The Complete Ballet Page 8

  In Romantic ballet the tragedy that happens is less about the people than the emotions inside those people. It’s not Giselle or Albrecht who has a tragic flaw, it’s love. Inside the crystalline purity of love there’s a crack, and as the story unfolds the crack is revealed, and the Romantic part isn’t the romance, it’s the attempt to stop the crack or hide the crack or glue it back together. Or believe that’s even possible. Rigoletto, which premiered ten years after Giselle, is about a human being trying to hold the world together. Like the dwarves Velázquez painted, he’s flawed, and like them he knows it, and like them the emotions he feels are the ones that everyone feels, that I feel, and part of being a father is making sure the flaws of the father aren’t passed on to your children. The fact that your blood was running in her veins makes it seem as if you knew her, what her thoughts were, and the games she wanted to act out with you, that you did act out, and I overheard a man in an ice cream parlor stating that all daughters love their fathers. Which first of all isn’t true, but it’s partly true because daughters learn about men from the first man they know. And changing diapers is part of it but showing her how to live by example, that gets complicated. You grow up with this person, a blind child, helpless and needing you, and you go through the stuffed dogs and the blue bicycles and the need you thought was her need, for you, gets turned around and you find yourself needing her. When Rigoletto, in the opera, finds his daughter’s dress on her bed he knows what’s happened. His daughter, wanting to escape his protection, didn’t tell him about the student she’d been flirting with, is possibly in love with, whatever love is, but because she’s not very good at dissimulation Rigoletto suspects some Casanova character has come along, a man like his boss, and it is his boss, disguised as the student, who visits the girl and professes his love. And the same sexist society existed in Rigoletto’s time. Knowing her innocence he knows that when she falls in love she’ll probably fall hard, and every parent of a girl must worry like this but now it’s too late. The girl has already been ravished, and the ravishing is bad enough but now she’s in love with the man who did the ravishing. And a hunchback can run when he has to. Rigoletto runs to the stable where his daughter has gone to meet her lover, and at this point he’s already hired an assassin to murder the lover, and when he’s presented with a body-bag sack he’s told it’s the man inside, and a buffoon is a monarch in revenge. I think that’s a line from Rigoletto. It’s in an aria he sings and then, in the silence after his singing he hears another song, and at first it seems like any familiar song but it’s not the song, it’s the voice, which can’t be right because the man is dead. And if he’s not dead, then the body in the sack, the sack at his feet, and at first he doesn’t realize what happened, that his daughter, having disguised herself, came to the stable and the assassin, not seeing through her disguise, standing behind a wooden post because that was his job, plunged the knife blade into her back, into the vertebrae, severing the spinal nerves, and Rigoletto, holding the sack, doesn’t want to open the sack because he fears what might be inside the sack, but he does. And his madness has already begun. When he pulls at the canvas opening we can’t see what he sees, but we see his face, turning numb, the blood flowing out of his face and pooling in his heart. And a young person’s heart is still pliable, but when you get old your heart gets brittle, and it takes about two seconds. Whether she’s alive or not, like Shakespeare’s old Lear, he hardly notices.

