by Maria Mutch
I snorted and she startled. “No, no milk,” I said. “Thank you.”
* * *
She was a shark. I had observed something of this in the journalists who had come by over the years to interview either Raf or me. In the case of this woman, Claire, she had interviewed him and now, months later, she wanted to talk with me. She seemed hungry, her face had a naked appetite while her smile was large and unbridled, as if she had just spotted the small animal she was going to consume. I wondered if this expression was a component of their sex, if she seemed similarly voracious when she took him in her mouth. She settled down into her chair and crossed her legs.
“I’m wondering,” I said. “Does he know that you’re here?”
She looked down, examining her tea. Then looked up again, smiling. “No, I don’t think so.”
She cleared her throat and put a notebook on her lap. “I’m curious about something. Can we just jump in? Yeah? Excellent. Your work is sometimes controversial. Does it bother you how people react, or does it make you more determined?” She actually grinned, dark as a great white. The dead eye, hot as a pin.
I watched her for a moment and decided to stir some sugar into my tea, which I rarely did. “I think you’re asking about something in particular.”
She smiled again. “I’m thinking of The Trial of the Body. I didn’t get to see it, though.”
“No, you would have been too young.” I sipped my tea. “It was a long time ago.”
She watched my face.
“A couple of people threw up in the aisles,” I said. “Five, if I recall correctly, who actually passed out. Ambulances came to a few of the performances. There was a small fuss in front of the theatre—maybe it was after the fourth or fifth performance. We started with empty seats, and by the end, the house was packed every day.”
“It turned into one of your most popular pieces, didn’t it? Iconic.”
“That’s the thing about the grotesque. One of the people who passed out threatened to sue, and reviewers wrote on their blogs and in the papers about what they said were my atrocities. But the atrocities weren’t mine. They belong to all of us. Rape and torture and lynching and betrayal. We used a lot of rope, a lot of binding. Think of dictatorships, covert operations, what people call third world countries. Think of this one. Your own neighbours. Domestic disturbances. Torture is a common language.”
“So is blood, yes? You had that, too.”
“Fake, naturally, in huge quantities on a specially made, recessed floor so the dancers could literally dance in it. And it became too much for some people, though their experience is what enlivened it. That’s how blood turns from a bunch of food-grade chemicals whipped up in a bucket to the essence of human life. People said they could even smell it, but that was their imaginations, of course. People were brought face-to-face with their unconsciousness in forty-eight minutes, and they revolted. Some stormed out.”
I paused here and stirred my tea again. “The point is, dance can do a lot of things, be a lot of things. It has enormous capacity, but time is needed to develop a shared language between the dancers and the audience. It’s all, in the end, a collaboration.”
She nodded, sagely, the tip of her pen between her lips. She took it out and said, “You had some dancers who lived on the streets, didn’t you?”
“Five of the twelve dancers came to us through an outreach program. They were all young people; one had actually been a professional dancer, for a time, but the other four were novices. The company was kind of rocked by their presence—weeks went by before we started to see the work come together. There were a lot of divisions. But I look at people’s bodies, the stories they hold in their structures—it’s not always necessary to know dance. I mean, generally speaking, I use professionals, but this was an opportunity to see movement in another way. Their bodies showed the toll of being relentlessly vulnerable. They had a lot of input in terms of what they would do. It was poignantly perfect in some ways.”
“And what happened after that?”
I shrugged. “In the end, everyone returned to their former lives. We lost touch, as people do, and it all felt rather useless. As if the whole experience hadn’t happened. Somebody asked me who I thought I was. For a while I stopped believing in the power of art, and dance especially. I had wanted to see us all transcend something. The suffering.” I picked a cat hair from the arm of the chair. “So there it is. This is the nature of our existence.”
“What do you mean?”
I thought for a moment. “Someone said that poetry is the closest medium to our nature, but I disagree. I think dance is the closest, oldest, most essential expression we have. It comes before spoken language. But maybe the place I went to was too dark for us all. As a choreographer, you play, quite literally, with other people’s psyches, both the audience’s and the dancers’. Art is an alive process, and you don’t ultimately get to control its course. I wanted connections and found them broken, and where I wanted meaning I didn’t find any. But then the reverse also happened in ways I didn’t expect. It’s the piece people still want to hear about. And sometimes that’s how it goes.”
“You had regrets.”
“No,” I said. “I’m saying that maybe it’s enough to spend time with other people, making something. And that’s all we have.”
She was silent, inspecting her notebook. She checked her phone, which she was using to record. I sensed the swirl of a small tempest. “Raf told me that during that period you started throwing things. Including an heirloom vase, I think he said.”
What bothered me, apart from her face, was not just that I threw things—which I did, as I was entirely captivated by my own futility—it was that I picked a vase to pitch straight to the floor. I didn’t expect so many miniscule white slivers, as if ten vases had exploded on the hardwood. A supernova of porcelain, almost beautiful. I wished I had chosen something else, something that was not a fragile vase once owned by Raf’s equally fragile mother.
