photo by Ben McKeown
Larry was in LA this week for work, so I’ve been home alone. These stretches used to be bad for me, an excuse to indulge all my most self-destructive habits under the guise of relaxation: stay up late, stare at my phone, let dishes and laundry sit. This week I asked myself constantly: what do you need? Okay girl, it’s time to go to bed I’d say out loud, gently. Okay, girl.
One thing I’d already okay, girled myself into was buying a ticket to a modern dance performance. I’d never been to a dance that wasn’t The Nutcracker or a kid’s recital. I was curious to see if I’d follow the… story? The intent? Whatever a dance is supposed to convey? I wasn’t sure. I wondered if I’d like it.
I needed to pick up my ticket at will-call, so I got there early. As I walked in the side-street darkness from my car into the building, the stone tiles rang out as I stepped on them, like they always do, like some primordial Big piano. I had a bag of prunes from the bulk bin in my coat pocket, a vision of slipping them one by one into my mouth during the show, not having to take my eyes off the stage. Prunes! Obviously a weird choice but also precisely the food I wanted. I put my palms on my cheeks as I walked, feeling exhilarated, and whispered aloud to myself I love you! You are so cool and interesting and fun and you have great ideas!
Remember the play I wrote about back when it was stretchy warm taffy? It closed last weekend. I still had no idea what the play was like for an audience member. It seemed that they often didn’t understand the play itself, or couldn’t in the way we did. Much of it refused to resolve into anything obvious, anything easy. Laughter rolled through the room some nights during sad parts or bittersweet parts or parts that just were. We repeated often, in our small-town interviews, in conversations in the lobby after, that the first time we all read the script, we had no idea what to think. And then I read it again, we’d begin: real people rose from the fog, and once we started to rehearse, moving as them, imagining their slumping or brightening or reaching out, we began to see what they wanted, what they fled from, what the fuck they were talking about. But after six weeks of rehearsal and twelve of thirteen performances, there were still connections that were dawning on me for the first time. After the twelfth performance, we all gathered in the lobby with a gaggle of spouses and friends. Gary pulled in the patio chairs from the set and the run crew groaned. We chatted, drank wine from plastic cups, passed tall cans of Pringles. I wondered aloud about “getting” the play or not “getting” the play: isn’t the point to communicate, to be understood? What does it mean to write a play in which no audience member will fully grasp your intent in one viewing?
Is that good? Or is it bad? I repeated, looking around for the answer.
My seat for the dance was in the second row, the orchestra pit, near enough to touch the lip of the stage. I sat down first and people filled in around me: behind, a row of college students required to be there for some class, muttering to one another, double-checking the short run time in the program. Beside, some married folks with wild white hair, slightly moneyed, blurring the air with spicy frankincense scent. In the moment between the lights going down and the curtain going up, I closed my eyes in the darkness.
The stage lit up, and there were people moving. There was silence at first, and I was close enough to hear the shushing noise of the dancers’ feet tracing the stage, breath heaving, then calming, the occasional pop of a bending knee joint. Music, then not, movement, then not. The dancers leapt and fell and repeated, slunk and pulsed. One at a time then all together, spreading. I kept holding my breath and had to remind myself to release it. The stage lights bled to the front rows and I felt that if they hadn’t, I would’ve let myself cry. Watching another person’s body move felt unbearably vulnerable and almost obscene. A dancer who’d been moving his hands in circles and arms in circles and waist-up in circles like a carnival ride would slow, wind down, eventually collapsing on the floor. Corpse pose. I watched the pulse in his neck slow, and watched the people around me watching too.
And did I get it? I felt I did, and there was no way to know, and in the moment, no reason to care. I’d wondered if there would be a story, if I’d be smart enough to follow it, but sitting there, even the concept of story seemed like a foil. The emotional translation beamed from their bodies to ours. Recognizable widening fear, hopeless drudgery, frenetic hope. The relief of stillness. Their bodies moving screens and the audience with a thousand lit-up projector bulbs for eyes.
To get back to the main level of Krannert from the orchestra pit means slowly climbing a lot of stairs upholstered red, surrounded by the elderly couples with tight elbows and students with very loose ones. When the younger people would spot friends, they’d greet one another then say Did you like it? and nobody had an answer prepared.
Like sounded so flimsy to me then, a nothing word, the wrong question.
The warming crush of the crowd lifted as we all headed outside. Walking to the double doors, I realized I was walking in step with a stranger just in front of me. Our shoes clicked over the glossy wood. I struck my heel against the floor for the next few feet, a new rhythm. It felt like something. I plucked a prune from my coat pocket and chewed it very slowly in the night air.
How lucky we are that everything feels like something.
I love you,
Lindsey
The dance I saw was Long Run by Tere O’Connor. This review writes about the dancing itself more evocatively than I’m able to.
If it isn’t too late, I highly recommend participating in Yumi Sakugawa’s webinar on creating structured habits for your creative practice. It’s today, but if you can’t do it live, you can access the recording later.