  When I said before that I wanted my life to be like a dance I meant it, of course, metaphorically. You can dance sitting down. Or weaving between pedestrians on the street. Sometimes I like to get in my car and just drive, more or less mindlessly, without destination, going straight if the light is green, turning if the light is red, following the dictates of the world as manifested by the signals of the world, stopping at stop signs faded by the sun, and the road I’m on now, metaphorically, is the same road I’ve always been on. The world is visible outside the windshield, and I hear that world humming against my tires, and when I grip the plastic undulations of the steering wheel, I can feel the world out there but without feeling. Just numbness. And there’s something seductive about numbness. No pain, no sadness, no disappointment. Just keep holding the steering wheel. There’s a crack in my black plastic dashboard, like a rut, and I’m in a rut, and I’ve made it my rut and I would gladly try something that isn’t my rut but the place I end up today is the cemetery. My mother is buried here, on a hill. I park my car, walk down the hill and her stone is here, her ashes beneath it, near a narrow concrete path. It’s a flat stone, with her name, the dates of her birth and death, and next to her is her brother, who I never met, he died young, and next to him is my grandmother, who I loved, and then my mother’s father, who I didn’t know, and there are two ways you can love your mother. The obvious way is to feel nurtured and protected. The infantile feeling of helplessness, like an invisible umbilical attachment, stretches between your two hearts for as long as you live. The other way is the way of understanding. That’s how I want to be loved, and it’s how I want to love my mother. By under standing the circumstances of her life, born into poverty and hating that poverty, needing to rise above the neglect she might have felt. And of course I don’t know what she felt exactly but I know she always seemed to want from me, and from everyone, a sense of both who she was and that who she was had value. And I understand that her need probably altered her love for me, or filtered it, but it didn’t erase it. I felt it. I still do. Dead she is but I’m still bound to her, and of course if she would have found the things she craved, one of which was money, then there would’ve been some extra when she died. I wouldn’t have been in quite the same position vis-à-vis Seymour and the Commodore. But that was then and now I’m standing under the cemetery’s blue sky, the uneven grave stones pushed up by the earth, or sinking into the earth, and although the earth isn’t a fluid, under the crust it is fluid, and it’s that thin crust we live on, and we die, and that’s why I’m here, to check on my grave. When my mother bought her plot she also bought a plot for me, but the under takers somehow misplaced my plot or sold my plot to someone else, and the cemetery man said he’d fit me in and now I see they’ve moved my mother’s stone closer to her brother, creating a space for me between her and the concrete pathway. The entire hill is filled with these same stones, the people beneath them with different names and dates, and I wouldn’t mind if my ashes were thrown into the open ocean. That’s where we scattered my father. But my mother paid for me to be with her, and her name is Freeman, her father’s name, probably changed at some point, and names won’t matter when I’m dead because, first of all, I won’t exist, except in memory, and since memories die when people die it’s all the same, the same doing nothing and being nothing, and I suppose at one point I wanted to be more, or do more, to make my mark as they say. I liked the idea of making my mark. I’d read about people, or heard about them, who made their mark, and that seemed to be what people were supposed to do. When they grew up. Not just supposed to do, wanted to do. When you’re young you think you’ll do something amazing, and then when you do it, before you know what it is, it’s gone, and that’s where I am, at the point where I haven’t forgotten my dreams but my dreams aren’t mine anymore.

  I grew up in the house my father built, and although I have no memory of it— we left when I was six— I can see it very clearly, the way he built the walls of the house, with bricks, letting the mortar that held the bricks seep out from between them. Weeping mortar was my father’s specialty. Instead of smoothing the wet cement with a trowel, he let it ooze out and harden, like volcano lava hardening halfway over a cliff.

  In Giselle, the lights come up on a graveyard in the forest. Hilarion, on his knees, is grieving over the grave of Giselle. It’s partly the fact of her death, the loss of a person he loved, the girl he wanted to marry and live with and raise children with, but since he was the one who left the sword in plain sight her death is partly his fault. And I know my father killed people in
the war but that was his job, supposedly the right thing to do. For Hilarion, to be responsible for killing the girl he loves, or loved, is too much sadness. The regret he feels is not like pain, it is pain. And when he walks off into another part of the cemetery he’s not softly berating himself, he’s doing it loudly, cursing his stupid self in the once-empty cemetery and that’s when the Wilis appear. They’re led by their queen, Myrtha, wearing a wild headdress, and they swoop down like birds of prey, all in white, a flock of once-beautiful maidens, and they’re still beautiful but now their curse is to rise from their graves at night, seeking revenge on the world of men by dancing individual men to death. The specific man doesn’t matter, their hatred, born of sadness, is universal. And even before Hilarion sees them he has a premonition, a sensation we now call the willies, and the word is based on these creatures, ethereal and dangerous and he sees the Wilis just before they attack. They surround him, calling to him, and whether he felt like dancing before doesn’t matter because now he has to dance. It’s the power they have. And while he’s dancing he’s also trying to resist, trying to pull himself away from what seems like a magnetic grip, and in fact he is able to pull himself free, and he runs away into the forest.

  The way Myrtha sees it, the women she commands have been wronged. They aren’t evil. And they’re not subservient objects either, or passive ideals of beauty. They’re agents of justice empowered by anger, and that’s what revenge is, a melding of righteousness and anger. They’re equal to anyone. And the problem is, their anger has no resolution. Like insatiable animals, they feed on death to satisfy a need but the need, which is their reason for being, can never be satisfied. Myrtha, with her broad, strong shoulders, knows the story of Albrecht’s falseness, and I almost said manly shoulders but I’ve only seen her played by a woman, and when Albrecht approaches the clearing the queen turns to her new recruit, Giselle. She’s about to induct Giselle into the coven of the unrequited when Albrecht, kneeling in front of her grave site, sees her. She hasn’t become a complete Wili yet but she’s changing, he can see that. And does he even know her anymore? He stands, approaches her, and it’s too late to apologize but yes, he does love her, and then Myrtha gives the command. Make him start dancing. And because it’s night, Giselle can’t disobey. And she knows the dancing will kill him, and she knows the Wilis want her to kill him. But if she loved him once, where did love go? And if it didn’t go, what can she do? She’s cursed, not knowing what will happen until, the moment she faces him, rising up on her toes, extending her leg behind her, her arms stretched in front of her, that’s when he takes her and lifts her and she knows her love is undiminished. They dance a dance of forgiveness, spinning and jumping and the forgiveness gives way to pleasure, then joy, and the problem is, to break the curse they have to dance all night. And that’s when Hilarion appears. He’s lost, disoriented, and a pas de deux is a dance for two people, for Albrecht and Giselle, and because Hilarion is alone the Wilis turn on him, chasing him into the forest and making him dance, spinning him and guiding him, dancing him diagonally to a nearby lake, and he knows he’s dancing himself into the water, and he can’t breathe under the water, and because he can’t stop dancing he drowns in the lake.

