Spider Robinson & Jeanne Robinson - Stardance.pdf

(174 KB) Pobierz
668058441 UNPDF
STARDANCE
Spider and Jeanne Robinson
I can’t really say that I knew her, certainly not the way Seroff knew
Isadora. All I know of her childhood and adolescence are the anecdotes she
chanced to relate in my hearing—just enough to make me certain that all
three of the contradictory biographies on the current best-seller list are
fictional. All I know of her adult life are the hours she spent in my
presence and on my monitors—more than enough to tell me that every
newspaper account I’ve seen is fictional. Carrington probably believed he
knew her better than I, and in a limited sense he was correct— but he
would never have written of it, and now he is dead.
But I was her video man, since the days when you touched the camera
with your hands, and I knew her backstage: a type of relationship like no
other on Earth or off it. I don’t believe it can be described to anyone not of
the profession—you might think of it as somewhere between co-workers
and combat buddies. I was with her the day she came to Skyfac, terrified
and determined, to stake her life upon a dream. I watched her work and
worked with her for that whole two months, through endless rehearsals,
and I have saved every tape and they are not for sale.
And, of course, I saw the Stardance. I was there; I taped it.
I guess I can tell you some things about her.
To begin with, it was not, as Cahill’s Sham and Von Derski’s Dance
Unbound: The Creation of New Modern suggest, a lifelong fascination
with space and space travel that led her to become the race’s first
zero-gravity dancer. Space was a means to her, not an end, and its vast
empty immensity scared her at first. Nor was it, as Melberg’s hardcover
tabloid The Real Shara Drummond claims, because she lacked the talent
to make it as a dancer on Earth. If you think free-fall dancing is easier
than conventional dance, you try it. Don’t forget your dropsickness bag.
But there is a grain of truth in Melberg’s slander, as there is in all the
best slanders. She could not make it on Earth—but not through lack of
talent.
I first saw her in Toronto in July of 1984. I headed Toronto Dance
Theater’s video department at that time, and I hated every minute of it. I
 
hated everything in those days. The schedule that day called for spending
the entire afternoon taping students, a waste of time and tape which I
hated more than anything except the phone company. I hadn’t seen the
year’s new crop yet, and was not eager to. I love to watch dance done
well—the efforts of a tyro are usually as pleasing to me as a first-year violin
student in the next apartment is to you.
My leg was bothering me even more than usual as I walked into the
studio. Norrey saw my face and left a group of young hopefuls to come
over. “Charlie… ?”
“I know, I know. They’re tender fledglings, Charlie, with egos as fragile
as an Easter egg in December. Don’t bite them, Charlie. Don’t even bark at
them if you can help it, Charlie.”
She smiled. “Something like that. Leg?”
“Leg.”
Norrey Drummond is a dancer who gets away with looking like a
woman because she’s small. There’s about a hundred and fifteen pounds of
her, and most of it is heart. She stands about five four, and is perfectly
capable of seeming to tower over the tallest student. She has more energy
than the North American Grid, and uses it as efficiently as a vane pump
(have you ever studied the principle of a standard piston-type pump? Go
look up the principle of a vane pump. I wonder what the original
conception of that notion must have been like, as an emotional
experience). There’s a signaturelike uniqueness to her dance, the only
reason I can see why she got so few of the really juicy parts in company
productions until Modern gave way to New Modern. I liked her because
she didn’t pity me.
“It’s not only the leg,” I admitted. “I hate to see the tender fledglings
butcher your choreography.”
“Then you needn’t worry. The piece you’re taping today is by… one of
the students.”
“Oh, fine. I knew I should have called in sick.” She made a face. “What’s
the catch?”
“Eh?”
“Why did the funny thing happen to your voice just as you got to ‘one of
the students’?”
She blushed. “Dammit, she’s my sister.”
Norrey and I are the very oldest and closest of friends, but I’d never
 
chanced to meet a sister—not unusual these days, I suppose.
My eyebrows rose. “She must be good, then.”
“Why, thank you, Charlie.”
“Bullshit. I give compliments right-handed or not at all—I’m not talking
about heredity. I mean that you’re so hopelessly ethical you’d bend over
backward to avoid nepotism. For you to give your own sister a feature like
that, she must be terrific.”
“Charlie, she is,” Norrey said simply.
“We’ll see. What’s her name?”
“Shara.” Norrey pointed her out, and I understood the rest of the catch.
Shara Drummond was ten years younger than her sister—and seven inches
taller, with thirty or forty more pounds. I noted absently that she was
stunningly beautiful, but it didn’t deter my dismay—in her best years,
Sophia Loren could never have become a modern dancer. Where Norrey
was small, Shara was big, and where Norrey was big, Shara was bigger. If
I’d seen her on the street I might have whistled appreciatively—but in the
studio I frowned.
“My God, Norrey, she’s enormous.”
“Mother’s second husband was a football player,” she said mournfully.
“She’s awfully good.”
“If she is good, that is awful. Poor girl. Well, what do you want me to
do?”
“What makes you think I want you to do anything?”
“You’re still standing here.”
“Oh. I guess I am. Well… have lunch with us, Charlie?”
“Why?” I knew perfectly well why, but I expected a polite lie.
Not from Norrey Drummond. “Because you two have something in
common, I think.”
I paid her honesty the compliment of not wincing. “I suppose we do.”
“Then you will?”
“Right after the session.”
She twinkled and was gone. In a remarkably short time she had
organized the studioful of wandering, chattering young people into
something that resembled a dance ensemble if you squinted. They warmed
up during the twenty minutes it took me to set up and check out my
 
