A Body of Work

by David Hallberg

  I sobbed uncontrollably. They just watched and listened. Sue and Megan are both mothers outside of the workplace, and their maternal instincts kicked into gear.

  “We have been waiting for this since the beginning,” Sue said. “Now is when the honest work starts.”

  “I didn’t want to waste your time with my emotional drama,” I told her. “We are here to do a job.”

  “But this is all part of the job. Your mental health as well as your physical health.”

  One of Sue’s greatest strengths is her decisiveness in times of crisis.

  “I don’t think you need a cortisone shot,” she said. “I think you need rest. Let’s calm it down so you have better control of it. You had been stressing before but still coped. Just now you aren’t coping, so we need to pull back a bit.

  “But more importantly, what will give you peace of mind? What can we do to convince you that you are doing this? That this is actually working?”

  “Nothing,” I dryly replied. “I’ll believe it when I’m back onstage. But for now I believe in the work we’re doing. I don’t doubt the progress made until today. But I have no guarantee for tomorrow. Or what the eventual outcome will be.”

  I had gotten it all out. Although it was cathartic, I felt defeated. Lost. But there were two women sitting across from me who supported me and were there to listen and continue the fight, because they believed in it. Believed in me and the outcome.

  I went home after that and crawled into bed. Drained. Speechless. Megan was so fearful that I might seriously harm myself that she drove to my apartment and called me to say that she wasn’t going to intrude on my private space but wanted me to know she was nearby. Though I was unaware of it at the time, she stayed there, hoping to send good energy to me, for the next two hours.

  Alone in my apartment, I realized there was nothing else to do but recharge. I was on empty and I needed to have something to give for tomorrow. Because tomorrow I would head back in and continue the fight, right where I left off.

  Though my outpouring seemed to me like a setback, Sue was right. That was when the real work started. By telling them everything I was feeling, I had helped myself over the finish line. In reaching the bottom, I had nowhere to go but up.

  CHAPTER 52

  After that, every day in the studio I was doing just a bit more than the day before. We built. The milestones became more definitive. Seven months after the start of rehab, the team collectively agreed that I was ready to jump without the support of the barre. The strength I had built prepared me for this kind of test. So I jumped, very small at first and only twice at a time, but we finally tested out the pressure the foot was put under when I took off and landed from the floor. It took all my courage and trust to believe I could ease into the air and land without incident. My first jumps were a defining moment. From there I inched my way higher and higher into the air. These were at last milestones I wanted to celebrate.

  * * *

  I BEGAN PREPARING for jumps that were demanded of me in certain classical repertoire. Double saut de basque. Double assemblé. And what felt like the longest to finally reach, double tour. Again I had to trust that I wouldn’t hurt myself if I tried it. I was shocked when I landed without incident. These were major tickings of boxes.

  * * *

  ALTHOUGH I COULD see the milestones, they were never good enough. And Megan learned to accept that.

  One day, after I had done a series of double tours, I said to her, “I’m still not satisfied with my grand allégro.”

  Megan looked at me in disbelief. She laughed, having witnessed the obsessive dissection I put myself under.

  * * *

  AS THE WORK progressed, the hair that I had so eagerly shaved off before I came to Melbourne was growing back. I was returning to my self. The shaved, swollen, desperate person was now the dancer in the mirror in front of me.

  * * *

  THOUGH I WAS grateful to have those first few months surrounded only by my team, as time marched on, the dancers of The Australian Ballet became an additional and vital support system. Together we did exercises in the mornings and soaked our feet in ice buckets at day’s end. I could join them in the common room, sit down and have a chat or a laugh, or even just sit silently. I became one of them as I sought solace to heal.

  Some were aware of how much support they were giving me: Brooke, Amanda, Rohan, Amber. Others—Bene, Coco, Adam, Andy—just had to be there to make me feel comforted. They never pried. They never asked if there was “any hope.” They just let me be. And because of that I felt safe enough to open up to them and become an unofficial Aussie. I wasn’t alone after all.

  * * *

  ONE DAY IN August 2016, some weeks after I had unburdened myself, Sue was treating me on the massage table. I’d had a good class that day, and for many days before it. I lay on the table, relieved that another day’s work was behind me, yapping away about nothing particularly important. She was actively flushing out my calves, creating an upward motion to release the tension.

  Sue had observed my dancing the day before. She would intermittently come into the studio and sit on the floor in the front of the room, as discreetly as possible, to study my movement. This was the best, most concrete way to determine where I actually was in the process; how much progress had been made and where the weaknesses still were. She would sit there, silent, inspecting not just the foot but the entire body functioning as a whole.

  As she massaged, she said, “After seeing you yesterday, I want you back onstage in October.” She looked at me, smiling, a gaze of complete matter-of-factness.

  I looked at her dumbfounded. “You mean in two months?”

  “Yes.” She smiled back. “Can you still not see that you are going to get back onstage?”

  The incremental easing into each dance step was over. She had been pumping me up for a while. Reinforcing the positives of my work and studiously troubleshooting the weaknesses still to be conquered.

