Dance to the Death
Act I of Giselle is peppered with autumn sun, leaves, and chimes; Act II is ruled by moonlight, mist, and oboe. The only landmark onstage is Giselle’s grave, a plain white cross in a lonely mound of earth, far from the sacred ground of a churchyard. In the Pavlova studio, we used a chair.
‘Remember your lines!’ Mariska shouted to the twenty-six ballerinas in identical white practice skirts, divided into two groups, hopping towards each other in arabesque with fierce concentration.
From tours en l’air to grand jetés, sissonnes to cabrioles, the infamous entrechat six, and so very many ronds de jambe en l’air sauté, Giselle is the jumping ballet to end all jumping ballets.
I was glad to be watching from the side, my Achilles tendons twinging in sympathy.
These rehearsals were charged with tension – not between the ballerinas, but between the ideals in our heads and the human bodies we had to work with.
‘Saoirse, why is your leg so low? Look where everyone else’s is! Fiona, don’t go soft in the back! Watch Rosie and Akihiko, they are your lodestar.’
The tension was most visible in Crystal, my cast’s Myrtha, queen of the vengeful ghosts known as the Wilis. Every night during the witching hour, she summons them to dance in a frenzied ball, dressed in white for the weddings they’ll never have.
‘Of all the roles to come back to after Achilles tendinitis,’ Crystal had groaned, lighting up a preparatory cigarette as we left morning class together. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I love Myrtha, but Jesus Lord, why does she have so many ballottés.’
In the last week of January, Crystal, Sander, Stephen, and I came together with the corps ballerinas from our hitherto siloed rehearsals to run Act II’s most dramatic sequence, when Hilarion and Albrecht, having paid separate midnight visits to lay a wreath and lilies on Giselle’s grave, are ambushed by the Wilis and dragged before Myrtha to be sentenced to their deaths.
First, I had to emerge from behind the grave, shrouded in a veil with my arms cradling air, eyes cast to the floor, suspended in the trance-like state from my scène de folie.
Unable to look at Crystal as she beckoned me, I used the music from the rehearsal pianist to guide my slow steps into the centre.
‘Wait… and off with the veil – breathe – and!’
My back leg went up in a swift attitude and I pivoted on the heel of my supporting leg as quickly as possible, like a mechanical toy wound by an overexcited child.
No matter how many times I practised it, the dizziness of not being able to spot because my gaze was directed downwards was brutal.
The speed felt dangerous, but I couldn’t betray that, because I was a ghost, and nothing was dangerous anymore. Ghosts did not get breathless.
I went up into soubresauts with my arms low, to maximise the length of my lines.
I vaulted diagonally with my feet pointed and crossed, using as much of the floor as possible while landing on it as little as possible.
I tried to imagine my body as a frost-veined leaf buffeted by the wind, as if I hadn’t already had a full morning class and an hour of solo adagio rehearsals.
‘All right,’ Mariska said when I rushed off and let the Wilis have the floor to themselves again. ‘Needs work, but will do for now.’
I tried to ignore the bruise to my pride, and the fear that last season’s phantom stress fracture would resurface.
I knew, logically, that the success of this production didn’t rest on my shoulders (or calves) alone.
Violeta, Magne, and Grace were all playing Giselle on other nights, as was first soloist Akihiko; Crystal, Blanca, and Annie had Myrtha to contend with.
And yet, in the confines of the studio, when only one version of the character existed and she was relying on me to bring her to life, the burden did feel like mine alone.
I dabbed the back of my neck with my towel and watched Stephen react to Crystal’s stony gestures. With an imperious flick of her arm, his leg shot out into a pas de basque.
‘Look more shocked, Stephen,’ Mariska called over the piano accompaniment. ‘Your terror should be seen all the way from the upper balcony!’
After rigid fouettés and violent leaps, Stephen fell into Rosie’s and Akihiko’s arms. They pulled him upstage as Crystal crossed her arms at the wrist and brought them down like a spear, just as Carabosse did so gleefully for Aurora’s curse: Death!
‘Thank Christ I don’t have to hide the exhaustion,’ Stephen gasped between chugs from his water bottle.
When Sander stepped up for his turn, I rushed between him and Crystal. Before she could invoke the fatal dance, I made a barrier with my arms: Not him. Whatever else happens tonight, I won’t let you take him.
Of course, Giselle has only just joined this ghostly purgatory, while Myrtha has who-knows-how-many years of supernatural power behind her.