  My wife and I were left, not with each other, but with a hole we couldn’t fill for each other. My daughter was four years, one month, nineteen days when she was taken. And I say taken because that’s what it felt like, like her innocence and joy had been taken from us. But it was also taken from her. Every thing good she would ever know was gone, because she was gone, and my wife loved her as much as I did. The years we’d spent trying to preserve her innocence, because innocent is how she came to us, pure and trusting, and suddenly, where there was life, and you think it must be something passing, like a passing thought or dream, but the dream is real and you can’t take your eyes away for an instant. That’s what we said, and at some point my body couldn’t take it. The loss, like a disease, invaded my body, eating away at the organs and bones until after weeks of not moving, hardly talking, certainly not comforting each other or embracing each other, one night I was in the kitchen, watching steam rise from a pot of cooking noodles, and I don’t remember how but we found ourselves in each other’s arms and we stayed like that, swaying and crying, and I was supporting her and she was supporting me and then I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t stand. My legs couldn’t bear my own weight and she had to hold me, holding me up for what seemed like hours, possibly years, and she had her own strength to preserve and after a while I was too much, too heavy a load, and when she let me go she turned, like a dancer turning her body, and she let me slip from her arms and fall, onto the brown sofa we had, more gold than brown, and I didn’t stop falling until I was far away.

  Albrecht’s problem is that he’s still alive. Giselle is dead, and the curse on him is that he has to keep dancing. If he can dance through the night his life will be spared, but at this point, having already danced for hours, his will to dance is exhausted. Whether he’s alive or dead hardly matters to him. Which is why Giselle forces him to keep dancing. If she can inspire him for a few more hours then the curse on her will also be lifted and finally she’ll be freed from rising up every night and reenacting the same story, over and over, and it’s an old story, and it’s not even hers. It’s Myrtha’s story. And when Myrtha returns to the graveyard she sees the lovers still dancing the pas de deux, Albrecht still alive, but barely, and faster, she says, go faster. Giselle does most of the dancing because Albrecht has just about left his body, which is what Myrtha wants, death. She directs the Wilis to surround the couple, taunting Giselle to dance him harder, to break him down, and Giselle can’t not obey and so she does, and the dancing takes Albrecht to a place beyond exhaustion, to the point when his body starts to shut down. He doesn’t shit himself or wet his pants but he begs to be spared. Which only whets Myrtha’s appetite. Her anger feeds on his vulnerability, and Giselle, as a way to protect both him and her own belief in love, lifts him, and like a danseur leading a ballerina she leads him as he once led her, supporting and balancing and embracing him in a dance that continues until the night sky gives way to clouds, in the distance, turning pink. Giselle, by choosing love, has broken the curse. As the sun breaks the horizon, and as the Wilis gradually fade into the morning daylight, Albrecht, looking up from a mossy gravestone, sees Giselle, and we all see Giselle, dissolving into herself, returning to her grave to finally rest in peace.

  ACT THREE

  La Bayadère

  La Bayadère was first performed in 1877 by the Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg. According to the calendar in use at the time it premiered on January 23, with choreography by Marius Petipa, a Frenchman who, working in Russia, is most responsible for transforming a stylized dance for men into what we now call classical ballet. The pas de deux we have is based on his pas de deux. The corps de ballet, which had always been kept in the background, because of him was brought into the spotlight. He died in 1910, on either the first of July or the fourteenth, and the reason two separate dates exist is because in Russia, until 1918, they used the Julian calendar. And any calendar approximates the time it takes the sun to get from one winter solstice to another. Now we use a different calendar, with a different, more accurate measurement, but because the sun moves as we do, in circular and cyclical and sometimes imperfect ways, as the years go by our approximation of its movement will always be just that.