There was the matter, too, that he had told her this, and now her expression was changing, to one of feathery terror, because she had just realized what this receiving of information, this bit of pillow talk, from Raf implied. She was caught. She dangled, twirling, upside down in the middle of the room, almost elegantly. She spun like a caterpillar on an invisible thread. Honestly, she was really beautiful.
“As you get older, you will learn not to mind so much what happens,” I said. I took a good gulp of tea because I needed to wash down the cold speck in my throat. “Everything except dangling in the open air with your twat on view.”
* * *
Later on I did regret saying this. It was nothing like my usual thinking. I had been her, after all, or some aspect of her. And I had always wanted to be one of those people, as Henry James said, on whom nothing is lost, but I also wanted to be someone who gave no impression of it. I didn’t mind appearing dim, in conversation, at least. I should have kept the last comment to myself. All I did was be a hypocrite and give a kind of testimony that she could take to Raf. He would know I knew. And she would dangle there between us, spinning charmingly, until one of us reached out and squished her with our fingers.
* * *
He said that he didn’t understand me sometimes, the rages that he could see under the surface occasionally shooting out, that this had been happening lately, that I hadn’t wanted to talk about it, that all I did was work.
“Where are you,” Raf said. “Who are you?”
And then he said, “What are you?”
So it is true. My brain as a scintillating thing, all fibres and filaments and threads and strings and connections that lead to a certain backward tangle. My parents still alive. Going about their business, utterly naive, uncomprehending, and the dog, too, and the house still standing, still packed to the gills. It was glorious, that aliveness, though I didn’t know. Everyone still there, and the sun late in the sky, and my mother on the lawn, dancing, and she may well have been high, she probabl
y was, but she was gorgeous and she was mine. She picked me up and spun me around, held my feet so I dangled and calmly watched the world from this vantage, still as a dozing bat. She was the first to help me understand my body, though she could do nothing to help me with my brain.
Volkova, ever one to employ elements of the circus, has her dancers drop from the ceiling upside down on cables, one by one at a pace that is excruciatingly slow, until they are all dangling at differing heights from the floor and call to mind spiders or caterpillars. It is difficult to tell, however, if they are the victims of their suspension or the ones in control.
—review of Efredra, Dance Magazine
Arms!
Charlotte was exhausted.
We had been at this too long.
I wanted her heart to break on the uplift and come back together on the landing. The sequence was an athletic one, intended to be long and frenzied, filled with difficult jumps and landings. Slow, considered movement has a place, as does standing still, but this composition needed the frenzied energy of the maenads. The clean had to alternate with the filthy and undomesticated, and in order to do this, she had to leave behind the known, the effort of which was stalling the progress of the entire piece. I wanted to see abandon. I could smell her sweat, even the fear in the droplets, though I wasn’t the only cause. What she feared was the apostate inside her, the emergence of her true nature. The body is a famous betrayer.
“Arms!” I called out again, and the body obeyed. She looked like she wanted to cry.
“Again!” I said, and a ferocity licked out from her and tried to sting me. I asked for a dip of her shoulders, I asked her to adjust that elbow, those fingers.
“That was better,” I said. “Again, again!” We were getting closer to what was being excavated, which was shame—in order to be rid of it, be delivered from it. The defecating, urinating, itching, orgasming, perspiring, ejaculating system that carried her energy also left her deeply, and unknowingly, conflicted. It held her back.
She thought that she knew her body, that she had a kind of liberation and willingness that others didn’t have. She would be the perfect conduit for whatever combinations of steps, jumps, falls, flights, and, moreover, the accompanying ideas. She had accepted, unflinchingly she thought, those ideas, as well as the gaze of others. Her art as vocation, if an impoverished one. She had done psychoanalysis, and meditation retreats, and mushrooms. She believed that she had learned years earlier to merge the mundanity of elbows, shoulders, ankles, knees with the fantastical: asshole, clitoris, nipples, tongue. To declare them equal and without shame.
She would have said that she was integrated and performing with abandon already, but she hadn’t even been close. Until this day, when the others had been sent home three hours before and the world outside the studio obscured by our task. The branches of the trees swayed outside the windows, almost scratching the glass. People in the office across the street had sex on a desk and were as oblivious to the larger schematics as she was. Nothing existed for her but this floor, sweat-streaked, the space contained above it, her body and exhausted breath, my presence. There were no taxis and buildings and hustle. No eight million.
I knew she wanted to cry, to yell, Fuck you, Molly!, but she was entranced by the emergence of a monstrous shadow suffering from its exclusions. We were now too far gone and the energy couldn’t be stopped.
I don’t normally push this far, challenging the possessions of a murky subconscious with a veritable cattle prod. I worried that I was doing something irreparable, verging on the criminal. She was growing too tired, and though I worried about injury, I didn’t feel I could stop her. The momentum was hers.
She sped through the sequence one more time. Her articulation was now erratic, her gestures and landings like an open tear as the other creature came through in one brutal thrust. She transformed so completely that she emerged toothed and clawed. The room smelled of colonizing animals. It was one of the best performances I had ever seen.
