she read to us from Auden’s No, Plato, no on the first day of rehearsals.
__________
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