The Stardance Trilogy

by Spider

  “Charlie—” Norrey began.

  “I was supposed to tell you that we can’t all be professional dancers, that they also surf who only sand and wade. Shara, I was supposed to tell you to dump the dance—before it dumps you.”

  In my need to be honest with her, I had been more brutal than was necessary, I thought. I was to learn that bluntness never dismayed Shara Drummond. She demanded it.

  “Why you?” was all she said.

  “We’re inhabiting the same vessel, you and I. We’ve both got an itch that our bodies just won’t let us scratch.”

  Her eyes softened. “What’s your itch?”

  “The same as yours.”

  “Eh?”

  “The man was supposed to come and fix the phone on Thursday. My roommate Karen and I had an all-day rehearsal. We left a note. Mister telephone man, we had to go out, and we sure couldn’t call you, heh heh. Please get the key from the concierge and come on in; the phone’s in the bedroom. The phone man never showed up. They never do.” My hands seemed to be shaking. “We came up the back stairs from the alley. The phone was still dead, but I never thought to take down the note on the front door. I got sick the next morning. Cramps. Vomiting. Karen and I were just friends, but she stayed home to take care of me. I suppose on a Friday night the note seemed even more plausible. He slipped the lock with a piece of plastic, and Karen came out of the kitchen as he was unplugging the stereo. He was so indignant he shot her. Twice. The noise scared him; by the time I got there he was halfway out the door. He just had time to put a slug though my hip joint, and then he was gone. They never got him. They never even came to fix the phone.” My hands were under control now. “Karen was a damned good dancer, but I was better. In my head I still am.”

  Her eyes were round. “You’re not Charlie…Charles Armstead.”

  I nodded.

  “Oh my God. So that’s where you went.”

  I was shocked by how shocked she looked. It brought me back from the cold and windy border of self-pity. I began a little to pity her again. I should have guessed the depth of her empathy. And in the way that really mattered, we were too damned alike—we did share the same bitter joke. I wondered why I had wanted to shock her.

  “They couldn’t repair the joint?” she asked softly.

  “I can walk splendidly if asymmetrically. Given a strong enough motivation, I can even run short distances. I can’t dance worth a damn.”

  “So you became a video man.”

  “Three years ago. People who know both video and dance are about as common as hen’s teeth these days. Oh, they’ve been taping dance since the ’70s—usually with the imagination of a network news cameraman. If you film a stage play with two cameras in the orchestra pit, is it a movie?”

  “You try to do for dance what the movie camera did for drama?”

  “It’s a pretty fair analogy. Where it breaks down is that dance is more analogous to music than to drama. You can’t stop and start it easily, or go back and retake a scene that didn’t go in the can right, or reverse the chronology to get a tidy shooting schedule. The event happens and you record it. What I am is what the record industry pays top dollar for: a mix-man with savvy enough to know which ax is wailing at the moment and mike it high—and the sense to have given the heaviest dudes the best mikes. There are few others like me. I’m the best.”

  She took it the way she had the compliment to herself—at face value. Usually when I say things like that, I don’t give a damn what reaction I get, or I’m being salty and hoping for outrage. But I was pleased at her acceptance, pleased enough to bother me. A faint irritation made me go brutal again, knowing it wouldn’t work. “So what all this leads to is that Norrey was hoping I’d suggest some similar form of sublimation for you. Because I’ll make it in dance before you will.”

  She stubborned up. “I don’t buy that, Charlie. I know what you’re talking about, I’m not a fool, but I think I can beat it.”

  “Sure you will. You’re too damned big, lady. You’ve got tits like both halves of a prize honeydew melon and an ass that any actress in Hollywood would sell her parents for and in Modern dance that makes you d-e-d dead, you haven’t got a chance. Beat it? You’ll beat your head in first, how’m I doing, Norrey?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Charlie!”

