Читать книгу Body of a Dancer - Renee D'Aoust - Страница 17

The first day of the Martha Graham Center for Contemporary Dance Summer Intensive, there is a large spot of dried and crusted blood in the center of the main studio floor. Advanced dancers doing sparkles on the diagonal across the floor jump before the blood and land afterward.

“Take to the air,” yells Pearl Lang. She is petite, elderly, full of spine. Her gray-black hair is pulled with a small pink bow into a small chignon at the base of her neck.

One barefoot young woman lands smack on the crusted blood. Claire is usually a very careful, very precise dancer. The entire line of dancers, each waiting a turn, cringes.

Although the floor and center exercises took up an hour and a half of the two-hour class, no one cleaned up the blood. Kristi is absent. Kristi doesn’t mind cleaning up blood and sometimes checks the studio floor before class. Spilled blood is a regular occurrence in a Graham class. Since modern dancers dance barefoot, often the skin tears or burns from the pressure of contact with the floor. If there’s blood, Kristi gets the rubbing alcohol and paper towel and wipes the floor. She never uses gloves. Kristi also goes barefoot at Grateful Dead concerts.

It is a bold move to be absent for the first day of Summer Intensive, especially when company auditions will take place at the end of the six-week session. Absence means weakness. Survival of the fittest is taken to new heights in the Graham School. You must not simply survive. You must thrive or perish. If you perish, it’s your own fault. The lipid content of your cellular structure is your fault, too.

Art won’t come to the weak. And art isn’t authentic if it doesn’t bleed. In other fields—take the visual arts, for example—young people haphazardly and loosely refer to themselves as artists before they even know what it means to be touched by fire—as if without practice and guts and pain, they are already exalted simply because they label themselves artists. But at Graham, no pain means no gain. I dare you to toss around the word artiste lest you rot in hell for your audacity.

It takes ten years to make a dancer, says Martha.

Martha has been dead for two years, but Summer Intensive is still sacred: Pearl Lang teaches the composition class. It happens right after technique class. The dancers make up stupid twisty movements and call the amalgamation of their favorite moves choreography. Always one idiot dancer puts in a grand jeté—legs split, leaping high across the floor—and always Pearl takes it out.

“Yes dear,” Pearl says, “I know you love to leap, but show me something you don’t love to do, and make it original.”

Pearl speaks kindly because, usually, the girl has no talent. Pearl does not speak kindly to those with talent. It’s a given. If you can’t take it, get out. This girl, Fran, will become an arts administrator, and then she’ll marry a wealthy banker named Ted who works on Wall Street for Merrill Lynch. Pearl knows not to alienate money and the financial support of the arts. Fran might even think she could have made it. Usually the untalented in any field are unrealistic that way.

Pearl calls the short pieces “compositions,” but the dancers call their pieces “choreography.” They pronounce the “ch” as in “chore,” so the word “choreography” sounds as odd as the little squirmy dance pieces look. No matter. The dancers know the pieces look odd, and they know they look like fools flailing about center floor, but they also know the little pieces of “choreography” are just a practice exercise, like copying a famous painting into a sketch book. But there’s no framed picture hanging on the wall of Martha’s studio; instead, there’s just sweat in the air and blood on the floor. Lots of dancers have bodies that resemble gorgeous frames hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art—but not the Met where Leo will end up as a has-been dancing in the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. There are plenty of dancers with beautiful bodies but no passion within. Some have ugly bodies, too. That’s why they study Graham.

In Martha’s studio, there is the scarred and ancient grand piano in the corner, the double doors that open to Martha’s courtyard and her tree, the high narrow windows, fluorescent lights and fan overhead, and the old barre with braces that are pulling off the wall.

The braces on the barre really need to be fixed. The barre cannot withstand the pull of weight for much longer. One brace has a screw loose, so part of it hangs limply off the wall. Ostensibly dancers don’t pull on the barre, but that is ballet. This is Graham. In Graham, dancers use the barres to pull away, to find the arch in the side of the body where one side swoops in and the other side swoops out, or to find the contraction. For that ever-present search, you face the barre, both hands on it, and pull back away from it, pretending someone punched you right in the gut—hard—whoosh, all the breath comes out of you, and you double over in pain and agony and glory and beauty. Back in Martha’s day, teachers would punch you in the gut to be sure you knew the real feeling. Real feeling. Real sensation. Art is no substitute for the real.

“You’re a bird, an eagle,” the teacher, Jacqulyn Buglisi, screams, “let go of the barre. Fly!”

Several dancers actually let go of the barre and fall on their butts. They are the ones who always follow directions, especially when screamed in high pitch. If you hadn’t been so terrified of Ms. Buglisi, you might have laughed: The ceiling is too low for flying anywhere, soon the barre will pull completely off the wall, and the humidity is so great that by the middle of class you want to plop down to the floor like the idiot dancers who actually let themselves fall on their tailbones when they didn’t have to do it. Ms. Buglisi had, of course, been speaking metaphorically.

When she describes a ceremony of Native Americans who hung by their pectoral muscles in the sun, she does not specify the tribe. They wove rawhide on either side of the muscle, so the body of the muscle took the weight of the body, and then they hung from poles. “Praise the sky!” whispers Buglisi, her face ecstatic at the thought of suffering. By the end of her class, you don’t care if you sink into a little puddle of sweat: Your suffering is that great.

Again and again, you dutifully turn and face the barre the way you face a partner. The heterosexual male dancers in Graham have to be tough—if they’re not, they’ll be used up. Though, of course, a male partner isn’t necessarily heterosexual, the role of the male in Graham is understood to be heterosexual or animal—Jason in Cave of the Heart, the Minotaur in Errand into the Maze—even if performed by a homosexual. Primarily the men function as hunks of flesh, the catalyst for the leading lady’s freedom—she works against him, she hits him, she loves him; always, in the end, she spits him out. She is warrior. He is dirt. The barre has to be as solid as a man, as sturdy as a partner should be, but the studio is old, the plaster peeling, and the barre is pulling away from the wall from years of stress and abuse.

You grab the barre and pull away, the way Martha herself might have grabbed Erick Hawkins if she wasn’t slapping him, your butt tight and head bowed, your back curving and your abdomen hollowed out. Please let this class be over soon, you think. In Graham, you hardly ever get to use the barre so hanging on for dear life should be a treat.

The class where you hang on the barre is an anomaly. Graham class starts off with excruciating floor work, and the spine is supposed to be unnaturally straight, straighter than a heterosexual, so straight it looks like a Giacometti rendition of a woman in shock. All those little bronze bits are the sweat balls rolling off the body. What you don’t know is that the emphasis on the straight spine in the Graham technique means that over time the natural curves of the cervical, thoracic, and lumbar regions flatten out so the spine eventually looks like a board. It means that the center of the body falls lower than in ballet technique, and it means that many Graham dancers in training flail about because the spine is rigid. That rigidity makes the arms stick out like scarecrows. No wonder everyone in Graham is looking for a center. How can you find a center if you have such distorted placement?

“We’re living a long way from Bumfuck, Kansas, now, girls,” Amanda announces in her British accent to the dressing room after class. She is taking off her sweat-soaked leotard and tights, exchanging them for a Lycra unitard hand sewn by Arturo. The dressing room is a long, thin room on the second floor of the Graham Center. “Where the hell is Kristi to wipe up that blood?” Amanda is black and has no boobs, and she is very thin and tall. She has attitude. But she also has passion. She’ll get into the Graham Company. The Company needs a black girl this year.

Kristi went to visit her sister in Hawaii and phoned to say her plane had been delayed, but nobody believed her. Everyone suspects she stayed in Hawaii with her sister to smoke some more pot on the beach and soak up the sun. Deadheads are potheads. Everyone knows she isn’t coming back. They are glad. One down.

But Amanda says, “There’s always another to take her place.” Except there isn’t. If you consider it, life doesn’t refill people who go missing. Kristi couldn’t stick it out, and now the question is who will willingly take on the role of wiping up spilled blood in the center of the room before Pearl Lang’s composition class. The dancers, like monks, are in charge of cleaning their own space, their own temple, but no one wants to do it. No one wants to touch HIV-positive blood. You know all dancers are promiscuous; it’s a given.

This Summer Intensive there are dancers from Croatia and Brazil, Germany and Texas. There are a few from Oklahoma because a former Graham Company member works at the University of Oklahoma School of Dance. Other states are represented, too. There are no dancers from the African continent. Amanda is from Great Britain. There are three from Taiwan. Kun-Yang is one of them, but he won’t make the Company because of his height. He’s too short. There are four from Brazil. Six from Italy. Italians really love Graham. The American dancers say the Italians love Graham’s pathos: her abdominal contraction. The Italian dancers say the Americans love Graham’s control: her stately walk. The Italian men love sleeping with the American men, and the American women want to sleep with the Italian men.

Briget pulls on a new leotard. She wears a fresh one for each class. She always smells like Downy or Bounce. Briget has been at the school for ten years. She is a legend: “That girl who auditions for the Company every year.” Someday she’ll get in, even though she is too stiff and too tall, because persistence pays off. When Briget dances she looks like a sunflower that never should have tried to sway in the wind in the first place—as if a sunflower has any control over weather. No dancer has control over management, especially if half of management thinks Graham wanted all her dances to die with her and half thinks the reverse. But management in a dance company just means those who yell the loudest and are the most intimidating and have been around the longest. All the dancers are waiting for Briget’s right knee to bust out. Briget’s right leg wobbles on every landing. But she’ll get in her beloved company first, and then her knee will bust out. Another one down.

Persistence really does pay off. If Carol Fried knows she can’t break you, then she’ll take you. The trouble is, most people go crazy along the way and stop dancing entirely. Daniela became the Firebird and tried flying out her fifth-story studio apartment window. Shelley understudied the role of Jason’s princess, murdered by Medea in Cave of the Heart, and then actualized the role with a twist by murdering herself with poison. Shelley didn’t even need Medea to do the dirty work. Through death, Jason’s princess loses her ability to speak—though probably she never had that ability in the first place—and Shelley lost her ability to speak, too. Sometimes a dancer just plain old loses it.

The other dancers call it going crackers, and if you stay around the Graham School it will happen to you, too. So get your training and get out before you become stiff and rigid and unmusical and forget your reasons for moving in the first place. When a dancer becomes a bird or something bad happens, the dancers say, “Ah, nuts.” It means, “Good, another dancer out of the way”; or, “She went nuts”; or even, “Ah nuts, it could have been me.” Male dancers don’t go crazy. Their penises are too needed. Often the males are homosexuals and too sweet to go crazy. It isn’t in them.

In the dressing room, Amanda says it the most plainly: “Kristi couldn’t take it.” The dancers all nod. They can take it.

Dancers are not known for speech, which is nonetheless interesting because speech and text are very important attributes in the postmodern world of dance. David Dorfman thinks he’s a choreographer and a writer, but really he simply used to be a baseball player, so he knows how to squat real well. Most dancers in the downtown scene don’t have any technique, and they don’t have any speech, either. The text they say is “I saw my mother” or something deep like that, and the audience is supposed to say, “Oh, wow, intense,” or something deep like that. Text scrolls across a screen in something Stephen Petronio dreamed up, which looks like a scrolling message in Times Square, except it is so small and so weird and so out of place, hanging there above the stage like the Stonehenge replica in the movie This is Spinal Tap, that the text means nothing at all. Neither does the dance. And the real Stonehenge is all surrounded by cement, for that matter. Who wants to dance on cement?

