by Famous Last Meals (Candidates; Famouse Last Meals; The Woman in the Vineyard) (v5. 0) (epub)
Once, when the approaching re-enactment was going to have a Hollywood theme, with Max attempting his best Rebel Without a Clue as the actor James Dean, she asked me if I thought other women found Max attractive. He was more Sal Mineo than Jimmy Dean in appearance and manner, but he was a superb mimic, and without his glasses he could, conceivably, in the right light, be said to have been handsome. I told her so.
“Handsome and attractive are not always the same thing,” she said as she brushed her hair in the mirror. We were sated. I was still in bed, unmotivated to return home to my considerable dung heap of marking: post-colonial critiques of Heart of Darkness. Inexplicably, or perhaps not, the thought of having to grade those essays reminded me of the first time I saw Jane Burden dance.
The venue was a crumbling community hall, a First-World-War-era building meant to have been temporary but so sturdy it remained standing after newer structures around it were razed. It’s there today and has had many incarnations: army drill and recruitment hall, homeless shelter, health clinic, government office, storage facility, youth drop-in centre, daycare, new-age temple, even a repertory movie house for a spell. The paint on the high arching ceiling was unfurling, plaster dropping in chunks, the radiators clanked loudly in winter when the boiler was working, and in residence were generations of rodents so used to people that they were said to occupy empty chairs during performances. Poets came here to stand on the low risers at one end of the long space and read from their precious pages. The acoustics were good. Theatrical productions, if they were not ambitious, could be carried out there. The space seemed best suited to rallies and massed suppers. A benevolent society still serves a meal to the indigent there on Sunday afternoons.
The first time I watched Red Bugatti perform, it was a hot day, one buried like shrapnel in the sweaty flesh of similarly unrelieved days and nights that stretched ahead and behind for weeks. The temperature rarely dropped below thirty degrees Celsius the entire summer, and the humidity stayed jammed near one hundred percent or as close as it could get without it causing rain, indoors and out. The rare rainy day brought little relief, contributing to a spike in the humidity without a corresponding dip in the mercury. A fan in the high ceiling sucked the thick air up and away from the audience. The wooden folding chairs we, an audience of nine, sat upon looked to be the same vintage as the building, but they were sound though thinly padded. The hall’s dim lighting was augmented by stands of theatrical lighting set up above and to either side of the stage and along the wide central aisle, where much of the performance took place.
I took a seat on the left side of the center aisle as one faced the “stage,” and about halfway back. Red Bugatti was performing a piece that can only be described as industrial techno-grunge, a posture already a decade out of style in the music-video world but which, because it dressed the gyrations of the street in the weeds of art (Johannes Pittfield Paul, the company’s choreographer had taken master classes with Peggy Baker, Danny Coleman and Sylvaine Delacroix), was supported by funds from all three levels of government.
Jane was unrecognizable and in her role unintelligible. I knew by then just how flexible she was. Without warning she could kick a leg up over her head and lean its full length vertically against a wall, stretching there as if doing the splits on the floor. The few times she came into my bed that summer she used her considerable suppleness to felicitous effect. Having this intimate knowledge of her body’s ability to bend well beyond what most of us think of as its natural limits, I was nevertheless unprepared for the crabbed, torture-chamber-inspired, arthritic pose she was forced to hold, moving only when moved—rolled is the more precise term—by another performer. I didn’t know who or what she was supposed to be portraying. Neither was the story of the dance ever more than fleetingly evident. Story is too bourgeois a term to be applied to the aesthetic that night. Even to admit responsibility to the audience, to fulfill the tacit communicative contract, reaching past the fourth wall to bridge the span between conception and execution, to translate, to be understood—this bunch wasn’t stooping to any of that.
At one point Jane, clad only in a kind of loose cloth diaper, her breasts and shoulders smeared with veins of blue paint, was rolled by a male dancer down the center aisle. She came to a stop against an empty chair two rows ahead of mine and moved her head just enough to clamp her mouth onto its leg. A computer governed by a random program was generating the “music,” and whenever it squealed with deliberate feedback Jane let out a corresponding loud moan, all the while keeping tight hold on the chair. If the seat still exists, her teeth marks are there. Her legs, flung back behind her head and crossed in a half-lotus posture, her shoulders positioned in front of the backs of her thighs, created the sense of two separate sets of body parts put together terribly wrong, by an inebriate or a Dr. Frankenstein with a demented sense of humour. I tried to watch the performance and ignore Jane. I was unsuccessful in both.
Later I would recall brief snatches of imagery from the rest of the dance: a woman simulating giving birth as she crouched on a chair being held aloft by two men; a couple, male and female, slapping each other rhythmically on the face, endlessly, each whack coming hard with the same palm against the same reddening cheek; a group of three forming a closed hoop that rolled around the perimeter of the hall continually until the performance ended. As with Jane’s character, each dancer produced startling sounds that came like the emanations of a madhouse and had no discernible connection to either the movements of the artists or the theme suggested by the title of the piece.
Afterwards she asked what I had thought of the performance.
“I was enthralled.”
“You were?”
“Definitely.”
“I detect a tone.”
“No, no tone. I believe I am tone-free.”
