I had a flashback to that Jimmy Stewart look-alike in the Arcotel in Zagreb.
What was it with that guy, and what the hell was he doing in Zagreb? I was pretty sure he wasn’t part of the conference – he really didn’t seem to fit in with the PSi crowd – but he was definitely passing through.
Well, I had been, too.
After I finished my barre exercises, I fixed myself a snack (hummous and raw vegetables) and sat down at the computer to move some more commas around. I did that for about forty-five minutes before I decided to let myself go on the Internet for a minute.
Famous last words. At this point, it won’t surprise you that I ended up back on YouTube watching that Satie dance again. I knew as well as you what I was doing, and I knew it meant my “productive” time was over for the day. The moth’s video was up to forty-three hits. Who was watching it? I looked at the column of related videos – unsurprisingly, plenty of Satie, a few just piano solos, and a couple of other choreographies, none of which were of particular interest. There was, however, a video of Natalia Makarova dancing The Dying Swan to Saint-Saëns. It was posted by Schoevia. I clicked on it. It’s pretty shocking. It’s Fokine’s choreography, as you may know, but Makarova’s interpretation is unique, and people tend to have fairly extreme responses to its convulsive qualities.
The comment section was volatile. BubbleChikk14 started it off: “HER ARMS ARE BEAUTIFUL!”
But arakhachatran responded “No her arms are not beautiful. Thats her worst part in thisperformance. You dont understand anything in ballet but try to act like a smart ass.”
That really pissed off yuliya1995 who shot back: “how do you know she has very gentle arms and i bet you cant do that so who do you call a smart ass? its you who is a smart ass who think they know about ballet.”
A few others weighed in, mostly outraged at arakhachatran’s philistinism. Somebody named ahamayoisac took a more Solomonic attitude, acknowledging that the arm movement was not elegant in a typical balletic way, but was expressive of genuine agony and for this reason “perfect.”
Frankly, I love it, but I think arakhachatran had a point. It’s practically spastic.
And then I saw it: a recent comment – dated July 27, 2009 – by falserebelmoth. She must have been watching this video, which might explain its popping up as “related” to her own. Of course, superficially, they were utterly unrelated: Makarova’s emphatic stabbing of the floor with those pointe shoes, her anguished face and contorted, convulsing torso had nothing to do with falserebelmoth’s quiet little moonwalk and her indecipherable downward glance.
And yet.
I’m sure it had something to do with the weird confluence of recent events – the shock of MJ’s passing, my dismal, meaningless conference presentation to the singular audience of Amanda Trugget, those disturbing encounters with Jimmy Stewart at the Arcotel… It was difficult not to read some kind of connection between these things, and I felt like the moth was trying to tell me what it was.
Her comment was, true to form, oblique, ambiguous, and strange: “like Birds One Claw upon the Air…”
To which quothballetcarper had immediately responded: “fancy seeing you here little lady. hows the pointe work going? practice makes perfect. i have my eye on you. bye.”
She answered, with what appeared to me to be modesty, quiet dignity, and slight defiance: “I cannot dance upon my Toes – No Man instructed me.”
He shot back: “Instruction is my specialty, little lady! Ur speakin to the ‘pro’! Whippin gals like you into shape is my ‘racquet’! Dont think Im goin to go easy on u just because ur a girl!”
Wow. And they thought arakhachatran was obnoxious.
I watched Natalia Makarova dance The Dying Swan five more times. Her tremulous, skinny legs stuttered over her pointe shoes. Her mouth was pulled back in a grimace. Everything about her communicated suffering.
“i have my eye on you”? What exactly did he mean by that?
I considered forwarding the YouTube link of Natalia Makarova to Sven but decided against it. Too much tragedy.
The great thing about that Makarova dance is that it’s obscene, but everybody acts like it’s normal. There are a lot of contemporary choreographers who just go ahead and make the obscenity explicit. People like Marie Chouinard. She’ll put her dancers in bondage gear and pasties with prosthetics and toe shoes. I kind of like Marie Chouinard, but Makarova’s more interesting to me.
There’s a famous essay by the dance theorist Susan Leigh Foster called “The Ballerina’s Phallic Pointe.” The title basically tells you everything. I could go into detail, but it’s probably not necessary. It’s a great essay. When I read it in graduate school all kinds of things became clear to me. Susan Foster is smart, and the essay is very erudite, but the tone is a little cheeky. At one point, she says, “She is, in a word, the phallus… Now this is a naughty thing to propose.” Well, yes, Susan, it is.
I like to imagine what would happen if you passed this essay out to all those stout, pushy moms with their little girls in pink tights at the Joffrey School.
There’s another famous essay in the field of dance studies by Joann Kealiinohomoku, called “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance.” That one also tells you pretty much what you need to know in the title. I often think of that one when people ask me if I do “ethnic dance.”
I’d been thinking a lot about Michael Jackson, and not just because of that dying swan. Actually, it was probably hard for anybody to stop thinking about him that week. Standing in line at the register at Morton Williams, I noticed his picture was all over the tabloids. I’m not sure how they rallied all of those editorial forces so quickly. He was even on the cover of TIME – just days after his demise. The conspiracy theories were rampant. I usually tend to be a pretty sober person. I’m not particularly quick to suspect foul play. But everyone seemed to agree that that personal physician of his was going to have some explaining to do. And as I said, I had my own personal concerns.
Of course mystery was something MJ seemed to encourage, what with the disguises, the glove, the various things he seemed to be trying to conceal. And maybe it’s natural that his propensity for concealment produced in me – as it did in many others – a complicated response. I already mentioned Reverend Billy. Like everybody else, I was a little perplexed by Barack Obama’s statement on Jackson’s death – but I also understood why he needed to pussyfoot around the issue. You may remember – he called MJ a “spectacular performer” but he felt compelled to add that there were “aspects of his life that were sad and tragic.” There were a few different ways to interpret this: as a melancholy reflection on MJ’s purportedly abusive upbringing, or as a subtle repudiation of his own purported abuses of others; as a lamentation of his seeming inability to own and inhabit his blackness, or as a suggestion that a racist world had led him to practically flay himself as a sacrificial lamb at the altar of whiteness. I realize my language may appear a little exaggerated. But maybe not so much for somebody like Barack Obama.
On the evening of July 29, the day that I’d gotten home from Zagreb, unpacked, showered, shopped, done my ballet exercises, moved commas, putzed around on YouTube and discovered that uncanny video of Natalia Makarova flapping around like a gorgeous, convulsive fowl, I decided to check in one more time on falserebelmoth. “Decided to check in” may be