  I softened. I can’t work Norrey into a tantrum—I like her too much. It almost kept us living together, once. “I’m sorry, hon. My leg’s giving me the mischief, and I’m stinkin’ mad. She ought to make it—and she won’t. She’s your sister, and so it saddens you. Well I’m a total stranger, and it enrages me.”

  “How do you think it makes me feel?” Shara blazed, startling us both. I hadn’t known she had so much voice. “So you want me to pack it in and rent me a camera, huh, Charlie? Or maybe sell apples outside the studio?” A ripple ran up her jaw. “Well I’ll be damned by all the gods in southern California before I’ll pack it in. God gave me the large economy size, but there is not a surplus pound on it and it fits me like a glove and I can by Jesus dance it and I will. You may be right—I may beat my head in first. But I will get it done.” She took a deep breath. “Now I thank you for your kind intentions, Char…Mister Armst…oh shit.” The tears came and she left hastily, spilling a quarter-cup of cold coffee on Norrey’s lap.

  “Charlie,” Norrey said through clenched teeth, “why do I like you so much?”

  “Dancers are dumb.” I gave her my handkerchief.

  “Oh.” She patted at her lap awhile. “How come you like me?”

  “Video men are smart.”

  “Oh.”

  I spent the afternoon in my apartment, reviewing the footage I’d shot that morning, and the more I watched, the madder I got.

  Dance requires intense motivation at an extraordinarily early age—a blind devotion, a gamble on the as-yet-unrealized potentials of heredity and nutrition. The risk used to be higher in ballet, but by the late ’80s Modern had gotten just as bad. You can begin, say, classical ballet training at age six—and at fourteen find yourself broad-shouldered, the years of total effort utterly wasted. Shara had set her childhood sights on Modern dance—and found out too late that God had dealt her the body of a woman.

  She was not fat—you have seen her. She was tall, big-boned tall, and on that great frame was built a rich, ripely female body. As I ran and reran the tapes of Birthing, the pain grew in me until I even forgot the ever present aching of my own legs. It was like watching a supremely gifted basketball player who stood four feet tall.

  To make it in Modern dance nowadays, it is essential to get into a big company. You cannot be seen unless you are visible. (Government subsidy operates on the principle that Big Is Better—a sadly self-fulfilling prophecy. The smaller companies and independents have always had to knife each other for pennies—but since the early ’80s there haven’t been any pennies.)

  “Merce Cunningham saw her dance, Charlie. Martha Graham saw her dance, just before she died. Both of them praised her warmly, for her choreography as much as for her technique. Neither offered her a position. I’m not even sure I blame them—I can sort of understand, is the hell of it.”

  Norrey could understand all right. It was her own defect magnified a hundredfold: uniqueness. A company member must be capable of excellent solo work—but she must also be able to blend into group effort, in ensemble work. Shara’s very uniqueness made her virtually useless as a company member. She could not help but draw the eye.

  And once drawn, the male eye at least would never leave. Modern dancers must sometimes work nude these days, and it is therefore meet that they have the bodies of fourteen-year-old boys. We may have ladies dancing with few or no clothes on up here, but by God it is Art. An actress or a musician or a singer or a painter may be lushly endowed, deliciously rounded—but a dancer must be nearly as sexless as a high fashion model. Perhaps God knows why. Shara could not have purged her dance of her sexuality even if she had been interested in trying, and as I watched her dan
ce on my monitor and in my mind’s eye, I knew she was not.

  Why did her genius have to lie in the only occupation besides model and nun in which sexiness is a liability? It broke my heart, by empathic analogy.

  “It’s no good at all, is it?”

  I whirled and barked. “Dammit, you made me bite my tongue.”

  “I’m sorry.” She came from the doorway into my living room. “Norrey told me how to find the place. The door was ajar.”

  “I forgot to shut it when I came home.”

  “You leave it open?”

  “I’ve learned the lesson of history. No junkie, no matter how strung out he is, will enter an apartment with the door ajar and the radio on. Obviously there’s someone home. And you’re right, it’s no damn good at all. Sit down.”

  She sat on the couch. Her hair was down, now, and I liked it better that way. I shut off the monitor and popped the tape, tossing it on a shelf.

