Dance While You Can

by Shirley Maclaine

  In Sydney, Australia, I contracted ptomaine poisoning from a bad oyster and threw up in between numbers into a bucket in the wings. When you’re out there with the lights coming at you like so many express trains and the music supports every movement you painfully attempt to make, your fellow dancers spurring you on because they themselves know that the only solution is to do it, you do just that. You DO IT, and soon you are soaring and dipping and flowing with the electric currents of the audience’s response, oblivious to what you believed would not be possible to overcome in any other way but by an act of will. When you find that surrendering to the joy of giving an audience pleasure can be a healing, you are transformed. The trick is to remember the transformation and trust that it will always happen again, no matter what goes wrong.

  I couldn’t remember that magic as I paced the rehearsal hall now. Maybe I didn’t want to. Maybe I needed obstacles to overcome, because I had been trained as thoroughly to believe that nothing was worth happiness and pleasure unless I struggled painfully for it. Perhaps I needed to play out the struggle more deeply than I ever had, in order to realize it wasn’t necessary. On the other hand, I had promised myself that I wouldn’t do a show again unless I could learn to have fun with it. Thus I constructed a built-in conflict. I needed both and they were mutually incompatible.

  As I went through the passions and emotions of show business, I saw again how analogous to life it is. How many situations, families, relationships, and love affairs contained the seeds of the same conflicts—how to deserve happiness and creativity without mistrusting it?

  I wasn’t the only one going through personal struggles. As the date of our first run-through approached, fiery emotions kindled by insecurities gripped everyone. It was unlike making a movie, because the potential for instant judgment and chilling humiliation in front of an audience doesn’t exist there. You can always do it again or fix it in the editing room.

  Each dancer had his or her objections to the costume he or she was clothed in. That touched the feelings of the costumer. Regardless of how much experience teaches one not to take things personally, rejection is a new and wrenching shock every time.

  The set designer didn’t feel there was enough time to construct the bandstand properly. The orchestrations didn’t arrive in time for the band to familiarize themselves with the music, which reflected on the composer. Some of the written material was late being delivered, which left us uncertain as to how long the show would run.

  The shoemaker was backed up on his orders, which meant we couldn’t work in our proper shoes.

  The synthesizers were so loud in the rehearsal hall, we couldn’t hear ourselves sing.

  The costumes wouldn’t be ready until we actually opened in front of a paying audience in San Antonio, Texas, which was our first play date.

  Through all of these obstacles, the creativity continued. Living on the edge of heightened fear of humiliation with no time as a comfort zone can cause serious paralysis, or it can provoke the opposite effect. This is the enforced phenomenon that exposes the underbelly of anyone who wants to make it in live theater. It is what Mervyn LeRoy used to define as “more than talent.” By that he didn’t mean blood, sweat, and tears only. It is actually an indefinable quality a performer musters in that moment of crisis that knits together the capacity to push beyond personal fear, insecurity, and self-judgment, to blend with the projected original vision—grasping beyond one’s reach, continuing to trust the dream, expanding into the imagination itself until you and the vision are one.

  It doesn’t matter if your crisis is sewing on two thousand sequins by six o’clock or finding the comedy in a tragic moment of a scene to fulfill the audience’s expectation of you as a star—the stretch is the same. Your goal is in jeopardy unless you can pull together all aspects of the production and your own unused potential for manifesting the dream.

  If a composer has written a song that is musically unrealized by a musician’s talent, he must find a way to tactfully coax and sculpt that musician to a little more expression. If the intricate movement in a dance number can’t be seen by an audience because of faulty lighting, the magic of the color spectrum needs to be plumbed and selected, so that everything can be seen. If a conductor’s tempo is too fast to allow the audience to feel, he needs to sensitize his feelings to blend more in harmony with the collective response. And if the star, out of insecurity, rushes the material, the reasons why the people came in the first place are compromised.

  In other words, live theater is bristling with such vibrancy that it requires all the people in it, regardless of their function, to test and balance their talent for combustibility in relationship to harmony. How far will the personal combustion go before it rattles the harmony of the whole? And which individuals are capable of recognizing the moment at which they must pull back and function as an integral yet sensitive part of the team?

  Of course the “star” plays the major role, but is not necessarily more important than anyone else because the very principles of live theater are based on interdependency. It doesn’t matter how wonderfully you play a scene if the audience can’t see you. It doesn’t matter how powerfully you sing a song if they can’t hear you. And it doesn’t matter how well you dance if the other dancers are not there as supporting entities against which you can be compared.

  During the rehearsal and creative process (usually four weeks), it is inevitable, and even possibly desirable, that personalities will clash. This is the time when cliques are formed and lines of protection drawn. Creative artists like having their own people as support systems. Learning to work with new human rhythms is at first an obstacle to the imaginative flow, and it is necessary to take the time to become familiar with individual patterns. Then the dynamics of working together can take over. People who know each other create in shorthand and are comfortable with criticism, because they know friendship will override the personalization of arguments. When it goes well, it is an intensely satisfying process.

