Fall Love

by Anne Whitehouse

  The college was putting the dance company up in guest rooms in a dorm. That night Paul was so worn out that he fell asleep with his clothes on, stretched out on top of the still-made bed in the room he was sharing with Hector and Eric. The dress rehearsal was the next day, and the opening that evening. Their Northampton run was four consecutive nights and a Saturday matinée.

  At the dress rehearsal, Kurt still wasn't satisfied with the performance of Alchemy. Tensely, he barked out directions. As he spoke, he struck the floor with his wooden rod so fiercely that Paul couldn't help but wonder if he really wanted to hit one of them with it. A pall of frustration weighted the air. One particular sequence of steps kept defeating them. Anticipating this part with a self-fulfilling dread, they couldn't seem to get beyond it. It seemed to Paul as if they were trapped in a scratched groove of a record that kept repeating itself.

  "Let's take a break before I have a breakdown," Kurt said irritably. Raising his voice, he ordered, "Time out!"

  Watching from the wings, out of Kurt's sight, Hector turned a backflip, which made the other dancers smile, except for Pam, who was slumping in the front row, her eyes closed. She and Hector weren't in this one. "Show off!" Paul hissed to Hector.

  "You're not taking me seriously. Come on, all of you, on the stage. You're not getting it. It's time for a little lecture," Kurt said.

  Paul heard his sigh echoed by Eric and Jane. Michiko was more polite. Like children before their teacher, they assembled at Kurt's feet. They knew what was coming; they'd heard it before.

  "I know what you're all thinking," Kurt said. "It won't hurt you to hear it again. Remember, there are two kinds of dances. In a dance like Nostalgic Cloak, with a fast tempo and a regular beat, the point is not to get behind the music but stay with it, and at the same time not to blur the movements. Each must be clear and distinct, and yet unfold seemingly effortlessly in progression. In a dance like that, to music that's a constant, driving pulse, there's room for refinements, a kind of playing against the limits. But in a dance like Alchemy, there's only one right way to do it and many wrong ways. The music is dissonant, and so you've got to keep counting the beats because they're always changing. There's a rigidity to this dance, and the range of movement is narrow. The movements themselves are isolated, abrupt, the feeling dissociative, but the fact is that you've got to be right on the mark. Remember, in the beginning the movement is generated along your spine. You're rooted to the spot. All right, back to your places. Let's try again."

  It always seemed like this, at almost the last moment, that it would never come together. But somehow it did. Often the smoothest opening nights were when they were already so exhausted that they couldn't work themselves up to being nervous. Besides, their toughest audiences would be their last ones, in New York. The Northampton community was so grateful that the Kurt Matthews Dancers had come that they seemed disposed to look upon their offerings favorably.

  * * *

  Paul's cloak billowed out behind him like a parachute as he gathered momentum and leapt through the air just as Eric crossed his path in a close, calculated miss. The dancers were inside the dance, inside the music's unfathomable heart, its muscular flourishes, its soaring joy. Paul didn't think about the audience though he knew they were there and could hear their laughter when they realized the near collision was intentional.

  He didn't think at all; there was no need to, no time to. He was dancing as he was meant to, in a dance that he had performed so often that it seemed part of himself, like a second nature. He felt the energy blossoming out of his body; he found himself taking small liberties: stretching out an extension, prolonging a turn. Still he was with the others, in patterns forming and breaking that he couldn't see. He was like a fragment in a kaleidoscope, part of a constantly shifting design.

  The dancers' costumes were identical black cloaks, cut on the bias so that they swirled, and lined with satin, each one a different, brilliant color: Eric was violet, Pam emerald, Michiko crimson, Hector yellow, Jane rose-pink, and Paul aquamarine. From the front, their cloaks spread wide, revealing black leotards and tights, the dancers were like butterflies; from the back they were like bats.

