April – June 1988 Heatwave
HEATWAVE
Blanca took her last ever curtain call at the end of Dances at a Gathering, her pointe shoes buried in roses. She had asked Nick for it to be her farewell piece: Swan Lake was her final firework, but Jerome Robbins’s one-act pastel dream had ended up being just that, for her and the rest of us.
There is no plot to Dances at a Gathering, no premise beyond five men and five women coming together and celebrating the joy of dance, the last few bars of Chopin spent at a standstill, staring up and out into the audience like children watching a comet cross the sky.
Uncomplicated and – to the audience – effortless.
Isabel, Grace, Akihiko, and I cried as Blanca took her final bows alone.
Rarely does a season at a ballet company go by without someone leaving, but it doesn’t make the losses any less painful, especially when it’s someone an entire generation of artists have looked up to for guidance; someone who always seemed grown-up, invincible.
Goodbyes were also painful because they reminded me that, one distant but inevitable day, it would be my turn.
I felt a tension headache loom whenever other dancers talked about plans to start their own school, or the law conversion degree they were doing on the side, or joked about marrying millionaires.
I preferred to keep any such future as far away as possible, to be dealt with only when absolutely necessary.
For better or worse, Sander was the perfect enabler. The only future he asked me about was future productions, future roles I hadn’t yet ticked off my list.
‘I hope it won’t be long until Romeo and Juliet comes around again,’ I said as we filled out visa paperwork together in the lounge. ‘I hope I don’t get too old.’
‘Too old? You are not even thirty years yet. Did Ulanova not dance Lavrovsky’s Juliet at forty?’
‘Forty-six. Good point, well argued. But you know what I mean. Blanca never danced Juliet. Crystal’s never danced Juliet, for the same reason she’s never danced Giselle – she’s too good at playing the darker roles.
Myrtha, Manon, Mary Vetsera…’ I bent the corner of the top page back and forth, thinking of our rehearsals for the first ballet of the next season, my heart beating a little faster.
‘You worry Mary Vetsera will keep you from Juliet? Why? Both are MacMillan. Both are… very dark.’
‘Again, fair points. But remember Prokofiev’s cheerful violins in Act I – Juliet begins innocently, na?ve. A proper teenager. Mary comes into the story already wise to the world, or at least she thinks she is. She understands the power of her own sex appeal in a way Juliet never does.’
It was the first time I’d ever said the word “sex” in Sander’s presence; I was suddenly very aware of my tongue. There seemed to be nowhere comfortable for it to sit.
I might not have been so easily flustered if it hadn’t been for Glen, whose curious voice needled at me every time I looked Sander’s way: “That’s almost word for word what he says about you.”
Had he just been teasing? Exaggerating? If Sander had said I was the company’s star and left it at that, obviously I would be pleased.
If he’d said I was prolific then fair enough, because I was, for the same reason as him: neither of us had been forced to take injury or illness leave.
But if he really had said I looked stunning too…
well, I didn’t know what to do with that.
I’d indulged in my crush on him for over a year now, but every time I imagined what would happen if he ever admitted he felt the same, it left me blue.
It couldn’t be the same. Men would never feel about me the way I felt about them.
They had needs, and they would always need more, need to go further.
I wouldn’t be able to give Sander what he wanted.
I would disappoint, again. Go off script, again. Be a dead end on another man’s road.
I didn’t want Glen’s words to be true, and yet I did. I wanted to put off ever finding out.
* * *
While the rest of the BCBC geared up for the last full-length of the season – Bournonville’s Napoli – Sander and I made the long journey to San Francisco, home of the USA’s oldest ballet company, for a gala in their stunning Civic Center.
Sander endured his worst bout of air sickness to date: he spent an entire afternoon lying flat on his hotel bed with the plane’s sleeping mask over his eyes (‘Trying to pretend I am two dimensions only’), while I fed him pieces of sugared ginger with one hand and read a novel with the other, occasionally putting it down to stroke his hair and insist he drink more water.
He was still fairly out of it the next day, not helped by the fact that the temperature hit 32°C by noon. In April.
In the Civic Center, I got lost on the way from the women’s morning class to the studio that had been reserved for us, so Sander was already there when I arrived. He was lowering a few of the window blinds, sunlight catching on his bare shoulders. My dance bag slid down my arm.
So he did sweat.
‘It’s okay I’m like this?’ he asked, tying a bandana under his fringe as usual. ‘Even with air conditioning, it’s so hot.’
‘Of course,’ I said, gesturing to my bare legs under my tutu.
‘Besides, good practice for the night,’ he said, which was true – the male dancer in the Act II Grand pas of Le Corsaire was almost always shirtless.
I avoided looking at him while we took turns standing in front of a whirring pedestal fan, until he rested his hands on his svelte hips and said, simply, ‘Ready?’
It was a small studio, and there was no session pianist to guide our steps – only a cassette recording.
We had to be our own coaches, correcting each other as well as ourselves.
I watched him travel between squares of sunlight as he drilled his variations, and shouted ‘Ceiling!’ whenever he leapt too high.
The Civic Center’s lobby was like a cathedral; during the performance, he’d be free to fly to any height he liked.
The ten-minute sequence was so quintessentially classical, so reminiscent of The Sleeping Beauty and Coppélia and The Nutcracker, that after a few murmurs of “lower”, “slower”, and “let’s take that phrase again”, our rehearsal quickly lapsed into breathy silence, his hands remembering the best placement on my waist for fast pirouettes, where to support my lumbar spine for back bends, when to delicately release my fingers so I could hold on to a balance.
He touched me more than I was obliged to touch him – the intimacy was in the negative space, in the touch that wasn’t yet an embrace.
He hugged me when our studio time was up; despite the searing heat, I could have stayed on my pointes, arms wrapped around his hot skin, until the building went dark.
I needed to get used to it, because after our guest run in New York with the American Ballet Theatre’s Giselle, as soon as we were back in London, we’d be dancing in closer proximity than ever before.
We were opening the new season with Mayerling.