Chapter 68 – A Song for Catherine
During the bus ride from the airport to the hotel the previous day, Gwen had assigned Gale to oversee the dancers. She was perfect for the job: gregarious and assertive. Gale let them sleep in the next morning, but had everyone at The Hall at 4pm. It was a meet and greet, and a sendoff for Catherine. The dancers sat in the theater seats while the Ps and the woman served them coffee, juices, and warm toasted bagels with cream cheese spreads. Most of them scrapped off the cream cheese. Gwen had told the team they should sit in the seats with the dancers, not in the chairs on the stage. She knew they had to bond with the dancers immediately, and get on with the show. After the self-introductions and mingling, Gwen stood at the front of the stage and offered a minimalist spiel. “We’re all here together to perform a ballet that was lost to culture for a hundred years. People are going to see it for the first time, and it’s going to be beautiful.” She held her arms outwards toward the seats in a commanding dihedral V. “We start with music of a master from the past, Stravinsky. He created that music inspired by four great modern painters: Van Gogh, Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso. We have taken the music and Stravinsky’s ideas for movement, and created choreography for four dances.” She motioned Selgey and Bart to the stage, where she double kissed them. “The choreography expresses four stories in movement, and is quite fantastic. So far, only four people have danced it. But as of tomorrow morning, it will exist in you,” she said, now waving out at the seats. “You will give it the life it deserves. You will dance Stravinsky’s vision.
“If you had done this ballet in Saint Petersburg, you would have performed to an orchestra, just as Mariinsky dancers have done for two hundred years. But here you will dance to something else. To Stravinsky’s music, yes, but not just to that master. You will dance to Stravinsky’s music as played by another master.” She waved The Whosey out of his seat and to the stage, where she gave him the double kiss, and where Selgey and Bart put their arms around him.
“Tomorrow morning you will start learning the choreography. We have three weeks before opening night. But we will have some music and dance right now, so we can learn about beauty together, as a team.” Gwen smiled broadly at Catherine and The B, which they recognized as the signal for them to come to the stage. Now there were six people with their arms around each other. “We met on the plane yesterday, and we talked. You listened to Catherine Deneuve, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, and to me. We told you about our production, and why we are doing it; about our thinking on the Stravinsky score and ballet; about Charleston, and the future of ballet here. You talked among yourselves, and made your decisions. So now we will make this ballet together. Catherine did much of the talking on the plane, and we owe it to her, in part, for the formation of this troupe. Now, we will give something back to her, in thanks.”
Gwen took Catherine’s hand and led her to a seat in the front row. Selgey, Bart, The B, and The Whosey huddled together in the center of the stage, murmuring. Then with a squeeze of each other’s shoulders, they separated. Townshend sat down at the synthe and flicked on the power switch. The three retired dancers, now choreographers, shed their sweaters and shoes, and linked hands. Selgey nodded at Gwen, who said, “While we slept last night, they were here, working on a thank you to Catherine. Mr. Townshend wrote a song for her. Mr. Baryshnikov choreographed a dance to the music for her, and here it is, for her, and for all of us.” She nodded at Pater, who pushed a button on a remote he held that started audio and video recording equipment. There was quiet in the hall.
Townshend’s hands connected to the keyboard while his eyes connected to the dancers. A massive wave of brass atonality rumbled out of the theater’s speakers and cascaded across the aisles of chairs. One diminutive ballerina, all of eighty-five pounds, practically was blown off her seat. The trumpets and trombones and English horns filled the air like cannons across a battlefield. It was the introduction to the second act of the lost ballet, and it sets the stage for the dance based on Cezanne’s painting of hundreds of workers breaking stone in the quarry. Townshend played a minute or two of the Stravinsky music to wet the taste of the Mariinsky dancers for the work sessions tomorrow, when the rehearsals would begin in earnest, and he would play the entire score for them.
The blaring brass thinned out and dribbled away. Kirkland, Thorley, and Baryshnikov set themselves for the song and dance they had created together the night before. Townshend nodded, turned the dials, and began singing in that beautiful upper register tone he used for his inimitable song, Red, Blue and Gray. His left hand played what sounded like a ukulele, his right hand sounding like an electric piano. His voice, an angelic voice, instantly captured everyone in the room. He sang about a woman on the movie screen, standing on a dirt road lined with cypress trees, wearing a yellow dress trimmed in burgundy and cream lace. She removed a wide brimmed hat so she could stare up at a family of crows conducting business in the top of one of the trees. The woman was Catherine Deneuve, walking down the lane of a French vineyard, the camera following her languorous gait.
Selgey broke hands with the two male dancers and played the part of the beautiful woman in the beautiful dress in the beautiful setting. She flowed away from the men, down the lane, watching the birds, feeling the sun on her face. Baryshnikov followed first, listening to Townshend’s singing, watching the ballerina ahead of him, thinking back thirty-five years to when he was bedding Deneuve. He pantomimed himself watching her on a movie screen, wanting the film to be his real life, in love with the woman in the yellow dress. He followed as Selgey skirted the perimeter of the stage, working her way from right to left, her now looking at Townshend’s hands on the keyboard, now looking out at the seat holding Catherine, now looking behind her at him. As she turned the corner of the stage and moved to the rear, Bart left his mark and turned the other way, moving in a sweeping gesture from left to right, knowing he would meet her head on, her and Baryshnikov moving counter-clockwise, him moving clockwise. He, too, pantomimed watching a movie on the screen, entranced by the figure of a beauty in a wide brimmed hat.
Townshend’s ukulele sound traded preeminence with the piano, first one sounding counterpoint to his singing, then the other. The three instruments flowed into and out of each other, telling the story of the woman wanting a lover with whom to walk through the vineyard. She had two men after her, and she liked both, but wanted to love only one. Which one? With her hat removed she asked the crows: which one? Which one would be her special friend, a man who could take her in the morning, and let her go in the afternoon?
Bart and The B wanted the woman to come out of the movie screen and into their lives, and for a few minutes they danced this fantasy.
After circling the stage three times in a graceful tripartite group, with Townshend singing about catching, having, and letting go, Bart and The B enclosed her in their four arms and four legs. She disappeared. Then, as he sang the last stanza of lyrics, she pushed them away and emerged from the cocoon. They fell away from her, the viewers knowing she was returning to the film screen, and the two men to their normal lives. Their dream of loving the woman in the yellow dress was over, as was hers of finding a man who could have, and not have.
The ukulele and piano sounds drifted away, and The Whosey stood up. The dancers came back together, the two Bs making a seat with their arms for Selgey, into which she climbed. The four performers came to the edge of the stage, with Catherine’s two former lovers throwing her a kiss, which she returned.
The Lost Ballet Page 68