Finally, she ended by folding down and placing her forehead to the floor. I waited until her breathing slowed. When it did, I said quietly, “There it is,” and she sat up, nodded, wiping her nose in the gesture of bloodied prizefighters, and got to her feet.
She said, “Again.”
* * *
Not that I am defending myself. Most dancers would have left long before we reached that point, or even quit entirely. When I was still a dancer, I wouldn’t have tolerated bullshit in a choreographer. I would have said, Find another. I would have said, Stick it up your ass.
Which is perhaps one of the reasons I became the person inventing the sequences. This dancer, however, made the allowance, she forgave me, and when the other performers gathered the following day they found someone entirely altered. She was palpably larger, more fluid. The light in the studio seemed to bend and reflect differently around her, and when the practice was over, the others were likewise affected—they regarded her. Which spawned ignitions of jealousy in one or two further down the line, but that, as they say, is another matter.
Hyenas
The young man to my left is laughing. Hand over mouth. “This is unbelievable!” in a loud whisper. The Joker sees a wrong creature, something dark and mangled. Forgotten or bereft. The primitive part of the brain fears the loss of the tribe, being left to die. His gut is in turmoil; toxic. He tastes something bitter, but he can’t look away or stop the laugh that bursts out from his lips, almost like a hiccup.
The other people around him aren’t sure they heard him right. But when he tries to suppress another laugh, the sound comes out almost like a fart or as if he’s choking. His body shivers with the effort of controlling it. His shoulders shake, his chest and stomach, and he is both appalled and delighted. The mix careens inside him.
A large woman with a ring of keys, absurdly thick, attached to her waist—she is a keeper, apparently, of gates and doorways—glares at him.
He snorts again, and she says, “Fuck’s the matter with you?”
The Gatekeeper rises to full height because she had been kneeling, and for a while her hand was holding mine. But she has let go of me and she appears about to shove the man. The stances, the dance between them—if there was still time, I would use it, I would create a new piece. At the same time, I want to say to her, Hold on to me, don’t let go.
I say, “Don’t.” But none of them hear me.
I reach my hand up to clasp hers, but all it meets is air. The Gatekeeper is facing off with the Joker, about to shove him. Hands spread wide on chest and a push with massive force—in a performance the Joker could jettison across the stage, slam into others. One action begetting more action, karmic, comedic, and propulsive.
“No, don’t,” I say, or think that I do. The words are there, I’m sure.
Theory
Did he walk into a forest or a sea? All the people who have gone missing have fallen through the membrane that separates the living from the dead. They have a secret society that doesn’t refute their individual isolation. Did he leap from a bridge in the city or climb up a mountain with the intention of not coming back? It makes a difference in some way, if the volition is his. It makes a difference, too, if he is alive and well and has erased one identity to assume another.
Perhaps he is like the johatsu in Japan who shed a miserable identity for the fresh start of a new one; maybe he’s been aided by a professional yonige-ya. He has just walked into another life, turned in his name for another, one that conveys an image he had wanted all along to project. Someone gave him a new birth certificate, a new passport, with a name slipped from the ledgers of the deceased. He has shaved his beard, or his entire head, donned the clothes of a businessman or a construction worker. Maybe he’s still in the city, absorbed into the streets, and maybe all his money is gone. Maybe he drives a taxi, deciding who is a worthwhile fare, or he is drunk beneath a bridge. He washes dishes in Chinatown, or he stands on a pier with the hood of a parka covering his face and a line cast in
to the water. Every shape of a certain size begins to resemble him, and he—his form—is replicated until he can appear simultaneously all around the city. He is not missing or lost at all, but has simply spread himself over a much larger surface area, like ashes that have been scattered.
I begin to think: What is alive, what does that mean exactly, and what is dead?
A Chimney
The house was gone, but not neatly. I stood on the property with other people, an adult’s hands on my shoulders, the weight of them to hold me back or down. A miscalculation, as I was as still as the frozen air. The ground was a scab of resistance. Metal lay heaped on ashes that were black in places and mounded and shocked white in others. A few grey beams tapered up to the sky, like the dead trees in swamps.
Lines wouldn’t stay. Whatever had been straight was swollen or deflated. My mind searched for the known and found muffin tins, springs, canisters, railings, the woodstove. An impossible book whose cover was still bright orange and lay on a pile of folds and shards. Worse, though, was the chimney, which still stood. I was exactly opposite and had a clear view of its lonesome tenacity, the slight curve to the left at its middle, as if it might lie down. I wanted to lie down.
Even though the air was cold and our breath came out in puffs, no one shivered. Snow and ice appeared in patches over the entire area. A balsam fir, just four feet high and intact, was close to the house and silver with long icicles where it had been sprayed with water. The town had only one hydrant, so the firefighters had had to draft water from the only nearby pond large enough not to be frozen solid. The ground was marked with a long trail of gashes. Ice poured from a dirty yellow firehose lying the full length of the driveway and which they wouldn’t be able to pull up until spring. My mother’s car and my father’s truck were burned and gutted in the front half and mostly intact at the back. I wondered about the items in the glove compartments. The mind wants the small as much as anything.
