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