  They formed sweeping diagonals across the stage, running off into the wings, and appearing, almost instantly, on the other side, having crossed backstage. "Make the cloak move with you like a palpable shadow, a bodiless partner," Kurt had said. "Exaggerate, underline, don't be afraid to make flourishes." All this he had told them, but he had refused to explain what Nostalgic Cloak was supposed to mean, what the cloak symbolized. "It's just a device," he had said. "It means whatever you want it to mean."

  Michiko sailed through the air on cue, Paul flexed to receive her and caught her in his arms. Like the intake of his own breath, he felt the audience's gasp of pleasure.

  When the performance was over and the curtain came down, the dancers hurried to take their positions for the call, the women in front and the men just behind them. Paul quickly adjusted his cloak so that it hung from his shoulders in even folds. He wiped the sweat from his forehead, and smoothed back his hair.

  For an instant he felt himself in limbo, disoriented, sealed off from the audience, whose response was muffled behind the curtain. Then the house lights came up, the curtain opened, and he heard the applause.

  He took his bows with the others, the sound of applause drumming in his ears. Drenched in sweat, the six dancers bent their heads and spread wide their cloaks. The applause swelled and faded, punctuated by a few "Bravos!"

  When, gradually, the roar subsided to silence, it didn't seem to him that he lost it. He imagined this applause merging with all the other applause he had ever received. It was engraved on his memory. He could recall the sound of clapping hands at will.

  * * *

  Dance absorbed Paul's life, onstage and off. The next afternoon he asked for the loan of an empty studio and shut himself up alone in it. Happy as he was to perform in Kurt's dances, he wanted something more: to create his own dance. He pondered his idea, born under a fleeting sunset, of the wild child, growing up without parents, language, or country. When he was younger, he had sometimes made up dances for amusement, but never before had he deliberately seized on a theme. If he were to try his hand at choreography, he considered, it would be simplest to begin with a solo. Out of the slender beginnings of his idea, he wondered, could he distill a dance?

  In the silence of the bare, dusty studio, with its unswept floor and walls of cracking plaster, he experimented, creating shapes and gestures with his body. In the middle of the afternoon, sunlight streamed in two large windows, illuminating dust motes in the air. Outside was a view of a green lawn planted with sugar maples, their leaves now turned brilliant orange.

  He remembered how he had climbed the steep mine excavation in the Connecticut woods and leaned out, as if daring himself to fall. Now, in the studio, he explored the limits of his balance, testing how to stop himself and how to fall easily. He considered how he wanted to use his whole body expressively. He thought of the gap to be bridged between intention and action. But exactly what, he wondered, did he intend to express?

  Exhausted, he paused and rested, sprawled on the studio floor. In this bare room he was suffused by a rare peace to be treasured. The dance taking shape in his mind made his life feel full and rich. He recalled himself a month earlier, as he had watched the migration of the geese from his Manhattan roof and had felt hollowed out by emptiness. That moment now seemed to him this moment's counterpart: in both was yearning. Yet the malaise, the vague fear that had paralyzed him in September seemed to have passed through his heart.

  He reflected how, when he appeared onstage, he felt reborn. He existed purely in the present. All the rest of his life was submerged below the level of consciousness. As he created the dance, he became the dance's creation.

  That evening he danced with the troupe in Lovely Night. In this standard of the Matthews repertoire, Kurt had proved himself an interpreter of the classical idi
om. This dance was more balletic than the others, with graceful lines and intricate partnering. The women wore soft shoes, like the men's, and simple skirts of white satin, slit at the thighs. The men's leotards were black, with a crescent of silver sequins sewn at the neckline. Lovely Night seemed ethereal to Paul and earthbound at the same time, a romance that gently mocked its own ardor. He had performed it so often with Michiko as his partner that he felt they were like one being. There was a chemistry between them, an intense, harmonious connection. He was sure of her, and she never disappointed him.