Unable to return Albrecht to the land of the living, Giselle insists that she share half of his dance, in the hope that this will stall his demise until dawn, when the Wilis must vanish.
For every brisé and entrechat of Sander’s, I contributed a rond de jambe, a swift développé, a deep arabesque penché.
Despite Mariska’s calls to “find the breath in the music”, I ran out halfway through my four grand jetés, the split leaps so close together that my body felt more like a stone skimmed across a lake. By the time I staggered off to the side, lactic acid was pulsing up my body.
‘Again,’ Mariska said, not just to me, but to everyone, all afternoon.
I couldn’t blame her for keeping standards high, for calling us out when our bodies tried to cheat and bluff their way through the steps.
But by four o’clock her voice was wearing us down.
‘None of you had shows last night. There is no excuse for corner cutting.’
‘And to think,’ Fiona said during the two-minute break, fanning herself with the hem of her skirt. ‘As soon as we’re done with this, we’ve got to start rehearsing the Shades for Bayadère. Does Nick hate us?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I think he has too much faith in us.’
I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but it had been almost a full year since I’d been made a principal. My week of relaxation with the others in Portofino felt long, long ago. I was shattered, yet refused to give myself any grace.
The only person who had the opposite problem during these rehearsals was Sander.
For once, his effortlessness was actually impeding his artistry – he had to keep drilling his solo because he didn’t look exhausted enough.
He managed a fearful frown during the fifth try of his entrechat six, at which point Mariska finally called it a day for the corps dancers.
Sander and I still had an hour scheduled for our second pas de deux.
Sander’s only correction was that, however slowly he thought he needed to go, he should go even slower – the problem with being fleet-footed in an adage was that he kept arriving at certain marks too early, leading to “dead moments” where he had to wait for me to catch up.
My corrections, by contrast, were wide-ranging:
‘Other arm, Trix.’
‘Relax your elbow just a little – here, I’ll show you—’
‘Don’t over-cross your feet.’
‘Come on, I know it’s the end of the day but you can flex your hip rotator more than that. Open it out. Don’t twist your knee!’
‘Careful how your foot lands!’
‘Look sad, but soft. Emotional pain, not physical.’
‘Don’t forget the meaning behind the music. What is it saying?’
At one point, my precious remaining energy deserted me completely mid-arabesque, and I slid into fatigued splits.
‘Are you all right?’ Sander asked, skidding to my side and helping me up.
‘God’s sake,’ I muttered, furious with myself. I looked at the wall clock – it was already after five, but without a performance to prepare for that night, it was for Mariska to decide when we were done.
Her face betrayed a sliver of pity. ‘Let’s get to the end of the pas. We won’t go from the top, just from the first travelling lift.’
Sander was still carrying me as if his hands never tired, the tulle of my skirt fluttering with the forest breeze that he was somehow conjuring in the studio.
I stretched my leg high in arabesque even as my sciatic nerve clenched; I bourréed backwards despite the crack forming along the seam of my left pointe shoe.
Sander knelt in Albrecht’s finishing pose, staring ahead, unsure if he really had just danced with Giselle, or a mirage borne of grief and remorse.
I came to a soft halt just behind him and leaned a hand on his shoulder.
As I raised my back leg in a lower arabesque than usual, he turned his head ever so slightly and laid a cautious hand over mine, confirming that Giselle was indeed there, even if her ethereal form was too diffuse, too strange, to make sense of.
Mariska clapped to signal the end of rehearsals for the day; the pianist wasted no time in tidying away his music sheets and hurrying off.
‘I know today was hard. It means you’re doing Giselle justice.’
I could feel her smiling in my direction, the way a parent tries to entice a grin out of a sulky child, but I was too spent to do anything except nod mutely and press my fingertips to my sinuses.
Mercifully, she said goodnight from afar, gathered up her things, and left us alone.
I sighed into my hands, wishing I could skip ahead to the moment when I was already home and collapsed in bed, drawing a line under the day.
Something fluffy tickled my hands. I gingerly parted them to find Sander holding my towel. I used a corner of it to dab at my eyes.
‘Thank you. Sorry.’ I managed a weak smile. ‘There are children starving in Africa and here I am getting weepy over a sodding rehearsal.’
Sander patted my shoulder. ‘Do you have somewhere to be now?’
‘No. But I need to think of something for dinner.’ I hated having to think about dinner when I was already hungry.
‘The Salon is only one floor down,’ he said, helping me to my feet. I didn’t know how he could bear to hold my sweaty hand, but had no intention of letting go until he did. He inclined his head to the door. Let’s go together.