equipment. I positioned one camera in front of them, one behind, and
kept one in my hands for walk-around close-up work. I never triggered it.
There’s a game you play in your mind. Every time someone catches or is
brought to your attention, you begin making guesses about them. You try
to extrapolate their character and habits from their appearance. Him?
Surly, disorganized—leaves the cap off the toothpaste and drinks
boilermakers. Her? Art-student type, probably uses a diaphragm and
writes letters in a stylized calligraphy of her own invention. Them? They
look like schoolteachers from Miami, probably here to see what snow looks
like, attend a convention. Sometimes I come pretty close. I don’t know how
I typecast Shara Drummond in those first twenty minutes. The moment
she began to dance, all preconceptions left my mind. She became
something elemental, something unknowable, a living bridge between our
world and the one the Muses live in.
I know, on an intellectual and academic level, all there is to know about
dance, and I could not categorize or classify or even really comprehend the
dance she danced that afternoon. I saw it, I even appreciated it, but I was
not equipped to understand it. My camera dangled from the end of my
arm, next to my jaw. Dancers speak of their “center,” the place their
motion centers around, often quite near the physical center of gravity. You
strive to “dance from your center,” and the “contraction and release” idea
which underlies much of Modern dance depends on the center for its focus
of energy. Shara’s center seemed to move about the room under its own
power, trailing limbs that attached to it by choice rather than necessity.
What’s the word for the outermost part of the sun, the part that still shows
in an eclipse? Corona? That’s what her limbs were: four lengthy tongues of
flame that followed the center in its eccentric, whirling orbit, writhing
fluidly around its surface. That the lower two frequently contacted the
floor seemed coincidental—indeed, the other two touched the floor nearly
as regularly.
There were other students dancing. I know this because the two
automatic video cameras, unlike me, did their job and recorded the piece
as a whole. It was called Birthing, and depicted the formation of a galaxy
that ended up resembling Andromeda. It was only vaguely accurate,
literally, but it wasn’t intended to be. Symbolically, it felt like the birth of a
galaxy.
In retrospect. At the time I was aware only of the galaxy’s heart: Shara.
Students occluded her from time to time, and I simply never noticed. It
hurt to watch her.
If you know anything about dance, this must all sound horrid to you. A
 
dance about a nebula? I know, I know. It’s a ridiculous notion. And it
worked. In the most gut-level, cellular way it worked—save only that Shara
was too good for those around her. She did not belong in that eager crew
of awkward, half-trained apprentices. It was like listening to the late
Stephen Wonder trying to work with a pickup band in a Montreal bar.
But that wasn’t what hurt.
Le Maintenant was shabby, but the food was good and the house brand
of grass was excellent. Show a Diner’s Club card in there and they’d show
you a galley full of dirty dishes. It’s gone now. Norrey and Shara declined a
toke, but in my line of work it helps. Besides, I needed a few hits. How to
tell a lovely lady her dearest dream is hopeless?
I didn’t need to ask Shara to know that her dearest dream was to dance.
More: to dance professionally. I have often speculated on the motives of
the professional artist. Some seek the narcissistic assurance that others
will actually pay cash to watch or hear them. Some are so incompetent or
disorganized that they can support themselves in no other way. Some have
a message which they feel needs expressing. I suppose most artists
combine elements of all three. This is no complaint—what they do for us is
necessary. We should be grateful that there are motives.
But Shara was one of the rare ones. She danced because she needed to.
She needed to say things which could be said in no other way, and she
needed to take her meaning and her living from the saying of them.
Anything else would have demeaned and devalued the essential statement
of her dance. I know this, from watching that one dance.
Between toking up and keeping my mouth full and then toking again (a
mild amount to offset the slight down that eating brings), it was over half
an hour before I was required to say anything, beyond an occasional
grunted response to the luncheon chatter of the ladies. As the coffee
arrived, Shara looked me square in the eye and said, “Do you talk,
Charlie?”
She was Norrey’s sister, all right.
“Only inanities.”
“No such thing. Inane people, maybe.”
“Do you enjoy dancing, Miss Drummond?”
She answered seriously. “Define ‘enjoy.’ ”
I opened my mouth and closed it, perhaps three times. You try it.
 

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin