THEATRICAL RELEASE
Renée E. D'Aoust |
 |
"Like a meteor shower [the Kevin Wynn Collection] was spectacular, beautiful
and potentially dangerous." - Susan Kraft, Staten Island Advance
When you see a star burn out in real time before your eyes, the sight and the sensation of sight travel toward you and stay with you, forever. Her name was Liz, but we called her Bruce. Bruce for Bruce Lee.
Liz was collected, firm, hard to taste.
She danced tough. Onstage, she held her own.
"It would be just like Liz to end dramatically," says a fellow dancer. "So theatrical. Everything a performance."
"She talked about doing it," says another.
Another phones me, sobbing, "Gone, gone, gone, gone. Néeeee." My nickname screeches into a wail.
"Breathe," I say. "Take a breath right now."
After I put down the phone, I go to the bathroom and throw up.
Despite being selfish and self-centered, narcissistic even, dancers are too giving, too generous, to dance only to the tune of their own breath. So even when she danced alone--in a single loft in New York City's Chinatown--she danced for you.
She could go over the front of her foot, land on her knee
without a sound, her back leg stretched behind her.
Liz didn't mind getting hurt, but once, I had my hair in a ponytail and whipped my head around, foot behind, demi-pointe, turning quickly. My ponytail smacked her in the face.
"Née," Liz said, "would you mind putting up your hair." An order. Not a question. I saw a little welt on her cheek.
"I'm so sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to."
In the end, when a life is gone, pleadings such as these mean nothing. If only her cells had been able to explode, and she had been able to keep herself alive. For it is the "I" in the end that keeps the self alive. The final performance of her life was not a theatrical event: it was a theatrical release from the pain of being trapped inside a body that could not move enough.
The sky opens. The fourth wall breaks.
She is gone.
The light is immense, immaculate, full and empty all at the same time. I look down. The light is there, surrounding me, and I am at peace.
"I hope she is finally at peace," says an acquaintance, a dancer with poor feet. The comment is banal, arrogant, and pretentious. Clichés convey the incompetence of those who are out of touch with their own feelings. They do not know how to address the dead. They think there should be different phrases for the different ways people die. Who cares, though, how someone dies? Why ask? Once she is dead, she is dead.
Regret does not let the dead live. The light descends.
I remember Liz, our Bruce, and her death.
. . .
The walls were white at the cast party Bruce held for us. She stayed up late the night before to make cookies. Dancers love cookies. Like puppies, they like treats. Liz paid for all the food and all the alcohol herself. She did not have poor feet. She could go over the arch of her foot and down to her knee. It is important not to glorify death, but why not?
Those who do not live in New York City but imagine they want to live there think the loft is romantic. Those who live in New York City know better. There was a hammock and rope in the corner. No one could see the rope or know its use. Now they feel they should have seen and should have known. Therapy teaches me that regret and guilt are different.
I remember the stairs up to the loft apartment. I remember the stove. The kitchen was open. I remember the small space for the bed and cloth curtains separating the open living area from the space for sleeping. I remember her first ballet teacher. He still teaches on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
. . .
Kevin Wynn sat at the front of the studio, looking over his notes, waiting for Liz and me to warm up. We'd stretched and done pliés, grands pliés, tendus, and ronds de jambe. I'd even done ronds de jambe en l'air. Circling the leg in a semi-circle warms up the hip before grands battements; after those, I lay down on the floor and circled my leg more aggressively, trying to warm up the hip area, especially the right side where sciatica hits. If I got my hips warm enough, the glutes loose enough, Kevin's movement didn't spark the sciatica.
That night, Liz and I didn't talk as we warmed up. It was our first rehearsal alone with each other. With Kevin. Each dancer has her own way of getting the body going at nine o'clock at night, especially when morning class is at ten. It makes for a long day to start and stop dancing; the contraction and release of the muscles causes all the major ones to freeze like a package of peas that has taken the wrong shape.
Liz looked down at me lying on the floor and did a little Irish step dance imitation of the leading man, Michael Flately, in Riverdance. We called him "Rooster." Later he became Lord of the Dance. Riverdance was all the rage on Broadway, and we hated it. Liz mimicked the Irish dancing, her feet flying out in front, her hands straight down at her sides, and then tossed her head. I giggled. At the cast party, she told a story about how a distant relative asked her if she was going to appear in Riverdance. We all flopped to the floor laughing and kicked our legs in the air like ladybugs caught upside down.
Broadway was so different from modern, but anyone who didn't know the distinction always asked the same question, which each of us had heard from one of our mother's friends, "Do you dance on Broadway, dear?" What was the answer? "No, we dance in lofts and black boxes, and we don't wear nylons or character shoes when we take class." Of course, those Irish dancers were very good, and we told ourselves we didn't make fun of them because of their success but only because we were all perpetually broke.
. . .
After I saved enough money to fly home to see my parents in Idaho, I ran into the Sheriff's Deputy at Hay's Chevron.When he found out I was dancing in New York, he asked, "With a pole?"
"You can wish upon a star," I said.
It was a common question from older men. If someone didn't ask if I were on Broadway, he asked if I danced in a club. A club meant a strip club, which meant I would wear a thong, or a love-string, as I liked to call them, and not much else. My friends teased me that I had the boobs to do it. But no, I didn't dance with poles or take off my clothes. I knew dancers who did, though, even dancers without breasts. I knew of the rumor that School of American Ballet students danced in Times Square, before Times Square was Disney, and that lots of Joffrey dancers, when Joffrey was based in New York instead of Chicago, made money in the seedy places--500 to 1,000 bucks a night. I never made any money from dancing. Not with a pole, not with my clothes on or off, and not on Broadway. I was off-Broadway.
Liz looked up at the stage lights:
"We're off-off-off-off-off Broadway."
One of my mother's high school friends, who chose the unfortunate time of visiting during my vacation to Idaho, said, "All dancers have anorexia.You'll want to watch your weight."
"My mind, you mean," I said.
"Don't starve yourself to death," she said, eating another one of my mother's chocolate chip cookies. "Anorexia is a slow form of suicide." The chocolate melted on her lip and a black spot stayed there the rest of the evening.
Dancers aren't supposed to speak up, so they don't. I couldn't even find my voice to counter the dismissive generalizations made by my mother's friend.
. . .
Liz was Korean-American. Her eyes were curtain scrims. There was mystery behind each scrim, and danger, too, and passion. Her eyes would have been called smoky in another context, or exotic in another era. When Bruce Lee stretches his body back and extends his front leg, the leg twists inward as if it could drill into its object. His eyes narrow and open all at once. There is nowhere else to look.
She danced like a boxer: fast in, quick out,
always going back for more. Her feet intricate.
"You Graham people love the floor, don't you," Liz said, laughing.
"Can't seem to get off it." I laughed.
As soon as he heard us talking, Kevin said, "Ready, ladies?"
Liz turned, immediately at attention. Warm-up was over. I rolled over to standing and took my place next to Liz. Liz arched her upper body back, extended her front leg toward Kevin, the leg twisted inward as if the leg itself could drill into its object.
"Okay, Bruce," said Kevin, "start with A."
Kevin made a clicking sound with his tongue in ¾ time, a waltz essentially, though in this context it should be called a post-modern waltz. He tapped the toes of his heavy leather Caterpillar boots on the floor. Kevin never rehearsed with music. Philip Hamilton would compose live music for this piece, and we'd combine the live music with the dance at dress rehearsal the night before opening.
Liz, her eyes narrow and open at the same time, started an eight-count phrase. Halfway through, at the dancer's count of 4 2/3, Kevin said, "Okay, Née, start B." Kevin kicked his left leg out, slightly, to indicate the start of the phrase.
and-ah 1 and-ah 2 and-ah 3 and-ah 4
and-ah 5 and-ah 6 and-ah 7 and-ah 8
I kicked my left leg out, circled it in a rond de jambe, which I made up because I couldn't remember the choreographed movement, then hit my stride as my body started moving from muscle memory. Characteristic Kevin arms flew across each other, one arm around my head while the other circled my waist. When I was about to turn, not a circle in the intuitively clockwise direction, but counter-clockwise against the flow of a right-handed person, Kevin said, "Stop. There."
Liz instinctively reached her hand out, and I grabbed it, taking Liz's full weight while she opened her leg to second and sat to the floor at the same time. I'm not sure how we knew what to do, except that we knew this was how Kevin worked. He taught us his phrases, his arms, his legs, and then he needed to see them moving in combination so he could adjust, usually not the movement itself, but the phrasing or spacing or direction or partnering. We moved for him to give him what he needed.
Other choreographers could spend hours on three steps. With Kevin, we never spent time endlessly discussing a particular movement, those anal discussions about whether a flexed foot means anger or a coupé a submission to love. A waste of time. A waste of body. Kevin didn't agonize over the meaning of three steps. He wanted movement. Dancing.
I held Liz's weight; no way would I let Liz fall on my watch. Thank goodness the soles of my feet were dirty and stuck to the wooden floor.
"Okay, let's go back," said Kevin.
Née: The rock.
Bruce: The river.
We started our phrases from the beginning, putting in a little more emphasis at certain parts, claiming the steps into our bodies. The "A" phrase person was the mover, the river; the "B," the rock. I watched Liz circle her phrase around me.
A back side front, turn, fall to the floor,
roll over her back to standing.
At the point where she stood with her back to mine, Kevin said, "There. Stop. Hold it a moment. Then, do the same ol' same ol'."
Kevin was a big man, warm and generous, his movement intricate and full. We adored him. The rehearsal process for Kevin's pick-up company was long and fun. It was the only time I really felt a choreographer wanted to see my body play. I always wished I could have seen him dance with the Limón Company. He'd left Limón because performance terrified him; sometimes he didn't even watch performances of his own company but sat in a nearby bar and came back for final bows.
At the first performance of his work that I had ever seen, the audience was made up of dancers. Dancers were often the only people who attended performances, but these were all different kinds of dancers--the whole dance community. Everyone loved Kevin. Okay, not everyone. Some critics thought his work didn't have story. Does modern urban life have story? It is a coming together and a separating, a patterning duet or a trio, a betrayal, an individual solo, a walking down the street alone with others walking next to you, a return, concrete beneath your feet, your dance bag heavy across your shoulders, everyone striving for something and finding their art and not finding anything at all. You don't know the story of each person whom you meet, but you do know how she moves. You can see it. Keep it cool, kid. Keep it cool.
Some said his work was a big massive dance party; consequently, it was too hard to follow and too fast to see anything. He didn't allow moments. What were his human sculptures then? Does living in New York City allow moments, I asked one critic, or is it one massive swirl of humanity? No and yes, she said. Well, then, I said, now you understand his choreography.
Other critics had different impressions: "A high voltage maelstrom of movement," appeared in The Village Voice; "An absolute knockout," in the New York Times. The review clip that described his movement best, from a dancer's point-of-view, was by Lisa Jo Sagolla in Backstage: "Wynn's difficult-to-do choreography calls on every aspect of a dancer's physical technique, yet demands only that which is kinesthetically natural."
When you are dancing for a choreographer who loves his dancers, you don't think about the critics. It was true, there was a lot happening onstage, which is why it was so much fun: tons of all-out, balls-to-the-wall dancing, trios and duets and quartets all at the same time. To Kevin, we were each unique. He knew our bodies. Or we felt he did, which is the same thing. If I couldn't dance with Jirí Kylián and Nederlands Dans Theater, I was lucky to dance with Kevin.
We all knew Bruce was his fearless muse. Liz got a solo that was not back grounded by a clump of moving bodies like most of the other solos in Kevin's work. Liz was alone, onstage, and we all crowded the wings to watch.
She danced tough.
Held her own.
. . .
I loved to watch Bruce so much in rehearsals with the entire group that sometimes I missed the steps Kevin gave to me. Stef filled me in later, after rehearsal. Stef absorbed Kevin's movement into her body like it was cotton candy. What Kevin called his pick-up group worked as a testing ground: for many, like Marc, like Stef, who both went on to Bill T. Jones, it was the penultimate stage before major touring companies; for others, like me, like Liz, though she also danced for Eun Me Ahn and Bebe Miller, it was the ultimate stage before leaving dance.
In the rehearsal for our duet, with no one else present, Kevin told me to stand up on Liz's back and roll off head first, no arms. I couldn't do it, so I stood stock still. Like a stork. Couldn't even shake my head: No. I could not fall from that height to the floor.
Kevin slapped his thigh. "Never seen that before," he said. But he didn't reprimand me.
Liz flopped over to the floor and waved her legs in the air, laughing. I could feel my face flush. Finally, I shook my head.
"I'll get on her back," said Liz.
Kevin said, gently, "Okay, Née, be the rock."
I got down on my hands and knees and knitted my stomach tight. Liz stepped up on my back. She put one foot on my sacrum and one foot on my upper back. Not one of those bridge-and-tunnel dancers who would have put both feet on my lower back, causing injury.
It was November, the performance run wasn't until January, but I knew what we worked on tonight could be in the show even though Kevin might not place it until a week or two before opening night. Then Liz would remember the entire combination, her river, A, and my rock, B, and reconstruct it, quickly, so that we were ready. Kevin's movement was in Liz's pores - she'd even whisper during performance.
Step right, back, around, kick it out, grab the hand,
head down, kick it over,
stand,
walk away, turn back, step back,
fall.
Fall again.
Down to the floor I'd fall and roll, and stand up quickly into parallel position with arms at my sides. Mountain pose, but we didn't call it that.
"Now," Liz would say, her back to the audience so they couldn't see her pucker her lips at me, "step back, my turn!"
I looked up from my position as rock and watched her explode for him. This was my first rehearsal with only Kevin and Liz. It would be our last. A duet. Instead of glaring at me afterward for a lapse in my body memory, Liz winked. Our secret.
Kevin decided not to partner Liz and me for the duet he'd created on us after all. Kevin put me with Stef, my friend, and Liz with Lara, her friend. Liz reconstructed the duet and taught it to Lara. Kevin set a new one on Stef and me that had a lot to do with our differences in height and ability to lift each other; although, all Kevin's dancers had to be able to lift and partner all different sizes and shapes. His choreography was egalitarian that way. Democratic and non-gendered. A male crotch or female crotch in your face, white or black or brown - it made no difference. But it made a difference to the audience. All those colors and shapes combined and reconstructed.
There's a synchronicity when friends dance together, a lightness where competition intermixes with love, and corrections are given by teasing or asking: Hey, love, Stef murmurs, why not grab my hand here, an arm indicates the movement, instead of here, a leg indicates a latter phrase. In our duet, I had to drop to my knees at the same moment Stef kicked over my head; if our timing was off, Stef would kick me in the head or, worse, the neck. I waited as long as possible to duck, daring Stef to kick too soon, and Stef smiled, her legs so long, so powerful, she controlled me with her limbs. After I ducked, I reached both arms overhead. Stef pulled hard, while I jumped, from a crouch up into her arms.
Both Stef and Liz had pale brown-colored skin, black hair, though Stef's was crinkly and wild, Liz's cropped and straight. Later, after Bill T., when Stef was dancing in Europe, Pina Bausch picked her up for a project. Stef is that gorgeous. Privately, Stef and I called ourselves a fusion of coffee and milk. Stef was espresso with an occasional lemon twist. Because of my weight, I was half-and-half. I'd lost my scholarship at Martha Graham school because I'd gained five pounds.
Martha Graham was dead and operatic. Kevin Wynn was alive and current.
A friend told me, her Argentinean accent slurring the words slightly: "Doll, you must go to the Kevin Wynn Collection. Borges in the dance. Will flip you."
The performance flipped me, I went back to Dance Theatre Workshop two nights in a row, and suddenly I had direction, a company I wanted to join, a reason to lose yet another five pounds.
By the time I got in Kevin's pick-up company, after shadowing his classes for several years, most of the dancers I'd seen in that first concert, including Kun-Yang Lin, had already moved on to other choreographers. But Marc Mann was in that first performance I saw and still with Kevin when I joined.
"Pedestrian, girl," Marc advised after my first rehearsal with Kevin, "keep it simple. Walk it."
The floor slides. The walls close in.
The rope is there, unseen.
Graham training had given me an abdomen. I could stand on two feet without falling over. I couldn't stand on Liz's back and fall off, but I had found my center. For now. I sent all my previous dance teachers postcard announcements for Kevin Wynn's Super Bon Bon run at DTW. I made sure to include the college teacher whose ridiculous contortionist choreography about dying fish had injured my back and who had told me I crashed to the floor and smiled too much when I danced.
She made it into the New York Times,
the Village Voice.
Both Lara and I had white skin, blonde hair, though Lara liked to color her short hair different shades of red. I never colored my long hair. Liz and Lara partnered downstage right. Stef and I partnered upstage left. Lara and Liz and Stef all knew how to "walk it"; they'd studied with Kevin at SUNY Purchase. On the SUNY Purchase College Conservatory of Dance web-site, Liz is listed as alumni - "with the angels." For the parallel duets, Liz and Lara were already onstage, downstage, in the spotlight.
After a mass combustion, a traffic jam or a subway squeeze, where Kevin piled ten dancers on top of each other, Liz emerged from the mêlée and kept spinning until Lara joined her. Stef and I waited until the stage cleared of the other dancers, and we ran on from opposite sides, second wing. We always took a beat when we joined each other before we started moving. Kevin preferred it that way, but Stef and I milked it for all its worth. Some of the dancers were really good at the beat - Stef was one, striking a pose and shooting a dagger at the audience - but others stumbled into the beginning of a phrase. I always pretended to be one of Barry Flanagan's huge bronze rabbit sculptures, which were currently on view along Park Avenue. Flanagan had a piece called Large Mirror Nijinski, two rabbits seemingly in motion with both arms raised and one leg extended, looking at each other across the street. I tried to explain to Stef that she could be one Nijinski and I could be the other rabbit, but she thought I was nuts.
"What girl," Stef asked, "you want me to pretend to be a faun?"
"A rabbit," I said.
Stef hadn't walked along Park Avenue for a long time.
Flanagan also had two permanent rabbits on 53rd Street, which I had walked by every morning on my way to Graham, and often visited now, so sometimes I took the shape of the one I called the Tai Chi Rabbit, thinking it was a nice counterpart to Liz's Bruce Lee on the other side of the stage. I lifted my right knee, right ankle on the bent knee of the supporting leg, extended my arms, and focused my eyes as if I were doing Tai Chi. No one really knew what the hell I was talking about when I waxed poetic about bronze rabbit sculptures and dance.
Kevin still liked to tease me, "Née," he might say, "are you Thinker on a Rock today?"
I could never get away from pretending to be some kind of animal; it was a hangover from Graham.
The two duets downstage and upstage were supposed to start moving together, but once we were in performance, Bruce and Lara always started before Stef and I were in place. It pissed Stef off because they hadn't done it that way in rehearsal. Stef thought Bruce and Lara were claiming glory, but I thought it was funny. Does an audience look at the dancer who is moving or at the one who is standing still? I took my rabbit pose and gazed adoringly at Stef. Movement was free with her. I'd spent too many years withering at Graham. Let it go, Stef sometimes whispered to me; I'd breathe and relax and let it go. Oh yeah, she'd say.
