Chapter 21
RHAPSODY
We wouldn’t have Rhapsody if Baryshnikov hadn’t commissioned Frederick Ashton to create it for him.
Set to the sparkling piano cascade of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, the choreography is so light and airy that the piece might as well be staged in the heavens.
I remember watching the televised recording of Baryshnikov and Lesley Collier with Stephen from his sofa, when he was a newly promoted soloist and I a newly promoted first artist.
‘What a rockstar,’ he declared, and I agreed. Baryshnikov was one of the finest classicists the ballet world had ever known but he was also, indeed, a rockstar.
English dance critics were generally loath to use such a term in their copy, but Bill Gordon did in his press night review of our mixed bill. Whether he’d meant to or not, Sander had officially entered the pantheon of exceptional male dancers, or “danseurs nobles”.
It would have been a dream to have Ashton himself direct our rehearsals, as he’d often done for the BCBC, Vic-Wells, Birmingham, and London Festival Ballet, but Rhapsody was one of the last pieces he ever created.
He’d already been living a quiet retirement in Suffolk for a few years by the time Sander and I were cast as “Lead Man” and “Lead Woman”.
On the night of our double debut, I waited in the comforting darkness of the wings, a cardigan over my blush-pink A-line dress and rhinestone-encrusted arm cuffs. I thought I was nervous, but Jamie, who waited next to me at the head of a line of five other male soloists, was actually shaking.
I tapped him on the arm and whispered, ‘Are you all right?’
He snapped his head in my direction and stilled his hands, as if released from a kind of stranglehold. He nodded, shook his head, then nodded again. ‘Nerves.’
‘That’s not like you.’ Jamie got nervous as often as the rest of us, but it normally manifested in a gentle swaying from one foot to the other and deep, focused breaths. I hadn’t seen him so stricken since our final-year BBA exams.
His face twitched. The orchestra finished tuning up, and in the silence before the conductor stepped forward, Jamie said, ‘It’s nothing, I’m just distracted. Don’t you worry about me.’
‘Are you sure?’
He gave me a quick glance and an even quicker pat on the small of my back.
Then Lori, having traded her daytime clothes for a formal black gown, began the performance from her piano in the orchestra pit, and there was no time left to talk.
I racked my brain for explanations. The only one I could think of was that on the Friday just gone, Charlie had been signed off on injury leave with a metatarsal stress fracture.
He might be able to come back for the start of the next season if he was lucky, but more likely he would have to wait until October.
Everyone in the company was used to the omnipresent threat of injury, sudden or gradual, but it hit much harder when it happened to a close friend, as if the Grim Reaper were leaning over your shoulder with a chilling “you’re next”.
Perhaps Charlie’s bad luck had rattled Jamie.
Perhaps, for once, he was grateful not to be burdened with a leading role.
Sander went into the performance with his usual fearlessness – his gold costume shone as he reeled off spin after spin, as fixed and precise as a power drill.
I made my entrance later on, and in between our slower, more delicate pas de deux, there were several stretches where I was either doing a solo or watching the rest of the piece from the wings.
As ever, I stared in open-mouthed awe at the height of his split leaps, and the revoltades that raised a hand (or rather, a leg) to gravity and declared it could wait.
On Sander’s left, dressed in yellow, Jamie was visibly in the flow of the music – whatever had spooked him had no place in the ecstasy of performance.
He and Fiona weaved their way around Sander in their respective formations, like spring flowers angling elegantly towards the sun.
I always liked to watch their hard work come to fruition when we were in the same cast together, focusing on them regardless of what was going on downstage.
But that night was different: my attention kept wandering back to Sander.
Not simply for his technique, but also his moments of stillness, his landings and transitions.
I had the sudden urge to somehow dissolve the rest of the world so that the only thing left would be Rhapsody.
His stunning, beautiful lines; the serenity of his expression.
The thought that I would get to dance with him for another three performances made my heart feel like more than a muscle. Like a blue flame.
Carolyn’s warning came back to me with a new shadow behind it: Be careful, Trix.
Too late.