by Henry Alford
“Great!” Lowery enthused, and then proceeded to show me the sequence. You know those football drills where the players bend their knees slightly and hold their fists up in the air at chest height and then piston their legs while pushing a heavily weighted object (a tackling sled) across the field? Imagine doing that, but then, halfway through, suddenly realizing you need to grapevine like you’ve never needed to grapevine before.
Lowery made the sequence look extremely easy, but as soon as I tried to do it, the image in my head bore no relation to what my legs and arms did. She did the sequence for me ten or eleven times, slowing it down and breaking it into pieces, but I started to feel like I was taking up too much of her time, so I took an iPhone video of her doing the steps.
Lowery moved on to the other male dancer, and I started looking at my video. I had gotten through it twice when Twyla walked over to me. The second she started speaking, I knew how I had erred: I shouldn’t have been learning the dance from the video, it’s an intellectualized approach to what should be a purely kinesthetic experience. While talking to me, Twyla did her thing with me, her rock-on-the-balls-of-her-feet-while-staring thing. This was at once thrilling (I have the attention of the world’s most accomplished living choreographer) and rattling (How has she gotten so far with such a limited repertoire of facial expressions?).
She didn’t seem disappointed with me. No need for that. But I was disappointed in myself. Indeed, during our subsequent three-minute-long talk, I stashed my iPhone in my pocket and found myself reflexively brushing my fingertips against my pants as if to wipe off any iPhone-derived besmirchment.
During this three minutes, Twyla did a marvelous thing. At one point, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a dancer’s hand fly into the air—have I stressed that there were more than a hundred people rehearsing in a space the size of an airport Cinnabon? Twyla must have seen it, too: she grabbed the front of my shirt at chest level, as if to choke me to death, and then, rotating me twenty-five degrees to my right, positioned me parallel with the bathroom wall, out of harm’s way.
* * *
I went back to my group’s huddle, hoping to find in their ministrations either inspiration or succor.
Lowery continued teaching them for another forty-five minutes or so. While instructing one woman in her forties to do a sequence that included a lot of shoulders and cross-stepping, Lowery said of Twyla and the move, “But she doesn’t want it pretty, she wants it dirty.” When another woman made a slightly bewildered face on being shown her sequence—the one where you run in place while slapping your armpits—Lowery neatly defused any tension by saying, “I know—weird, right?”
Meanwhile, over by the window, Twyla gave instruction to Pierpont, the New Yorker writer, who was there with her husband, a warm, rumpled man in his sixties who walked with a cane. “The cane is good,” Twyla said to the husband. (In the past, One Hundreds volunteers have included paraplegics.)
Pierpont’s husband went into his sequence for Twyla’s inspection. Between counts six and eight, an arm thrust saw his cane lift up in the air like a sword, which caused him and his wife to grin.
He looked at Twyla as if to say, “Why not?”
Twyla stared at this unblinkingly and, five seconds later, ignored it by complimenting him for finishing the sequence on eleven.
* * *
Gradually seven of my group had wandered outside, where we were practicing our sequences in a courtyard while a family of four, eating in a Le Pain Quotidien that overlooked the courtyard, gazed at us disinterestedly.
Soon, Lowery joined us outside. We asked if she’d watch us do a run-through, and she said sure. She wondered if any of us still had any questions.
I asked, “How should I arrange my face?”
“You’re grrrrrrrr,” Lowery said, gritting her teeth fiercely. “Like when you play football.”
“I don’t.”
“Well, like you’ve seen in movies.”
Got it.
Lowery said that, in our first run-through, she would count the eleven out loud, so we’d know where we were supposed to end.
“Except for you,” she said to me. “Because yours ends on eleven-and.”
What?! I’m not supposed to be in synch with everyone else at the end?
I gnawed on this bone for about fifteen seconds before realizing that it was too picayune a detail for me to worry about. No, I should focus on larger issues, such as the preceding eleven seconds of movement.
We ran through our sequences three times.
I got better.
