finish up the day, we rehearsed sections of repertoire, including Madame’s ballets. I rest my case: if it looks like dancers work longer hours than athletes, that’s because it’s the truth—which is to a dancer’s disadvantage. The body needs a sufficient amount of rest and recovery as well as nutrition when it is this active. The ballet world, built on obsession, competition and starvation will never figure this out. It is cemented into a tradition that involves an outdated work ethic. The dancer’s fitness regimen involves hours of physically demanding repetition (why else would it look so easy onstage?), optional cigarettes, mixed with coffee and no food. The law of diminishing returns has never been read to the dance world.
Maryse and Chantal kept their noses turned up at me when I was partnering them, when I was beside them at the barre, when I was dancing next to them and when I was anywhere near them for that matter—fortunately it was perfect ballet posture. I had no qualms about staring at their chests, it made them horribly self-conscious—they needed to get out in the bigger world and see how far being a little league bitch would get them. And I noticed everything: when Maryse got thinner, Chantal seemed to put on weight, as if no stray pounds would leave our little company. But Maryse looked like death in this condition, which, paradoxically, made her perfect for the children’s roles that called for waif-like fairies, sylphs, fireflies or something equally translucent. Chantal did her best to disguise her expanding thighs with a variety of sheer rehearsal skirts, and I had the misfortune of being her pas de deux partner while Jean-Marc partnered only the skeletal Maryse, making him look even more capable.
Sometimes Bertrand shared Louise with me. She was the only one who responded like a real performer. She had instinct, trust, generosity and perhaps even a crush on me; she always looked at me with a grin and a twinkle in her eye as though we were sharing a private joke. On this particular day we danced together rehearsing the pas de deux from Minkus’s Paquita. Both of us knew the choreography more or less, although we had never danced it together. As Hortense crucified the music as if she were nailing Jesus to the cross and making damn sure he wouldn’t get away, Louise and I flew beyond the staleness of that crummy little studio. Madame stood silent and the other two couples finally stopped their cumbersome, indulgent and weighty movements to watch as well. If Louise hadn’t been Bertrand’s woman, I would have made her my dance partner for life. There was a natural sensitivity in every move we made; every lift, every turn, we became one, and far more than one when we danced.
Later that week, we were to rehearse one of Madame’s creations set to Debussy’s “La Mer,” and based on Grimm’s Little Mermaid. Jean-Marc, her Neptune, was late and had not called in. Madame was visibly shaken by this lack of etiquette, so I stepped in. I took my place and watched Madame slide across the classroom, arms carving the air, her footwork an intricate swirl of triplets. She swam me from an imaginary giant clam, to Louise, bourréeing as Les Algues, an overgrown piece of seaweed. I followed slowly. We call it marking; in the whole ballet theatre world we call it marking. You rarely, if ever, dance full out when initially learning the choreography.
“You’re not going to move like that!” she shouted after I traced the steps, head down, arms grasping the air, counting out the beats. “Of course not, Madame.”
“Go and sit down.” Madame choked, turned red, leaned on the barre.
Louise rat-a-tatted something to her and then muttered to me under her breath, “Madame hates marking. She’d rather see you get it wrong full-out, than have you mark it.”
But Madame shouted back short and quick at Louise, “Mes nerfs!” She stood by the window and lit a cigarette.
Louise rolled her eyes then whispered, “Make her choreography look difficult. Does that make sense?”
It didn’t matter. Even if I did pirouettes on my ear, Jean-Marc had stood her up.
Madame continued to make things more difficult. She altered the choreography, put in extra lifts, made them last longer. My repertoire became rife with adagios with laboriously slow lifts from Albinoni to Telemann. To my credit, Chantal and Louise appreciated a male who didn’t gasp in a presage or a cambré.
Only one of them, Saint-Saëns’s “The Carnival of the Animals,” provided any real dancing challenges. My only other hope was a piece she was putting together to Holst’s The Planets, but even then I had been assigned all adagios while Jean-Marc and Bertrand were allowed to allegro. True, adagios showed off my line, but I had the quickest entre-chat, and tighter and cleaner footwork. One bright spot remained—Chantal’s bullying: if I placed my hands on her waist for a lift, she would dig her nails into my wrists, and on pointe she would shift aggressively to make it look like I didn’t have her on her centre; she would pull at my arms, or go limp spontaneously, and Madame could see through it. If anyone were to shit on me it would be Madame and Madame alone. “Chantal you are dancing like a dead marionette. Qu’est ce que vous faites? Enough! Monsieur Rottam is a dancer, not a cheese-maker!” Thank God someone else had incurred Madame’s wrath.
One Monday, after one too many lifts and not enough dancing, I pressed her, “Madame, when do we start rehearsing Rimbaud? Shouldn’t we be rehearsing Rimbaud? And what are the exact dates? Which theatre in Harlem? The Apollo? The Company performed there. Before my time of course, but I’ve seen the pictures, just after the Apollo reopened and then closed.”
“It’s the Harlem School of Music.”
“That’s in Brooklyn. It’s the Brooklyn Academy of Music.”
“Harlem.”
“But—the Dance Theatre of Harlem?”
“And unless you can convince me as Verlaine…”
At that point Chantal ran out of the room in tears.
“Chantal! Christ!”
Louise giggled. “Chantal’s afraid of New York.”
“Maybe she’s afraid of herself,” I added.
I’d taken a wrong turn. I started doubting Madame, and once I lose trust, I am gone; that’s when my eyes go blank, I suppose. Slowly day by day, class by class, rehearsal after rehearsal, the thought crept over me that I had little to do but recover, get strong, get some cash and then get out of there.
The next day, I inquired about payday, with not much money to spare, and they laughed. We were on a break in the small kitchen off the classroom. As usual I was deaf to the Québécois rat-a-tatting going on around me. I had practised my question. “Et bien, quand est-ce que nous reçeverons nos salaire?”
“Didn’t Bertrand tell you? The classes are our payment,” said Maryse, in quite good English, which was a shock since she hadn’t spoken to me since we first met. She obviously took great joy in being able to deliver such bad news. I had had enough free classes to know this was not a bonus. In smaller places, men’s fees were always overlooked. Madame definitely owed us. Besides this, I started to see her innovative exercises as masochistic, designed to destroy line, over-build thighs, and make me strong, like Madame, but too tight. What had worked for her at the academy in Budapest wouldn’t work for me. My legs were becoming bulky and overly muscular. She was one of those teachers who could only work from the perspective of their own body type, and although her strength had made her an anomaly and a legend, it hadn’t made her a very good teacher. Her reputation was of no use to me. My pants were becoming tight on my thighs. I remember Kent, someone I was yet to meet, using the term thunder thighs. This turbulent honeymoon with Madame was over. It was worse than what I had left on the prairies.
Конец