  But sometimes the cliques of the “support systems” collide. That can be devastating to a project, unless the collision produces sparks that ignite a whole new process. It is a question of degree, I think. As long as just one individual involved in the collision of creative differences remains open-minded to the opposite camp, such wars are productive. It only takes one person. And as we were learning, each of us was that person.

  The group around me was also very aware that achieving the ultimate goal of one’s vision was not everything. Indeed, the process was becoming more and more educational. We often talked about this approach to our work. Theater was changing because of our personal attitudes. So was filmmaking. Yes, the director had the last word in films; and the star had the last word in shows like mine. Someone had to be in that position. But, whereas previously neither theater nor films were considered a democracy, these days a more open-minded creativity prevails.

  It had something to do with how people in our business were growing personally. More people were spending as much time working on themselves as they were on a creative project. We were beginning to see that our talent was only as productive as our personal insight. If we were blind to ourselves and to others as individual human beings, how could we have any understanding with respect to the audience? We were learning that we could only see in others what we were capable of seeing in ourselves. Otherwise we were out of touch, locked into ideas and points of view that would divorce us from our own creation, and from the audience for whom we were creating it.

  In any creative session, the outcome depends upon how willing the participants are to share themselves. Out of such sharing an atmosphere of trust develops, and as a result new and innovative entertainment evolves. The audience comes to feel. They come to be transported to another place. They come to be transformed. That being the case, we—the dancers, the musicians, the director—needed to fall in love with the process of transforming ourselves. Our rehearsal weeks provided us with that opportunity.

&nb
sp; After emotional struggles at the start, I got to more practical matters. I developed metatarsal pain in my left foot. It was sharp and stabbing. I couldn’t dance. I called my friend, Anne Marie Bennstrom, who is a doctor and chiropractor. “Well, my dear,” she said, “you know that the feet represent the last spiritual connection to the earth, because we walk upon it. If you think you have integrated your understanding and harmony in every way but still have something bothering you, you will feel it in the feet. There must be something bothering you, yes?”

  Bothering me? She must be kidding. How about my whole life? I was becoming anxious about the late delivery of some of my lyrical material. I felt I wouldn’t have time to learn it and develop it properly. Anger was building in me at Buz, our lyricist. The frustration was under everything I did.

  I thought about what to do. If Anne Marie was right about my foot, I’d have to solve it with my head and heart. I sat with myself for a while—a meditation you might call it—Western style. Slowly it dawned on me that, even though he was slow, he was good and he might be having problems himself.

  I called Buz. Instead of berating him about being late, I felt better about complimenting him on what he had already delivered and said I couldn’t wait to get new stuff. He sparked right away. “You really liked it?” “Yes,” I said, even though I had already told him weeks before. “God, that’s wonderful,” said Buz. “Sometimes I feel I’m back in school delivering my term paper to a teacher who won’t give me a passing grade.” How many times had I heard that from every really good creative person I knew. It seemed as though anyone who was any good was constantly attempting to please parents, teachers, or various other authority figures from childhood. The past was constantly with us, alternately haunting and inspiring us.

  “Well,” I went on, “it’s terrific and as soon as I can have your new stuff, I’d love that too.” I waited a moment. “And Buz … I love you.”

  I heard a deep sigh over the phone. “Oh, that’s so wonderful to hear,” he said. “Thank you.”

  The material came the next day. It was no surprise to me that my foot pain disappeared simultaneously.

  With that lesson, I began to release some of my tension. It’s so easy to be told that tension never helped anybody. I knew that. We all knew that. But to live without it, knowing that it is our choice to disengage from it, was probably the basic issue of the next few weeks. My show would be a good environment in which to experiment with not only that process but the results … which would be my next lesson.

  One day, during a break, we each shared our recurring nightmares. Much to my surprise, everyone had one. The dancers all had a recurring dream that they found themselves on stage and forgot the choreography. Alan’s night-time anxiety was that the opening date kept changing. The set designer worried his way through a union strike every night. One of the musicians dreamed constantly that the airlines kept losing his instrument (bass guitar). Mike Flowers (our company manager) always dreamed the traveling trucks were lost and couldn’t make dates.

  My dream was one I had had since childhood. It varied slightly, but the premise was always the same. I found myself arriving at a theater for some reason, only to be told that it was my opening night. I didn’t even know I had an engagement. I was completely uninformed. And rather than call my agent to ask what was going on, I would rush to the wardrobe department, put on some spangled outfit, call the dancers and the musicians to the stage, and proceed to try to learn a two-hour show in the half hour I had before the curtain rose. I could hear the people out front, and I was obsessed with living up to my apparent obligation to put on a show.

  The anxiety built as I crammed steps, lyrics, and patter into my mind. Never once did it occur to me that it wasn’t fair—that I didn’t need to deliver a show. I had to deliver one. My survival depended upon it.

  Then the curtain rose. The audience applauded at seeing me, but the terror was so excruciating I’d wake up.