  Under the hot glare of the lights, he felt the music permeating him like another species of light, colder and thinner—the moon's filtered beams. He did not need to count, nor did he falter. He was so perfectly attuned to the swelling and subsiding rhythms that his concentration seemed instinctive, all effort transformed to receptivity. The dance's shifting moods were a spectrum of desire. As he experienced them, he expressed them.

  Without haste or doubt, he arrived by Michiko's side, perfectly in time with the music, as Jane and Eric and Pam and Hector were paired downstage from them. The women turned towards the men, then revolved away from them. Paul was behind Michiko as they faced the audience together, and when he embraced her, he felt her secure in his arms. The men lifted the women by supporting their thighs and the smalls of their backs. Paul perceived Michiko's force as she arched away from him, a resistance that counterbalanced his hold on her, so that she was extended into the air.

  Gently he lowered her without releasing her. As they enacted their pas de deux, Paul sensed, under its joyous recognitions, an ineffable sadness, like a taste of mortality, and in these instants it felt deeper than any love.

  At last the couples broke apart, and the dancers wove around each other. Paul and Hector and Rick stepped back, as Michiko, Pamela, and Jane came forward. The stage was the women's. They bent in deep curves towards the ground, their arms like gravely fluttering wings.

  This was their leavetaking. One by one, they slipped off the stage, and the men held it at the last—a final surge, and then a flickering, like brightness in eclipse. The dance ended with their still figures on the stage.

  Again, performances had become part of Paul's everyday life. The Northampton engagement ended on Sunday, and the troupe travelled together to Boston the next day. On Tuesday they opened at a Cambridge theater. The first night went smoothly, and Kurt gave the troupe the next afternoon off. After lunch they scattered quickly. Feeling a need of solitude, Paul set off by himself.

  The October sky was blue, dotted with puffy white clouds. The temperature was in the sixties. Paul strolled at his ease, enjoying the warmth, the breeze, the colors of the drifting leaves as they fell on the uneven brick sidewalks of Cambridge. On Brattle Street, near Harvard Square, he was attracted by a notice for an exhibit of contemporary photography.

  Curious, he went in. The gallery was attached to a tearoom in an old house, with low white walls and wooden floors. One photograph among all the rest caught his attention. At first he didn't recognize it as a photograph at all, although he knew that because it was in the exhibit, it had to be. A small mirrored rectangle in a frame, it shone back his own reflection. From a distance he saw the blurred image of his own face. He approached, expecting it to resolve. Instead, it disappeared, and he found himself looking at another man's face—a photograph etched in the glass, the artist's self-portrait.

  "Demirrored Mirror," the label read. Paul stepped slowly backward, hoping to catch the image in the instant of change. Through trial and error, he discovered the exact point in space from where he saw the two faces simultaneously, the etched photo and his reflection, superimposed. If he altered his position ever so slightly—ahead, to the side, or behind—one or the other image disappeared. But he wasn't able to see it as it vanished.

  He retreated, blinking. As he left the exhibit, he glimpsed, next to the tearoom, the simplified, sleek sculpture of a bird carved in wood, on a pedestal.

  He reflected, When one fashions a bird, one is not so much copying nature as studying nature's inherent construction. Touch is even more sensitive to shape than sight. If the object fulfills its purpose and was originally designed with love, he concluded, then it justifies its existence. He thought of his dance, still in embryo. He had been so involved with performing Kurt's dances that he had not had time to develop his idea further. Now he felt a rush of desire to create that most elusive of objects, a solo performance. He promised himself that he would be his own embodiment; he would evolve the dance on himself, at once sculptor and living sculpture.

  The week's interim between the troupe's Boston and Hartford engagements had come about from an accident in the scheduling. Now it seemed a lucky break to Paul. Harry, an old friend living in Boston, with whom Paul was staying, knew someone with a loft in the warehouse district downtown near the channel. Graciously he made arrangements for Paul's free use of the space in the afternoons.

