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Pilobolus, Re-Revisited
It’s about to be Friday of Pilobolus SI, Week 3.
How do you express what it feels like to come to a place that somehow helps you heal pieces of your past that happened what feels like a lifetime ago?
Last night we went to the Joyce, saw P7 perform the same program I caught last time but from the other side of the house (highly recommended, btw), chatted with old friends in the company, then ran for the 1 train, horsed around on the near-empty S train (without inconveniencing anyone), dashed wildly through the tunnels into Grand Central’s main terminal (again, without inconveniencing anyone), caught the Metro North with ten minutes to spare, ate Sour Streamers (also highly recommended), and generally conducted ourselves like unsupervised kids.
It was honestly pretty sublime.
I still love to run up an escalator when there’s nobody on it.
After the train ,T and I drove back to campus, kvetching about drivers and over-bright headlights and bad road design and listening to queer, Jewish punk rock, and that was sublime.
Tonight, after a day packed with dancing, we sang show tunes (and Scarborough Faire, which must be a theater-kid staple because my sister and her friends loved it, too) around the piano.
That was also sublime.
Not everything here is.
What we do here is work, and some of it is the difficult work of making art with other artists, even when we’re collectively sleep-deprived and hopped up on enough caffeine to give the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir a heart attack. Artists are jammed with ideas and typically pretty self-directed, and there’s so little time, but we figure it out.
We are the cats, and we are the herders of cats (which, to be honest, is pretty much how actual cats work, when you think about it—only a cat can tell another cat where to go[1]).
We make our way through the difficulties, and in between, we get to be, for better or worse, overgrown dance kids at dance camp. Only we’re mostly kinder to each-other now than maybe we would have been when we were *actual* dance kids, in middle- or high school.
We rattle around in the dorms and bring way too much food but somehow not enough of that one thing, but someone else has it or it’s on the community table or in the community fridge or at any rate something close enough is, so we figure it out.
Our towels hang on the racks in the hallway. Our rooms are full of dancewear and endless snacks and foam rollers and massage guns and candy. We have fans in our windows and other fans strapped to our bunks. There may be an illegal toaster. We’ve written our names on signs on our doors, then added drawings: a hedgehog, a kitty, a skull, a nonrepresentational swirl.
The kitchen is cursed, but we make it work.
Tomorrow, we wrap up with a show, as we always do. I’m in one piece I love (I get to jump, so I’m happy) and a couple others that are coming together.
I am not struggling to remember the choreography.
Maybe at another point in my life, I would have said, “I wish I could stay here forever.”
I’ve learned, though, that part of the magic is exactly the fact that we go home eventually. Not because it keeps this experience from developing the inevitable annoyances of everyday life (we run into them, if on a smaller time-scale), but because if I didn’t go back to the world at large, I couldn’t take what I’ve learned here and live in it out there.
I am grateful that here, for a little while, I’ve been just a dancer, and young, and free to be a little irresponsible—a little bit wild—when I’m out of the studio. I am grateful that I’ve been part of the whole.
It’s hard to express how healing that is to the kid in me who never managed to learn that trick; who was never part of the pack running full-tilt for the stairs to the terminal, laughing like loons.
I think what I’m saying is this: I cannot change the past—but it seems that my heart is rewritable.
Notes
[1] “‘Cause a cat’s the only cat who knows where it’s at,” presumably.
Remember: You Are A Prince
Tonight we premiered three new works.
I danced a principal role in two of them, with two excellent partners.
I made a tiny mistake in my first piece that the audience didn’t see (my brain skipped ahead and my partner saved me from myself right away ^-^’), and an angel press didn’t quite get all the way there because I let a wardrobe malfunction distract me (my trousers ripped — good thing I kept my tights on under them!), but other than that it was quite possibly the best performance I’ve ever given as a dancer.
I felt confident. I felt strong. I felt connected to each of my partners, to the music, to the corps, and to the stories we created with our movement.