  Over and over I had that dream. It was a terrifying feeling of profound, paralytic anxiety over the promise I made to myself as a child to live up to what was expected of me. Who was expecting so much of me? Every time a difficult moment occurred in the rehearsal hall, the dream came crashing back to me. I was uninformed, unrehearsed, untalented, unenlightened, unprepared; and yet it never occurred to me that I didn’t have to do it.

  I associated my mother with that recurring dream not only because of her expectations of me, but because she wanted her children to live up to the unfulfilled expectations she had of her husband.

  There was a hidden agenda in our family. Warren and I were driven not only to fulfill our parents’ unrealized dreams but, in the process, to prove Mother correct in her aspirations for us in spite of our father’s fears and his harshly critical attitude toward our efforts. She was in competition to prove her husband’s criticisms wrong. She would make certain her children succeeded in this world, not only for herself, but because she saw her husband as a disappointing failure. He, of course, had the same vision of himself, which was why he was so harsh on us.

  We had to do it. We had to be there. We couldn’t disappoint her, or the audience, or ourselves, and we had to refute our father. In other words, there was no way Warren and I wouldn’t become stars. It was bred into us by parents who were in competition with each other. One was driven to believe in success. The other was afraid of it.

  My Dad had been a teacher most of his life. He was a good teacher too. He had also been the principal of several schools I attended. He loved teaching but had wanted to be a great musician and had been offered a scholarship to study violin with a splendid teacher in Europe. He decided against it. His reason, as he told me later, was that he felt he would make an investment in his musical future with a great teacher in Europe, only to find he’d return to New York and end up playing in the pit of a Broadway theater eight times a week, twice on Wednesday and Saturday—not his idea of high artistry.

  Somehow I knew there was more to his negativity than that. He used it as an excuse so that he wouldn’t be hurt by daring to achieve. His mother had been extremely cruel to him, having literally chased him with butcher knives and locked him in a closet once for two days. His own courage had been thwarted at an early age. He learned to be afraid even to try.

  “Monkey,” he used to say to me, “one thing my mother taught me well and that was how to fear. I’m an expert in feeling fear.”

  She berated him at every juncture, squashing his dreams and aspirations before they ever had an opportunity to develop. So his expectations of success were nonexistent. Daring to dare was a guarantee of rejection, pain, humiliation, and abuse. In fact, he’d often tell me that achieving success usually meant stepping on someone else (his mother?). He had come to equate success with corruption and would have no part of attempting it.

  I believe all of these factors underlay his judgment of, and sometimes his cruelty to, his children. In the name of protecting us from the ravages inherent in daring to be somebody, he resorted to contempt and dire warnings of failure. I often wondered what brutality his mother had experienced. It must have been deep and abiding for her to teach her son the attributes of fear above all else.

  I was left then with the dilemma of overcoming my father’s criticisms and viewing him as a rehearsal for the tough world out there, or succumbing to the proposition that indeed I didn’t have any talent and shouldn’t even try. Either choice was a guarantee that stepping onto a stage would cause me profound anxiety. So why do it? Was it for audience approval? No, it was really a plea for my father’s love.

  At times in my childhood he had been cruel and emotionally humiliating in his judgments and comments on my developing career, but I think I intuitively understood that he was really commenting on and harshly judging himself for not having had more courage to develop his own talents. And how could he have developed the courage when he had had parents who were doubly critical of him?

  When I sang for the first time at a school assem
bly in high school, the audience loved my comic rendition of “I Cain’t Say No” from Oklahoma! But he berated me for believing I could sing at all and suggested that I certainly should not desecrate the words and music of Rodgers and Hammerstein ever again. I didn’t—for years.

  When I lost the lead in the Washington School of the Ballet production of Cinderella and was relegated to dance the Fairy Godmother instead, I was destroyed. Instead of comforting me, Daddy stood over me on the stairs, accusing me, as though it were my fault, of having grown too tall, and sadistically pointing out that I wasn’t a very good dancer anyway. I tried to bolt from him to the sanctuary of my bedroom, but he wouldn’t let me pass. He wanted to drive home his point that I should give up and not try to be more than I was capable of. The more I cried, the more he attacked me.

  I got sick and vomited on the stairs. It didn’t deter him at all. I remember Mother looking on helplessly. Finally I slumped to my knees. The expression on Daddy’s face was one of pained triumph.

  He hadn’t enjoyed what he’d done. He seemed compulsively driven to treat me that way. As, no doubt, his mother had treated him.

  Soon after that I ran a relay race during an important high school track and field meet. When the baton was passed to me, I dropped it. As a result, our team lost the race. My father had been watching from the bleachers. I never got over the dreadful crawling feeling that I had proven him right by stupidly dropping that damned baton.

  More painful than my father’s lack of confidence in himself were the memories of my humiliation when I thought he felt I hadn’t performed well. I suffered not only from feeling his assessment of my talent was low, but also from the recognition that my failure gave my mother nothing to hope for. I had to make something of myself, not only to prove him wrong but to give her a victory over him. She had set up the ground rules for the family. We were to succeed no matter what to assuage her frustrations. But more to the point, because she was our emotional support system, we fed into her competition with Dad by becoming successful. Our family unit then was a win-win setup for overachievement. We had to in order to get love.