Dance critics think text means something and give it credence as such, but like all critics they think that everything means something even if it doesn’t. Sometimes a dancer doing stupid twisty movements and speaking nonsensical text is just a dancer speaking bad text. It isn’t to say that Martha wouldn’t have tried techno-gadgets had she still been alive, but techno-gadgets only go so far if the dancers have nothing else to do—or, worse, if they look as if they have nothing else to do. Techno-gadgets can’t help a sloppy dancer or a fat one or one without any technique. Techno-realism can’t make stupid twisty movements anything other than what they are. Go ahead and yell: RELEASE TECHNIQUE IS TECHNIQUE. You know it isn’t. That’s why Pina Bausch uses amazing dancers, trained dancers with technique, even if they only stand still or walk around in a Bausch ballet or open their legs wide and close them. Hieronymus Bosch would have adored Pina. For sure.

The spine is your body’s tree of life, says Martha.

One! You’re down. Two! Scoot your feet around and under and wrench yourself up to standing, don’t feel the tear across your knee, ignore it, it isn’t happening. Three! You’re up.

“And again!” Pearl yells.

Don’t think because you haven’t been taught to think. Do it. Whatever they want. Again and again. All art is the act of showing up. You’ve been taught that a dancer lives to dance: Movement to a dancer is like breathing to mortal souls. You must bleed. Bleed now!

You’ve heard it so many times it doesn’t matter if you believe it yourself. The body is aching, but you don’t feel it now. You’ll feel it later when you can barely lift a hand to turn the faucet on to fill the bathtub with water, and you can barely lift the box of Epsom salts and pour it into the tub. Whatever gender you are sleeping with at the time brought home the Epsom salts. Special treat. You dump the whole box into the bath and the carton falls in, too, because you’re so tired you didn’t hold it tightly enough. There is only tomorrow in the world of dance because goals are too far out of reach, so use up everything now.

Somehow you lift your leg over the rim of the tub, and though earlier in the day you could fall to the floor in one count, now it takes you eight counts to get your body lowered into the water. You sit holding your knees crunched up to your chest in a little huddle. It hurts too much to lean back, so you just sit there in a little ball in the water. If you are lucky, your sexual partner comes into the bathroom and clucks a little and picks up a washcloth and washes your back. Gently. Ever so gently.

After the bath, you don’t have sex; you never have sex. You are too tired to have sex, and too sore to have sex and who the hell wants to explore the body at night when you’ve been exploring the body all day and you know where every little muscle is that isn’t doing what it should? Those piriformis muscles would be great for sex because they are so strong, but you can feel your sciatic nerve ever so slightly. The last thing you want is for someone to touch you and make the nerve go on fire.

The words of the raunchier Graham teachers yelling at you reverberate in your brain all night as you lie there and stare at the ceiling: “Have an orgasm! Then you’ll know life. None of you know life! Where is your contraction? Where is your orgasm? You’re all frigid!”

Only the lucky ones have sex, the chosen ones, as Martha would say, “the athletes of the gods.” These are the true purveyors of Martha’s House—the House of Pelvic Truth. It isn’t called that for nothing. Somehow the athletes of the gods are able to make all the little muscles work in their body and fall to the floor and breathe while they contract and then run and leap and look as if they do nothing but live life fully and completely in their bodies and in the dance. They have orgasms at night with a lover from a country foreign to their own. The rest just open the legs. That isn’t even sex.

There is no question the will is always there—even in your bed at night, even if you just open your legs—the will to move with power and force and beauty. Martha says she never sought beauty, even though the grotesque is beautiful. When the teacher walks into Martha’s studio all the students stand, quickly, and pull the feet together and squeeze the buttocks together and keep the arms long, palms in against the thighs, hopefully the thighs are not feeling or looking too big this morning, the hair should already be pulled tightly back and away from the face—it is okay if it’s in a ponytail, no bun-heads here, though you might act like one.

One! You’re up, standing, for the teacher. “Please sit,” Pearl says, sometimes offering a little bow. Two! You sit. “And,” she says. The pianist begins banging out whatever he’s banging out this morning, and you are bouncing up and down, pushing your head to your feet: bounce, bounce, bounce. “Breathings!” yells Pearl. You breathe. Then stop breathing. This is how you start every day. For blood. For art. For Martha.