After our parallel duets, Liz stayed onstage for her solo. She was exhausted by then, but Philip Hamilton drummed her onward. Liz threw her right leg around to a lunge - an open, extended Fourth position - and took a moment to look out at the audience. She did not see their faces, she was already gone, into the dance, but they saw hers. Bruce had that power. The power to stay with you long after the performance is over. Then she rolled over the top of her front foot, her knee hitting the floor with no sound whatsoever, threw her back right leg around her body, spinning in a circle as if she were a top, and exploded back to standing, limbs flying everywhere, stopping still in the same Fourth position. The audience gasped - how could she move that way? Liz was a being out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. She lives.
The effort in her body - not her face. Not until the end.
We went on tour, and Liz warned me, "Watch out for the sound guy, I've partied with him." Still, Stef and I partied with him at a topless bar that made me feel I had a flat chest. We ended up running through sprinklers with our clothes on at 3a.m. It seemed like the thing to do while on tour in Florida. I didn't know that the Florida tour really was to be my last performance with Kevin - on a huge proscenium stage and real lights and a Marley floor. Lara smacked me so hard during the performance I got a shiner on my forehead and had to perform my solo in a daze. The costume was a tiny pair of brown Lycra shorts and a cropped tank top. My butt was firm, and I wore my Wonder Woman bra that held my non-dancer breasts tightly in place. "Fame," we sang before the curtain rose, "I wanna live forever."
In the end, Liz's boyfriend, also a dancer,
found her in her loft apartment.
Liz's boyfriend helped her down to the floor. Her feet were bare; she wore no socks. Once he enfolded her body into his, the way they had practiced many times, there was nothing left to do but cry. So he did. She had leaned back, heavy with weight, and he pulled her close, raising her bare feet off the dance floor, encircling her with his arms, folding her head next to his neck, her breath warm and sweet on his skin. Except now there was no warm breath. As he folded her into him, there was no sweet breath at all.
He let her down to the floor, felt her wrists,
her lack of breath. Kissed her pale brown face.
He is strong. A powerful mover. Lifter. Muscles. He might have said, "What have you done, my love?" speaking to her out loud. He might have pulled her body into his arms, cradling her. His body shook. Tears fell down his face onto her face. The fluid from his body had too much life for him now, but not enough for both of them. "No, no, no, no, no." Go back. Phrase A. The river. His body shook.
Some thought the concert should have been cancelled. But the show must go on. The show always goes on.
She wanted to quiet the sway of her body,
the swings of her mood, the thinness of her being.
. . .
Become the earth. Watch her move across the sky. An arm here. A leg there. Phrase A. Phrase B. Makes no difference. A full constellation suspended in the arms and legs of the tour jeté. It is a swirling Capoeira movement, head down.
The burning of the star affects others in the sky. Down below, the force of the explosion makes us reverberate and circle. As if we are onstage alone with a spot, we try to find the center of the light. For those who are left behind, it becomes a dull search.
At first, the pain is felt as if a meteor shoots through the top of your skull and rips out what you held most dear. You begin looking for what is dear in all the wrong places. You walk in a daze. Some keep dancing. Others do not.
Only someone who has gone before knows to raise the scrim, look you straight in the eyes, and say, "I do not know what to say."
Her whole life an effort to carve space
by shaping the negative air around her.
Not on Broadway.Not with a pole. Not in a black box. In a field far from New York City, I am dancing.
I am dancing under the stars. After a rond de jambe en l'air, I take a wide and open Fourth position. Look up.
There is the dancer Liz whose nickname was Bruce Lee and who lived a short time, yet long enough to burn out so brightly the light lingers and does not fade and travels still.
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