* * *
We had almost three free hours before we were to return to the check-in site to “stage” the piece. I went out into Rockefeller Park and kept practicing my sequence for about half an hour, until my shoulders and thighs ached. My inspiration was Twyla—a workaholic, a practitioner and preacher of the gospels of discipline and routine. (Baryshnikov, after Push Comes to Shove: “Twyla takes it for granted that the choreographer and the dancer can do a single enchaînement three thousand times to get it right. I had never had the habit or discipline to do anything so many times and with such concentration of energy.”) I wanted to get on this bus for her. I tried not to be bothered by the fact that I was doing my moves at about half the required speed.
At a certain point in my efforts, I noticed, out in the largest open part of the park, Twyla and her seven dancers rehearsing. I sat down on a park bench and watched them for a while. I was sort of hoping to see my football sequence; I didn’t. But it didn’t matter. The dancers’ work was gorgeous, full of weird, slinky surprises and bursts of muted elegance.
Over the years, Twyla has specified at least two motivations for The One Hundreds: to build community, and “trying to get the world to dance so that they’d understand us.” As I sat on the bench, this second aspiration spoke to me. In the dancers’ hands, or should I say bodies, Twyla’s use of everyday gesture coexisted seamlessly with the more formal splits and jetés and relevés. In the past when I’d appreciated effortlessness in art, it had mostly been a notional matter: I could see the lack of strain, but I didn’t know, and possibly couldn’t even imagine, what this strain would actually look like. But having struggled with my tiny percentage of the choreography that the dancers were doing, I didn’t simply know it, I could almost feel it.
Studies in neuroscience have borne this out: the neural mechanisms that are fired when you see movement are very close to the ones fired when you engage in that movement yourself. As neuroscientist Marcel Kinsbourne has written, “Perceived behavior gives a leg up to more of the same in the observer, who becomes a participant.”
Which is to say, though I would have liked to have sat there and watched the dancers run through the whole dance, I could only watch for ten minutes or so: it was too exhausting.
It occurred to me that maybe my uptick of dancing in the previous four years was partly an attempt to make going to the ballet or going to see Michelle Dorrance or Pina Bausch’s company even richer. Once you’ve been on the factory tour, you really start to taste the cinnamon.
Why hadn’t this occurred to me earlier?
Duh.
* * *
Eager to work off some of my nerves, I walked home, took a shower, and lay on my bed for an hour.
I returned to Rockefeller Park a half hour before the call time, so I could check out the vibe of the field where the performance would be held, and practice a little. It had gotten overcast, and even rained a tiny bit, which had made all the green of the tree-dappled, mist-tinged park look lush and fecund. There was a brooding quality to the heavens and the Hudson River below; the boats that scuttled past the park looked worried. The grass was damp, and I appreciated the fact, like I have never appreciated the fact before, that I would not be doing splits from a standing position.
Over the next twenty minutes, I had great fun talking to four or five other volunteer dancers; knowing that you are backing up seven gorgeous, super-talented young dancers is a cross b
etween going backstage at a Broadway show and hearing your name announced over the radio.
If there is a blatant manifestation of snobbery in the dance world, it is that nonprofessional dancers like me are not called nonprofessional dancers, but, rather, non-dancers. I felt instant camaraderie with all my fellow “non-dancers” and thought, Maybe what’s missing in my life, particularly given that I work freelance, is acquaintanceship. I have my tiny handful of close, trusted friends, and I have the swarm of faceless thousands whenever I walk down the street, but sitting in an office by myself all day really curbs my mid-level intimacy.
I walked the two blocks back to the meeting space. Approaching it, I saw Twyla in the window. She winked at me. Had she seen me practicing like a demon? Had she seen me watching her rehearsal? I wasn’t sure what the wink was celebrating, but I decided not to overthink it: on a cool winter night, ambiguity can warm you.
I went inside. I knew I needed to run my sequence a few more times, but Twyla was standing in a central location in the room, talking to Alex Brady, a rugged, preppy dancer in his forties who works for her. Part of me was desperate to have her see my sequence, but a larger part was afraid that she would. So, I, uh, punted: I walked thirty feet away from her to the north side of the room, putting a large pillar between us, and proceeded to run the sequence such that she could see only the part I did well (the middle), but not the parts that were a little shaky (the beginning and end).