  I had regarded her positive reinforcement as just her way of trying to get me to believe that I was making my recovery. I knew what I had done previously. And I knew what I had done that day. But I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, let myself jump ahead to the future. So her words went in one ear and shot out the other.

  I climbed off the massage table and headed home. Sue reminded me of the October goal once more as I walked out. I laughed it off, making light of it. It was just another way for Sue to pump me up.

  * * *

  MY MIND WANDERED on the tram ride home. Sue could profess all she wanted, but I wasn’t setting myself up for disappointment. There had been too many of those previously.

  I unwound from the day’s work on the balcony of my apartment. Earphones on, a cigarette rolled, playing the music I was obsessed with at the time. Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Third Movement. It offered optimism. Strength. Positivity. I looked up at the sky, the light settling down over the roofs of Melbourne, the first, brightest star coming into view. I gazed beyond the world beneath me and my own struggles and into the vastness of the darkening sky. Sue’s words came back into my mind.

  Two months.

  From two years, down to two months.

  Oh my God, I thought. I’m going to get back onstage.

  As the Third Movement pulsed in my ears, the tears flowed freely. Finally they were tears of joy, not pain. The pain was over. I could feel it. I cried because I had done it. We had done it. I thought of the work over the last months, slogging through day by day, step-by-step of the same routine, maintaining our determination in spite of everything. We had built ever so slowly and incrementally and finally produced the outcome we so desperately wanted.

  All I could do was look up at the sky in gratitude, indebted to the universe for giving me this new opportunity to dance. I put my hands in the air, palms facing upward, as I rejoiced. I clasped my hands, crying, “Thank you.” Then I repeated it, over and over.

  That night I smoked my last cigarette. Smoking was no lon
ger an option, now that I was a dancer again.

  * * *

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, after a deep, restful sleep, I came into the studio with a new perspective. Finally I had seen the light in my darkness.

  Before our class started, I told Megan the news. “Sue wants me onstage in two months,” I said.

  “I know. She told me.”

  She looked at me. After a pause, she said, “For two days I’ve felt uneasy about something. I’ve been nervous but couldn’t put my finger on what it was, that it’s because I’m starting to let you go. It’s time for you to fly and our time is almost up.”

  That moment truly was approaching, closer and more realistic than ever before. But the most powerful thing was that I knew it now. I knew I was returning to the stage. Awakened and reborn.

  * * *

  TAKING THE TRAM into the ballet center on my last day, I forced myself to look out the window instead of burying myself in a book, and to take in every stop, building, street that I had now passed five days a week for nearly a year. This had been my refuge. This city where I hid and healed. And somehow, I was heading in for the final time. The rehab was officially coming to an end.

  * * *

  THERE WAS A last set of stairs to my metronome in the concrete bunker. And for my last exercise, the leg extension igniting the burn of my quads that never got any easier.

  But I knew that I would be doing the exercises I had learned for the rest of my career. Until I retire, I will be leg-extension-ing, J-Lo-ing, calf raising, side lying, step-upping, Nobby’s landing. I will find a set of stairs in any city I dance in, and skip up them to my metronome.

  * * *

  MEGAN AND I worked one last time. It was business as usual: Megan giving me corrections when she felt I was open enough for them. Me trying to drop my armor and listen to her as I slogged through the steps, most of which were comfortable by now, some of which were still tricky. I pushed on anyway, thinking back a month and knowing that thankfully they were better than before and would be still better tomorrow. Emma Lippa, a Russian pianist (who for years had played during class and rehearsals at Bolshoi) heightened my artistic drive with her weighted, orchestral playing. She motivated me. Made me want to dance, and not simply work.

  An hour later, I was cooked. I couldn’t even muster the last à la seconde turns Megan gave me. “Get up on your hip,” she said. I had no more juice in me to even do that. So without a grand finale, some sort of gesture that encapsulated the last many months of work, we finished. I sat on a chair by the mirrors. I was done. It was complete. I was ready to be released into the world.

  Emma stood up from the piano bench. Megan knelt on the floor next to me.

  “My congratulations,” Emma said to Megan. “You have moved an enormous rock. Every day I would walk by the studio and there you two were, working, working. You have made an enormous effort.”

  Megan covered her face and started to cry. Through her tears she said, “I just hope that what I did helped you in some way. I so desperately wanted to help.”

  I couldn’t hold back my tears either.

  “Megan,” I said, “you don’t need to question whether it has worked or not because the proof is in what I am able to do now. Look at what I can do. And look at where I was when I arrived in Melbourne. That is the proof that it has worked.”

  She said, “I know it hasn’t always been the easiest working relationship for us. And I’ve tried to adapt myself to what you needed. I stepped back when I thought you needed space and then would choose my words carefully when it came time to say something. But I just hope it was all the right approach. It has been such a gift to work with you and see your progress and witness what you can achieve.”

  I listened to her. She had gone through a lot with me throughout the year. The stress it put on her. The worry. Our work together had been just as much of a struggle for her as it was for me.