  “I came to apologize. I shouldn’t have blown up at you at lunch. You were trying to help me.”

  “You had it coming. I imagine by now you’ve built up quite a head of steam.”

  “Five years worth. I figured I’d start in the States instead of Canada. Go farther faster. Now I’m back in Toronto and I don’t think I m going to make it here either. You’re right, Mr. Armstead—I’m too damned big. Amazons don’t dance.”

  “It’s still Charlie. Listen, something I want to ask you. That last gesture, at the end of Birthing—what was that? I thought it was a beckoning, Norrey says it was a farewell, and now that I’ve run the tape it looks like a yearning, a reaching out.”

  “Then it worked.”

  “Pardon?”

  “It seemed to me that the birth of a galaxy called for all three. They’re so close together in spirit it seemed silly to give each a separate movement.”

  “Mmm.” Worse and Worse. Suppose Einstein had had aphasia? “Why couldn’t you have been a rotten dancer? That’d just be irony. This”—I pointed to the tape—“is high tragedy.”

  “Aren’t you going to tell me I can still dance for myself?”

  “No. For you that’d be worse than not dancing at all.”

  “My God, you’re perceptive. Or am I that easy to read?”

  I shrugged.

  “Oh Charlie,” she burst out, “what am I going to do?”

  “You’d better not ask me that.” My voice sounded funny.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m already two-thirds in love with you. And because you’re not in love with me and never will be. And so that is the sort of question you shouldn’t ask me.”

  It jolted her a little, but she recovered quickly. Her eyes softened, and she shook her head slowly. “You even know why I’m not, don’t you?”

  “And why you won’t be.”

  I was terribly afraid she was going to say, “Charlie, I’m sorry,” but she surprised me again. What she said was, “I can count on the fingers of one foot the number of grown-up men I’ve ever met. I’m grateful for you. I guess ironic tragedies come in pairs?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Well, now all I have to do is figure out what to do with my life. That should kill the weekend.”

  “Will you continue your classes?”

  “Might as well. It’s never a waste of time to study. Norrey’s teaching me things.”

  All of a sudden my mind started to percolate. Man is a rational animal, right? Right? “What if I had a better idea?”

  “If you’ve got another idea, it’s better. Speak.”

  “Do you have to have an audience? I mean, does it have to be live?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe there’s a back way in. Look, they’re building video facilities into all the TVs nowadays, right? And by now everybody has collected all the old movies and Ernie Kovacs programs and such that they always wanted, and now they’re looking for new stuff. Exotic stuff, too esoteric for network or local broadcast, stuff that—”

  “The independent video companies, you’re talking about.”

  “Right. TDT is thinking of entering the market, and the Graham company already has.”

  “So?”

  “So suppose we go freelance? You and me? You dance it and I’ll tape it: a straight business deal. I’ve got a few connections, and I can get more. I could name you ten acts in the music business right now that never go on tour—just record and record. Why don’t you bypass the structure of the dance companies and take a chance on the public? Maybe word of mouth could—”

  Her face was beginning to light up like a jack-o-lantern. “Charlie, do you think it could work? Do you really think so?”

  “I don’t think it has a snowball’s chance.” I crossed the room, opened up the beer fridge, took out the snowball I keep there in the summer, and tossed it to her. She caught it, but just barely, and when she realized what it was, she burst out laughing. “I’ve got just enough faith in the idea to quit working for TDT and put my time into it. I’ll invest my time, my tape, my equipment and my savings. Ante up.”

  She tried to get sober, but the snowball froze her fingers and she broke up again. “A snowball in July. You madman. Count me in. I’ve got a little money saved. And…and I guess I don’t have much choice, do I?”

  “I guess not.”

  Chapter 2

  The next three years were some of the most exciting years of my life, of both our lives. While I watched and taped, Shara transformed herself from a potentially great dancer into something truly awesome. She did something I’m not sure I can explain.

  She became dance’s analogue of the jazzman.