“It left you feeling uncomfortable, I can tell.”
“Yes, but you opened my eyes.”
“Really?”
“Really, yes.”
“To what?”
“Well, to a new way of perceiving, for one thing.”
“New way of perceiving what? I’m curious.” This could not end well.
“Pain,” I said after too long a pause. “A new way of perceiving human pain and suffering in all its various guises.” She was expressionless. Say something, I thought. Nod your head. “Yes,” I blundered on, “how often do we pass by our fellow humans oblivious to their pain? The frozen mask, the hunch of the shoulders, the cramp of an uneven stride, the stiffness of an arm that won’t swing. These are all the indications we have. But your dance. Your dance made me...”
“…feel others’ pain.” Even after saying this she was revealing nothing.
Certain now that I had expressed a colossal misread of the dance’s meaning and had been blind to the themes of connection and healing implied by the title, I began to think I should admit that I had neither enjoyed the dance nor understood it.
“Jane,” I began, abducted by the urge to confess, “what I mean to say is...”
“You’re incredible, Colin, you really are.”
“You’re right.” She had seen through me. What did I know about the artistic value of her performance and that of her equally highly trained peers? Who was I but a narrow-minded, thinly educated, introverted lout who knew more about psychiatry than I did about interpretive movement? She could see this. She had flushed me out.
“I have to tell you, I was prepared for you not to like it—it is a difficult piece, making so many extraordinary demands on dancer and spectator both—and I guess I was braced for the possibility that you might not get it completely, but—”
“Jane, I know, and I’m so sorry.”
“You’re sorry? About what? I was going to say—”
“Oh. Then I shouldn’t have interrupted. Go on.”
“But why are you sorry?”
“I’m not.”
“You just said you were.”
I had run out of ground cover. “I was starting to say that I’m sorry I didn’t—”
“But don’t you see? You did!”
“I did?”
“Yes. You expressed it beautifully. I wish I had recorded Johanne’s words during rehearsal so that I could play them to you now. What you said, you know, about pain being at the core of all miscommunication, it’s, I kid you not, almost his exact words. It was like you were listening in on us. You weren’t, were you?”
Too stunned and relieved to reply, I jigged my eyebrows a couple of times and grinned with incredulous lips, keeping my teeth hidden. A toothy smile would have given me away. I must have gotten it, then. I couldn’t have made it up. All that was secondary. She had been impressed by my assessment. For the first time with her I felt other than a make-work project, a man-in-embryo for a girl to incubate, hatch, nurture and educate. For the first time when I looked at her I didn’t feel defensive, my wary eye no longer on the lookout for the expected projectile thrown at me from the wings.
Jacoba Wyndham is better known in Europe than at home. In Germany she is renowned for her punishing performances that can go on for two hours without pause. Audiences there appreciate her uncompromising commitment to her art. Dance purists here in North America dismiss what she does as agonized masochism, even those who remember (or would learn about if they took the time to read beyond her website) the car accident that destroyed her knee. Even the least knowledgeable among us, armed with this telling information, would understand the extent to which she had to change her style to accommodate the injury. She takes her brace off only on stage. The pain is omnipresent.
Critics have called her an original and a fraud, sometimes in the same review. They have never known what to make of her. She refuses to go away, even after such a brutal failure as Demolition Nursery. How to describe the effect of that dance? Imagine yourself on a train, not a North American commuter train, an Amtrak or a Via Rail, those cattle cars reminiscent of a Greyhound bus, but the compartment of a European train, the kind with seating for four and access to a common corridor. The train has pulled away from the station and you let out the breath you’ve been holding, because it appears you have the compartment to yourself. You prop your feet on the seat opposite. Just when you think it’s safe to close your eyes, let go of the difficult world, pick your nose or slip a hand down your pants, in comes a woman who has the close-cropped head and bearing of a Marine Corps drill instructor and the clothes of a bag lady, but who moves with the tread and balance of a cat. Instead of taking the seat across from or beside you, she straddles your lap and begins to kiss you with garlic-laced breath. She plucks your eyebrows one by one, criticizes your kissing for being too stiff. She replaces your secretive hand with hers. Her fingernails are ragged and dirty.
In the car on the way home from the hospital, Jane said she wished she’d been hurt in the accident before the performance I watched in the old drill hall. Then she’d really have known what it was she was supposed to have been feeling, as a crab or human pretzel or whatever she was supposed to be, rolled about the floor. I doubted a torn-up knee would have improved her role in that bizarre show. She certainly wouldn’t have been able to fold herself into a lewd beach ball. But she was serious. She was the kind of person who would have taken a ball-peen hammer to the joint. To prepare. To get it right.
I had my first inkling of this when I drove with her to her father’s house in Vermont. It was the weekend after the performance. As she told me more about Sergei Esenin, I tried to gauge just how far she would go for the sake of art and, nearer my own concerns, what she might expect of me, as a friend, lover and confidant.