In short, I felt good. I felt present.
~
Afterwards, I had this moment that felt like a little series of windows in time had opened up.
For a heartbeat, I caught a glimpse of a long-ago me from a terrible time in my life; a me that couldn’t believe that he would ever dance at all, let alone like this. A me that politely demurred when someone suggested auditioning for the dance program at Academy (the arts magnet that I did attend, although I didn’t major in dance) because the thought of not making the cut felt like a knife twisting in my heart.
A me that honestly didn’t believe I’d make it to the age I am now. A me that didn’t even really believe that I’d make it to my next birthday.
For a heartbeat, I saw a slightly older me — the me who couldn’t follow up on a friend’s suggestion that I drop in at a local ballet company’s school. I still couldn’t let myself hope. I still believed both that you cannot return, once you leave the country of Ballet, except as a tourist, and that I probably wasn’t really good enough — that I had the physical aptitude, but not the brains.
For an eyeblink, I saw myself, raw and just a little bit hopeful, a college student finally setting foot in the studio again, cradling in my heart of hearts the dimmest hope that somehow, maybe, I might find a way to dance, even just a little.
For a breath, I saw the dancer that I was towards the end of my first year as an apprentice at Lexington Ballet, stubborn and determined, but also frustrated and so, so afraid I’d never figure it out.
I wanted to reach back and say to them — to all those iterations, all those past selves, so to speak — Even now, we’re making it. We’re getting there.
A couple of years ago, my friend BG told me, “You will dance, and you will do great things.”
And tonight I danced, and tonight I think my company made something great and beautiful.
Tonight I danced a pas de deux that ends with me carrying my partner off the stage, and as we vanished into the wings, the audience responded resoundingly. I heard a voice shout, “Bravo!”
That’s no small thing, on a Thursday night in a city where people don’t see a lot of ballet, and really don’t see a lot of contemporary ballet. (That pas was in the closing ballet, which is quite contemporary.)
Reader, none of that is the main reason that I dance: I dance because dancing is where my soul, or whatever you want to call it, thrives. It’s where my heart feels whole.
But I’d be lying if I said that it was anything less than amazing to know that you’ve captured this room full of strangers and brought them with you on your journey and actually moved them.
~
At the end of the day, besides the dancing itself, it blows my mind that I am part of this company: that I’m valued and wanted; that I have friends at work; that I get to spend my working days creating art with these vibrant, singular people.
It blows my mind that I’m living this life.
The sense of gratitude is impossible to articulate. So much of my life right now is a prayer of thanksgiving that, even in the hard and dark and troubled times we’re living through, somehow there’s room in the world for art and for artists, and somehow I’m one of them.
This night is a golden night. My heart and soul keep thrumming with a deep kind of contentment.
I think: so this is how it feels to be in the place where, not too long ago, you hardly dared to dream that you might someday be.
Right before I went on for the first time tonight, standing in the crossover behind the stage, I took a deep breath and repeated something that L’Ancien told me time and again in class. Simply: “Remember: you are a Prince.”
He would say this to me when I was struggling and getting into my head and getting in my own way. Just, “Remember: you are a Prince.”
Tonight, I was a classical prince in foofy Regency-revival sleeves and a velvet waistcoat and tights and a contemporary prince in 50s (60s?) Greaser gear, with my t-shirt sleeves rolled up and black trousers (that almost made it to the end of the show).
What links the two is the decision to believe, for this moment, that you deserve to be here.
That and my hair, because 10 minutes isn’t really long enough to un-shellac your hair and turn a buttoned-down Edwardian ‘do into a passable DA.
PS: Counting the five in the Noir finale, there are about 20 lifts distributed between the pieces I did tonight (10 in the main Silver pas; five in each finale). And excepting the angel press that didn’t quite make it (see above) they all went well by any measure, be it metric, Imperial, or SAE.
danseur ignoble 