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 needed. Often the males are homosexuals and too sweet to go crazy. It isn’t in them.
In 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