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.
Act Two
“You put a man and woman on a stage together, and already it’s a story.”
—George Balanchine,
Quoted in Robert Greskovic’s
Ballet 101: A Complete Guide to Learning & Loving the Ballet
Attending a Wedding: NYC
At the start of the ceremony, when the music paused, I turned off the fluorescent lights in the bathroom and opened the door. Through the crack between the door and the wall, I had a full view of the main room. My scholarship at Graham only covered tuition. I had to work to cover living expenses.
The groom wore a tuxedo not unlike my own. Short, he had blonde hair and brown eyes. He looked similar to the men I saw standing on the subway platform at the Fulton Street stop when I came to work: He lacked natural color, his eyes had bags of blue underneath, and his complexion was well manicured with money. He looked harried, as if he were worried about getting a spot on the Number 6 Train uptown, and his hands looked as if they were better occupied holding the Wall Street Journal than waiting for the palm of his future wife.
The string quartet started playing “Here Comes the Bride.” The groom adjusted his bow tie and turned to watch the bride. His best man, equally well manicured but taller, put his hand on the groom’s shoulder.
The cummerbund felt loose around my waist. It did not fit properly, so I had tied the narrow ends of the cummerbund around a belt loop at the back of the black pants. The shirt, also too big, bagged around my waist. I let
