Strip

by Andrew Binks

  None of us give in. Who didn’t go down screaming and raging? There isn’t one of us with broken dreams who doesn’t burn to their toes to be given another chance to make it. Why? We’re only here for a moment, but it’s then, in that moment, that we want to let the universe speak to the world through us. We are the mediums, sylphs for the projections of the stratosphere, and will do whatever it takes because it feels so damn good and bad. It just feels, period. Chances don’t slip by easily. You can’t be exposed to the power, the beauty and the strength of creation, music, art, the human form, and not let it affect you. You can turn your back, but you will always regret it.

  I can say it now (I couldn’t then) that if you dance, or do any art for that matter, you’ll leave yourself wide open for opinion. You won’t please everyone. Dance flows. Dancers are dancers whether they like it or not. Dance, by its nature, is a function and a process. And if you think the only pleasure you will know is your own, then stop. You have to be generous or it will not thrive. Art is not perfect. The process is, but the product isn’t unless you can change someone’s life for a moment or forever. You will have to be crystal clear to your audience or you will make no difference. At least do your colleagues a favour—show perfection, show expertise, show originality. You will never be allowed to sit back on your heels or your sore, tight ass or hurting ego, because you have to dance all the goddamn time; that is its nature, like scaling a cliff with no rest stops. Like a shark that has to keep moving to keep water flowing through its body. Like Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes. You will never relax, let go and think, Look at me. You only get a few moments to enjoy the applause. If you think it’s that moment to appreciate yourself, you’ll trip up. You miss a beat and that’s it: you stumble, fall and disappear. An inflated ego is a fleeting reward. It does no one any good.

  Our tour starts next spring in Chicago: performances and workshops. Then on to Ann Arbor, then Windsor where I will look up Kent’s parents. Then the universities in Toronto, Kingston, Ottawa and Montreal, and finally Laval in Quebec City. We will perform a ballet I have been working on based on one of Nelligan’s poems. I don’t know who will be there. After that, who knows, a western tour perhaps?

  In the summer I went to Chicago and New York, but the number Brittany had given me was out of service, and any enquiries yielded nothing. I wished her the best, hoped she was still alive somewhere and being loved by someone good.

  I did a pilgrimage with a small sum of Kent’s money that Ruth gave to me, with orders to use it. I saw the masters: Pilobolus, Eliot Feld, Graham, New York City Ballet, abt, Joffrey, the Dance Theatre of Harlem and Merce Cunningham at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. (Did Madame still fantasize about New York?) I took class when I could, attended workshops, master classes. As my body distilled itself back to the essentials, I felt the reservoir replenish itself, this time to overflowing. All of it is now part of my vocabulary as I continue to invent my own language and definitions. I am a small part of that magic that people pay to see and share, wherever I work. The stories tell my truth.

  Rachelle loves to say, “Your eyes have lost their… blankness”—one of her favourites, just to keep me humble, just to remind me that it returns from time to time. While my musculature went from tight to taut, my heart burst and broke and broke again. Kent knew the bigness of the dance world, more so than I. He feared I would be naive enough to think the world offered nothing, if not stardom. Stardom is for Baryshnikov and Kirkland. My dancers and I have a more important calling.

  It is the stories in bodies, shapes and shadows that reveal themselves. I point my dancers and my intentions in a direction and tell them to fly. Sometimes it’s careless. Sometimes the ground we tread is uneven and precarious. Whether the inspiration came to me in my sleep as a nightmare, or as the image of someone’s reflection in the window of a bus that reminded me of someone else, a friend, living or dead, someone spiralling down a stairway, or loving an older woman or two men, or breaking someone’s heart, or washing amongst the ebb and flow of tide and waves along the shore, or on a wheat field with the wide-eyed innocence of an adolescent, or the narrow squint of doubt that comes with age, set against a summer prairie sky or an approaching blizzard, it is true.

  And sometimes a simple tune means absolutely nothing.

  There’s a space at the back of the bus, the back of a plane, the back corner of a café, or the back of my mind, that is my own rehearsal hall where my ideas expand—on seat backs, tabletops or scraps of paper. In the end it isn’t about the dancer or the choreographer or the music or the applause. It is about the dance, a language we badly translate but seem to understand. The best I can do, the most comfort I can offer myself is to know I am a part of it.

  From the moment I got those university girls into their tutus and onto that stage, to having a chance to dance my best Tybalt, from the moment I used all that I knew of the body and its static form, magnetic emotions, repelling electricity, wayward poles, short-circuited auroras, gleaming auras, fermenting stories and crippling genetics, to having a few dedicated people dance the story—from all of those moments—my dreams have come true. I can affect people, dancers, audiences.

  For every Lisa, Marcel, Bertrand, Guy, Daniel, Patrice, Brittany, Nadine, Madame Talegdi, Kharkov, Rachelle and Kent, there is a dance.

  They’ll all be there, in the theatre. You’ll also see me watching from the wings, spinning or tumbling across the stage, or hiding somewhere among the audience. I may be seated right beside you. I’ll strive to show that love—however painful, overblown, dangerous, satisfying, obsessive or nurturing—is never wrong. Maybe a piece of the puzzle will fit back into place, and make things a bit smoother, or maybe not quite.

  I’m dancing now.

  Only for a moment, “Gloria” was my song, and the dance, my life.

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to the caring guidance once again from Nightwood Editions, Silas White and Lizette Fischer, for their kind support and attention to detail. I must thank the late great playwright and friend Elliott Hayes who took my early efforts and created the play Strip. Thanks always to Keith Maillard and Maureen Medved whose wise mentoring helped me to set out on this fascinating journey along the road less travelled. Thanks to those who read and provided feedback to early stages of this manuscript: John, Carol, Alaina, Donnard, Emily, Nilofar, Ben. And thanks to others who have yet to read it and are always there with an encouraging word, including Kim and Susan. Thanks to Louise and her feedback at the self-directed Estapona writing retreat. Thanks to my caring mother and father, for their patience and love, and thanks to my family, brother, sisters, in-laws, nephews and nieces as well as dear friends, for their love and support. Thank you to those amazing souls who have danced through my life and inspired the characters in these pages. And thanks especially to my partner Bernard and my muse Hugo, who challenge me to do my best, bolster me when I need it, and are here throughout.

  About the Author

  Andrew Binks is a graduate of UBC’s Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. His first novel, The Summer Between, was published in May 2009 by Nightwood Editions. His work has been featured in Joyland.ca and the Harvard Square Editions anthology, Voice From the Planet. His short fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Galleon, Fugue, Prism International, Harrington Gay Men’s Literary Quarterly, Bent-magazine, Globe and Mail, Xtra and Xtra West, among others. His poetry has appeared in Quill’s ‘Lust’ issue and Velvet Avalanche Anthology. Two of his plays received public workshops in Vancouver and Toronto in 2010 and he was one of the contributing writers to the Festival Players of Prince Edward County “Sounding Ground” audio plays.

  www.andrewbinks.ca

 

 

 
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