The house was composed of two connected log cabins that had been transported across the border from Quebec and reconstructed on the property, making a roomy but still intimate L-shaped space. One of the cabins was two-storied, and the three bedrooms were situated on its upper floor. The large fireplace, kitchen and living room area were in the smaller cabin, which, because its open space concentrated warmth, sustenance and the comfort of two long, deep, blanket-draped sofas, was the place where people tended to congregate. On the ground floor of the larger cabin Jane’s father had a study with a sofa bed. Down the hall were a mudroom with laundry machines, a second toilet and a storage room.
Jane’s brother Tighe was there that weekend with his girlfriend, Francesca. Tighe was about three years older than his sister, and he and Francesca acted like a married couple. I liked Francesca immediately. Short (she preferred, “compact”) with a pretty face, kinky black hair, full hips, round breasts and the faintest hint of a moustache, she had refined the art of nagging into a form of entertainment. She never stopped smiling while she nipped at Tighe’s heels. He was built like a pro wrestler, though lacking the proto-human rolls of flesh at the back of the neck, the bullet-shaped shaved head or the long, ape-man tresses. He was so big I wondered if he took steroids. Tighe had a placid nature, however, suggesting that he had achieved his extraordinary muscle mass as a result of exercise, diet and inherited genes. Nothing Francesca said to him ever made him drop his big open grin.
They worked at the same club in Montréal, she as a waitress and he as a bouncer. They spoke English with a hint of a French accent. We saw them for supper two of the days, for brunch on the day before we were supposed to drive back to Toronto, and the rest of the time Tighe and Francesca spent riding their four-wheeled all-terrain vehicles along an old railroad bed.
We did all go swimming together on Saturday afternoon at a nearby quarry. Jane wore a bikini that kept threatening to fall off. “I used to be fat,” she explained, adjusting a shoulder strap. “Fatter.” She was as thin as a noodle. She had to hold everything together with her hands whenever she jumped off the edge into the water, a thirty-foot plunge from the top, where we’d spread our towels. Tighe grinned approval for
her bravery.
He and Jane had a quiet rapport. They were well past the awkward years of mutual sibling exasperation. Something in the understated, quasi-secretive nature of their exchanges—they often looked away when speaking to each other, as if keeping one ear open for distant signals—spoke of a history of solidarity and mutual dependence.
Their mother lived in rural Connecticut with her second husband, a man she had met in rehab. Their father was away on business somewhere unidentified and would not be joining them that weekend. He worked in Montréal as a planner or architect—he could well have been an engineer; it didn’t register with me at the time. Jane said that her father came in and out of their lives, as if he were a distant uncle. The summerhouse had interested him up to the point at which the construction had been completed. Now he was looking for lakefront property in Quebec’s Eastern Townships and had his mind set on a house built of straw bales and wattle. Tighe, when he referred to his father, spoke with a dismissive tone: the “old man,” the “scatterbrain.” “He” had forgotten to stock the beer fridge. “He” had neglected to put gasoline in the ATVs. Again. Jane intervened, reminding her brother that neither had Tighe done any of these chores, and reminding him further of the various maintenance tasks that had to be completed around the property. I had the feeling she wasn’t so much defending her father as closing family ranks, keeping private matters private. I was more than a friend, she made that clear from the way she hugged and kissed me in front of the other two, but I wasn’t all the way “there” yet. Certain doors
remained closed.
I got on easily with Tighe. We found subjects of common interest to talk about, and I never felt from him the disapproving scrutiny of the protective older brother. One of his interests, I was surprised to learn, was stagecraft, Tighe moonlighting as a set builder. Theatrical illusion fascinated him. He loved making something flat appear three-dimensional and fully functioning in a movie. He talked about the art of distressing new objects with paint, dirt and grease to make the
m appear old. The designer only got in the way. Yes, the vision was necessary, the initiating idea, but a director needed creative, resourceful people who could work with their hands, work with what was in front of them to make something out of nothing. An entire house erected in a morning and torn down before sunset, that was the kind of thing Tighe was talking about, a whole dining room you can pack up and put in a suitcase.
“You should hear them when him and his friends get together,” said Francesca, who had wormed her way onto his lap. It was well after supper and we were sitting outside in Adirondack chairs on a sheltered, flagstone patio off the kitchen. “Talk about your hyper-bowl.” She and Tighe wrestled playfully for a few seconds, subsided into cuddling, and appeared to fall asleep.
I wondered about the antecedents of this interest in theatrics, in brother and sister. As far as I know, neither of their parents had acted, sung or danced except during family gatherings. Perhaps the talent and compulsion had skipped a generation. Or maybe it had more to do with something that had happened to them when they were growing up. An outside influence? A child never stops trying to get his parents’ attention. I asked Jane. Was their approval an easy thing to get?
“No, it wasn’t. I heard about it when I didn’t achieve to their expectations.”
“And when you did?”
“Did what?”
“Achieve.”
“Not a word.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not. When I got anything less than a perfect mark, my father zeroed in on the one- or two- or five-percent deficit. He would make me sit with him and go over the mistake and re-do the problem until I got it right. To him this was the only real opportunity for learning.”
“And for you?”
“In a word: torture. All I could think about and feel was his disapproval, his disappointment.”
“Does it still seem that way? Are you able to see through his eyes now?”
“On a cold, intellectual level, maybe. It still hurts.”