She had the good grace not to come over to me. However, soon she addressed the crowd, saying, “It’s easier for me to yell at you in here than out in the park.” She explained that we would break into two groups; each group would run onto the stage at the conclusion of the five dancers’ dancing, then we’d be given a count of four, and then go into our sequences.
The vibe in the room was one of restlessness, burgeoning excitement.
We started filtering out of the meeting space to go to the park, and I overheard one of the other dancers—a woman in her fifties—mention her “pregnancy.”
“Oh, are you pregnant in this?” I asked.
“Yep,” she said, putting her hands about three inches from her stomach, as if calming the fetus with Reiki.
“I’m a football player,” I offered. “I probably knocked you up.”
“Don’t tell my husband.”
Out in the park, we—all one hundred of us—rehearsed the volunteers’ entrance, dance, exit, and curtain call three times.
* * *
Gradually an audience accumulated; it looked like about two hundred people.
The two initial dancers, dressed in white shorts, shirts, and sneakers, launched into their beautifully synched moves, which elicited many sighs and a few gasps and chuckles from the audience. After each eleven-second sequence, the dancers would walk back to their initial starting place, which gave the piece the pleasing quality of a hundred ocean waves.
Three-fourths of the way through the two dancers’ part of the presentation, one of the one hundred tapped me on the shoulder and pointed at them: they were doing my sequence.
I had not recognized it because, in my mind, it happened at half the pace.
The next five Tharp dancers, all doing different sequences at the same time, were even more fun to watch: a tiny circus of gesture.
Then we, the one hundred, burst onto the scene, and blew the whole thing to smithereens.
Those eleven seconds are a bit of a blur to me, but I know this: I did not do all the steps. I did five of them and then, on noticing that everyone else was almost at the end of their sequence, I turned and stuck my landing. Eleven-and.
* * *
The audience had arranged itself in a long, skinny line, so when we hundred ran back onto the stage area of the lawn for our curtain call, we mirrored this long, skinny formation, but with tiny clumps of people at either end; from a bird’s perspective, we must have looked like a toothless comb.
We bowed. Then the seven dancers emerged from behind us and Twyla from the audience, and they bowed.
In the group-huggy after-scrum, people said goodbye to one another. Twyla told me she hoped we’d see each other again, and Lowery said to get in touch if I ever came to New York City Ballet. I felt light-headed from the ether of working—albeit for eleven seconds—with these two huge talents.
Interestingly, all three of the reviews of the performance that I came into contact with during the next few days—one from Greg immediately after the performance, and ones in the Financial Times and New York Times a few days later—dwelled on the eleven seconds that my fellow volunteers and I had contributed.
Greg came up to me at the end of the performance and hugged me, saying, “That was cool!” Then: “It was an interesting confusion at the end. I never know with Twyla’s work where to focus my attention, so with a hundred of you dancing at the same time, it was like ‘Here is my problem as a choreographer.’ ”
In the Financial Times, conversely, Apollinaire Scherr extolled the multiplicity of movement (“Cunningham tilts, Broadway shuffles, Paul Taylor strides, a baseball pitch, Graham contractions, a golf swing, Gene Kelly gallops, ballet pantomime and hoofer patter”) but landed squarely on the big group scene at the end, which she called “a beautiful egalitarian chaos.”
Meanwhile, in the Times, Brian Seibert also took note of the diversity of gesture (“It’s as if Ms. Tharp were cruising the supermarket of American dance, grabbing items from every aisle and filling up her cart”), but then saw the big crowd scene as an emblem of Twyla’s career: “In 1970, she was saying goodbye to the avant-garde and hello to music, on the cusp of a brilliant decade of invention and fame. The ending of ‘The One Hundreds,’ so massive and yet so short, condensed and yet flung wide open, is like the Big Bang. Ms. Tharp has sometimes described the work as an artifact of its time, but it’s really a portrait of her back then, exploding.”