  I told her, “I want you to know that you were always saying the right thing. That the friction between us came from my struggle to open myself up to your corrections. The battle was with my ego, not with you. I struggled to let my armor down and let you in. But I think back on the time spent here, and where I was at the beginning, with socks on, lying on a foam roller. And where I am now; jumping and gearing up to dance for an audience after two and a half years. And I think . . .” I couldn’t get the words out. There were just too many emotions.

  Finally I settled for saying, “Fuck . . . We did it, man. We really, really did it.”

  * * *

  LATER THAT DAY, Sue, Paula, Megan, and I headed for a celebratory toast; to put a final mark on the work now behind us. We sat around the table and raised our glasses. It was my turn to thank them one last time. After a while, the administrative staff of The Australian Ballet showed up to celebrate with us. Soon we were all completely drunk, and reminiscing about the months of grinding but miraculous work.

  I knew they were uncomfortable with the word “indebted.” But I was indebted to them. They gave my life back to me. Again, I raised my glass to them and the experience we had behind us.

  CHAPTER 53

  In December 2016, I was about to take class at the State Theatre in Melbourne with the dancers of The Australian Ballet, with whom I would be performing short excerpts from the classical repertoire in seven days. When I stepped onto the stage for the first time in more than two years, it stopped me in my tracks. I couldn’t walk beyond the edge of the wings to start a warm-up before class. I gazed around me. At the theater and its red seats; the vastness of the house encompassing three balconies. The proscenium separating the audience from the performer. The sharp division of the fourth wall. Then, the beating heart of any theater, which everything revolves around: the sacred area of the stage. Work lights on, absent the sets and lighting that audiences witness, but still as magical. Barres set up onstage for daily class. The piano, down stage right, with a light clipped to its lid. I hadn’t ever felt so grateful to be on a stage and have the privilege to dance on it.

  I couldn’t contain my elation. I told the dancers around me what the day had brought.

  “Can you take a picture for me?” I asked. “Today is the first day I’m dancing on a stage in over two years.”

  I was so moved to see them react with joy. They had a sense of what I’d been through, for they had witnessed much of the arduous process.

  * * *

  I WARMED UP quietly, looking out to the vast theater where audiences sit. There was no one there now, just two thousand empty red seats. I was physically shaky. A slight tremble inside me. Before class started, I closed my eyes and took a couple of deep, slow, meditative breaths. I felt the ground under my feet, planting myself firmly to the floor. I opened my eyes again, ready to commence. And so, as in the studio, it started with pliés.

  An accompanist named Bryan was playing the piano for class. Having suffered a concussion after falling off his bike, he knew the long road back to his art well. Through every step of my rehabilitation he had congratulated me.

  “Great to see you jumping around, mate!”

  “Great to see you rehearsing, mate!”

  And today, he came up and hugged me.

  “Great to see you onstage again, mate!”

  And just as the four-count introduction began, I couldn’t suppress my tears. It was overwhelming. I was back on a stage. A space I thought I would never return to. I bent and stretched my legs, coordinating their action to my arms.

  I felt the power of the stage. I had weathered the unimaginable for more than two years, in the depths of depression and doubt. It was as if everything had unraveled around me, and through the year I had collected all the pieces slowly and laboriously and, with the help and support of my team, put them back together again in a new way. All of that brought me there, standing at the barre, crying, listening to Bryan playing and looking out into a vast, empty theater.

  * * *

  TWO DAYS LATER I was onstage for class again, this time looking
into the wings impatiently. My parents were arriving from Phoenix for the week. I hadn’t seen them the entire time I’d been in Melbourne. They knew little of my life here, my process, my daily routine. During that time they could only imagine my surroundings and the people who were helping me back to life. So when this show was scheduled, they had planned their trip “to thank the team.” They were as indebted as I was to the entire Australian Ballet.

  Pushing through center work, I kept glancing to the wings to see if they had arrived yet. Finally, two familiar figures appeared in the dimness of the overhead work lights. Midexercise, I stopped and raced over to them. They had just landed after their twenty-hour trip, delirious but happy. We embraced and held each other tightly, quietly crying. Tears of joy. All they could say through their tears was “We love you so much. We love you so much.”

  I knew my parents would have enjoyed seeing Melbourne, but they were more interested in what resided within the walls of the ballet center. Many members of the company welcomed them with the Aussie hospitality that I had come to know, including David McAllister, the Artistic Director, who from the beginning had fully supported my need to come there and work with his team.

  Before the injury, I would have disappeared into the building early in the morning, leaving my parents to their own devices for the day, only to emerge early in the evening, tired, in need of dinner and a bath. Sensing their desire to watch the entire daily routine, I instead brought them with me for every move I made. I was happy to have them by my side. Grateful to see familiar faces after my year of solitude. And when the workday had finished, we headed back to my apartment to cook and talk. I had decided to open up to them. I had shut out most of the people closest to me in the last two years. But this was a new time. I could explain more clearly what had happened to me. And rightly express the gratitude I now felt having come out the other end.