  Dance was, for Shara, self-expression, pure and simple, first, last, and always. Once she freed herself from the attempt to fit into the world of company dance, she came to regard choreography per se as an obstacle to her self-expression, as a preprogrammed rut, inexorable as a script and as limiting. And so she devalued it.

  A jazzman may blow Night in Tunisia for a dozen consecutive nights, and each evening will be a different experience, as he interprets and reinterprets the melody according to his mood of the moment. Total unity of artist and his art: spontaneous creation. The melodic starting point distinguishes the result from pure anarchy.

  In just this way Shara devalued preperformance choreography to a starting point, a framework on which to build whatever the moment demanded and then jammed around it. She learned in those three busy years to dismantle the interface between herself and her dance. Dancers have always tended to sneer at improv dancing, even while they practiced it, in the studio, for the looseness it gave. They failed to see that planned improv, improv around a theme fully thought out in advance, was the natural next step in dance. Shara took the step. You must be very, very good to get away with that much freedom. She was good enough.

  There’s no point in detailing the professional fortunes of Drumstead Enterprises over those three years. We worked hard, we made some magnificent tapes, and we couldn’t sell them for paperweights. A home video-cassette industry indeed grew—and they knew as much about Modern dance as the record industry knew about the blues when they started. The big outfits wanted credentials, and the little outfits wanted cheap talent. Finally we even got desperate enough to try the schlock houses—and learned what we already knew. They didn’t have the distribution, the prestige, or the technical specs for the critics to pay any attention to them. Word-of-mouth advertising is like a gene pool—if it isn’t a certain minimum size to start with, it doesn’t get anywhere. “Spider” John Koerner is an incredibly talented musician and songwriter who has been making and selling his own records since 1972. How many of you have ever heard of him?

  In May of 1992 I opened my mailbox in the lobby and found the letter from VisuEnt Inc., terminating our option with deepest sorrow and no severance. I went straight over to Shara’s apartment, and my leg felt like the bone marrow had been replaced with thermite and ignited. It was a very long walk.

  She was
working on Weight Is A Verb when I got there. Converting her big living room into a studio had cost time, energy, skullsweat, and a fat bribe to the landlord, but it was cheaper than renting time in a studio considering the sets we wanted. It looked like high mountain country that day, and I hung my hat on a fake alder when I entered.

  She flashed me a smile and kept moving, building up to greater and greater leaps. She looked like the most beautiful mountain goat I ever saw. I was in a foul mood and I wanted to kill the music (McLaughlin and Miles together, leaping some themselves), but I never could interrupt Shara when she was dancing. She built it gradually, with directional counterpoint, until she seemed to hurl herself into the air, stay there until she was damned good and ready, and then hurl herself down again. Sometimes she rolled when she hit and sometimes she landed on her hands, and always the energy of falling was transmuted into some new movement instead of being absorbed. It was total energy output, and by the time she was done I had calmed down enough to be almost philosophical about our mutual professional ruin.

  She ended up collapsed in upon herself, head bowed exquisitely humbled in attempt to defy gravity. I couldn’t help applauding. It felt corny, but I couldn’t help it.

  “Thank you, Charlie.”

  “I’ll be damned. Weight is a verb. I thought you were crazy when you told me the title.”

  “It’s one of the strongest verbs in dance—the strongest, I guess—and you can make it do anything.”

  “Almost anything.”

  “Eh?”

  “VisuEnt gave us our contract back.”

  “Oh.” Nothing showed in her eyes, but I knew what was behind them. “Well, who’s next on the list?”

  “There is no one left on the list.”

  “Oh.” This time it showed. “Oh.”

  “We should have remembered. Great artists are never honored in their own lifetime. What we ought to do is drop dead—then we’d be all set.”

  In my way I was trying to be strong for her, and she knew it and tried to be strong for me.

  “Maybe what we should do is go into death insurance, for artists,” she said. “We pay the client premiums against a controlling interest in his estate, and we guarantee that he’ll die.”