  Paul liked the large room, the industrial setting. Here, where nature was so remote, he thought, he would crystallize his dance from his ideas and early experiments. Yet he found himself up against a dead end when he tried to dramatize the dilemma of the Savage Child (his early, working title). Ruefully, he decided that the conflict between the individual and society was an impossible subject for a solo. How could he have been so dense? He felt ridiculous.

  For about an hour he berated himself, pacing the floor. Maybe ideally it's not an impossible subject, he reconsidered, but it's certainly not working for me. He thought that he was willing to alter the subject to suit the dance, but to what? He wondered if there was anything to his idea that he could salvage.

  It occurred to him that if he wasn't to be the child, he could be the nature that the child had grown up in. Through dance, he could try to suggest the qualities of rocks, of trees, of flowing water. If the result proved too leaden, he could leaven the effect with portrayals of small wild creatures, birds, and insects. He reconceived his Savage Child as Savage Landscape.

  That night he went through Harry's large, eclectic collection of tapes, looking for a score. He found it in the eerie songs of humpback whales, recorded underwater at depths of 1500 feet. He listened to exchanges and choruses unintelligible to him. The whales' songs sounded mysterious, even hypnotic. A natural, unmusical music, he thought, that he could manipulate towards his own ends. He made a copy of Harry's tape, and Harry loaned him his boom box with a tape player. During his afternoons in the loft, to the accompaniment of the undersea songs and in a fever of energy, he invented the shapes and gestures for his dance.

  "I'm making a dance," he told Kurt on the day of their last performance at Boston College. "I'd like to stay in Boston to work on it during the break."

  "I've wondered where you've been spending your afternoons. You're trying to upstage your director, is that it?"

  Paul felt his face growing red. "No one could ever upstage you, Kurt," he said.

  "You know, I can't resist giving you a hard time. Don't take it too personally. So what's this magnum opus of yours?"

  "It's… it's," Paul hesitated. "It's trying to give resemblances of nature. Kind of hard to explain. I'd rather you see it than try to describe it."

  "I'm willing. How have you been rehearsing it?"

  "I've borrowed a loft. The dance is a solo, and I'm it."

  "No other dancers to direct. I don't blame you." But as he spoke, Kurt smiled broadly.

  "If I make a mistake, then it's all my own."

  "Well, we need imaginative infusions. Otherwise we ossify. I'm talking about the company as a whole, you understand?" Paul wasn't quite sure he did, but he nodded anyway. "I've always said that choreographers are scarcely ever trained in their art," Kurt continued. "They learn by doing. It's been true of me, and it could be true of you as well. I'll tell you what. Show me your dance, and I'll give you an honest appraisal."

  "I'm not ready quite yet."

  "Well, when you're ready." Kurt shrugged his shoulders as i
f to indicate that it didn't matter when, and that their conversation had come to a close.

  Paul wasn't finished. "I'll show it to you in Connecticut," he offered impulsively.

  Kurt appeared unimpressed. "Sometime next week? Fine. And if not then, some other time." Paul nodded. "Tell me, for the sake of curiosity," Kurt said then, "what's your score?"

  "Whales' songs."

  "What?" Kurt raised one eyebrow. "Sounds weird."

  Paul laughed, excited by Kurt's skepticism. "Wait and see," he said.

  * * *

  The troupe scattered, to reunite in Hartford. Paul stayed behind. On the spur of the moment, he'd set a deadline in order to put pressure on himself to finish the dance. Even if it was an artificial deadline, he thought, he'd like to try to meet it. And if he didn't—well, it was no great loss.

  He was fortunate in that he was able to extend his hours at the loft. Even when he wasn't rehearsing, his dance filled his thoughts. He decided to alternate the whales' songs with moments of pure silence.

  After the full moon which had announced the beginning of the week, the weather grew colder, and the sky was overcast. The last day of October came without Paul having made any plans for Halloween. He worked all day in the loft, fitting together movements in his dance, until he was mentally and physically depleted. When he hallucinated black spots shuddering in the air, he stopped and switched off the tape. I can't take any more, he thought; I've got to get some fresh air.