Pierpont’s New Yorker article came out a week later. I was surprised to see myself mentioned (“a man named Henry, who wore a yellow shirt, announced that he was going home to take a shower: ‘This is a lot of pressure.’ ”). I was thrilled, too, to see how she described our work’s ending: “It looked as though the unmediated language of dance were taking over the world.”
Reading that line again, I heard the curmudgeonly voice of Henry Ford moaning about neighborliness and community involvement.
Maybe we hadn’t done it as he envisioned, but done it we had. Non-dancers, building bridges through the medium of non-dance.
DANCE AS EMOTION AND RELEASE
1.
THE MINUTE YOU BECOME AWARE of your underpants during the day is the minute your day becomes hostage to underpants management. I can be at the very top of my game, everything larky and full speed ahead, when all of a sudden, blammo, the only thought occupying my brain is an elasticized waistband’s uncanny ability to creep ever-northward.
But I can’t let my mind wander down this particular ill-lit pathway right this second because my contact improv teacher Chisa Hidaka, a petite dancer with a mischievous grin, has just given me a task. A daunting task.
We’re standing in an old, funky studio in downtown Manhattan, where she’s told me she wants me to run toward her and the other two students in our class—they’re standing shoulder to shoulder in a row, like conjoined triplets—and to jump up and into their outstretched arms.
Um, okay.
I walk twelve feet away from the other dancers, for the purposes of velocity and stalling. I turn and stare at them. Two of them are women under five-foot-seven, one of whom is pushing fifty; the other is a good-looking, patrician dude who does not scream “stevedore.” It’s like I’ve been asked to land a 747 in an airport’s frequent flyers lounge.
I banish from my mind all thoughts of undergarment creep. But now I can’t stop thinking about Nijinsky. Choreographer and ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky wowed early twentieth-century audiences with his ballon, or ability seemingly to hang in the air. His sister Bronislava’s journals tell us th
at Nijinsky could, astoundingly, count to five while off the ground. Meanwhile, he was often doing those little back-and-forth foot flutters known as entrechats. Of which he could do twelve.
But I am not Nijinsky. Floating is not part of my, uh, m’oeuvre.
So.
I take a deep breath, I try to relax my shoulders. I recall Nijinsky’s own comment on his trademark talent—“Not difficult. You just have to go up and then pause a little up there.” I think, Fuck you.
I start running.
I leap and twist, and as I do, every food overindulgence of the past two weeks flickers in my brain like a Vietnam flashback: the two gin and tonics I slurped down out of anxiety at a party two nights earlier, the three-fourths of a pint of Häagen-Dazs I recently ate with a tiny salt cellar spoon in an effort to appear dainty.
And: ker-plunk!
My shoulders and upper back land nicely in the arms of the sturdy woman on the left side of the triad: totally adequate. But somehow my lower torso never gets very high in the air, and winds up smooshed against the other two dancers’ knees like a bone-in prosciutto that has tunneled out of prison only to be pinned against a chain-link fence by a powerful searchlight.
I recover my feet, withdraw, and look hopefully at my teacher.
Slightly awkward pause. Slightly awkward pause floating in the air Nijinsky-like.
“You’re falling down,” Chisa says, finally. “But you need to fall up.”
(Author slaps own forehead with palm of hand.)
* * *
For some of us, dance’s most compelling function is its ability to provide release. The tensions that we hold in our body—and sometimes the emotions held in abeyance by those tensions—get a nice little jiggle from strenuous movement. Unlike the Rebellion function, though, this kind of dancing is generally not a reaction against anything.
Too, this is the function of dance that has most made its mark in everyday speech, whether we be doing our “happy dance,” or “waltzing through” some part of life obliviously, or triumphantly “dancing in the end zone.” While most of these expressions are metaphors for joy, we occasionally see other emotions referred to also, via the language of dance—e.g., in the heat of a negotiation with a Realtor, you might “do a little tap dance,” denoting frantic effort. Or: the intense resolve and magisterial elegance of both matadors and bulls have earned bullfighting the nickname “the ballet of death.”