Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

You began to laugh.

Sara Hardy was not the first dancer I had auditioned. She was, in fact, the nineteenth. Six months prior, the terpsitone had sat downstairs, with pride of place in the student workshops. It was my crown jewel, my new infatuation. It felt like an object I had found, an old artifact I had uncovered: dance that makes music. Whereas the theremin reads melody from the gestures of two hands in the air, the terpsitone, the “ether wave dance stage,” interprets the movements of the whole body. The performer’s gestures have a double meaning — the gestures as gestures and the manipulation of sound.

I had been influenced by Martha Graham’s dance company, the way free movement seemed to sing; and also by our hot nights in Harlem, where the trumpeters invented genius one instant at a time. My vision of the terpsitone saw it used in two different ways: by the most skilled choreographers, adapting composed pieces into motion; and by other dancers, volatile and learning, in improvisations.

Yet I could not find performers of either type. Dancers came to my door, pliéed at the doorstep, but when they arrived at the dance stage they were cowed by the electronics, or not cowed enough. I posted notices at ballet schools, backstage at the 48th Street Theatre; these dancers hesitated in the terpsitone’s electric field, grimacing at the noise, unable to complete their movements. They started like birds at every change of pitch. Other dancers, avant-gardists referred to me by Schillinger’s crèche of choreographers, were too liberated. They whirled and twisted across the stage, whipping sirens from the circuits. I thanked them all and said I would be in touch. Then I collapsed into an easy chair, sighing. Eventually I towed the terpsitone upstairs.

Now Sara Hardy was here, tottering on the charged stage. It was a washout. She moved limply, scared to provoke a sound, provoking sounds all the same. Amid the terpsitone’s high ooooo , supple and responsive, Sara didn’t seem to recognize her own limbs. She lifted her arm and her eyes widened, as if she was horrified by what she had found.

I turned off the generator. As soon as the hum had left the room, Sara seemed to grow five centimetres. She was again a gazelle, on tiptoes.

I showed her out. “Thank you,” I said, one hand on the doorknob.

She slung her bag over her shoulder. “It’s very hard.”

“Yes,” I said.

I dragged my feet back up to the fourth floor. I found you crouching on the dance stage, arms loosely resting on your knees. “So much for that,” I said. I turned off the room’s lights. I did not like you to see my disappointments.

“Hey,” you said from the sun-sliced darkness. “Can I try?”

“Try this?” I said.

“Yes.”

I left the lights off. The room felt quieter with just sun and shadow. You were silhouetted in the window, still crouching, like a little kid. I squatted beside the generator and flipped the switch. The room filled with sound. You were listening to it. I listened to the sound of the terpsitone as it listened to you listening.

You raised one hand and then the other, paying attention to the changes. You bowed your head and lifted it. You grinned, and the antenna was not sensitive enough to notice. You wiggled your hips. “Here,” I said. I plugged another cable into the generator. Now a coloured beam shone onto the dance stage from a spotlight above. It flickered, as if it was being run through a film projector. As you moved your limbs, raising hands and bowing head and wiggling hips, the beam changed colour in accordance with the terpsitone’s pitch.

“It shows you the note,” you observed.

“Does it help?” I asked.

You came slowly to your feet, the light going rosy. The terpsitone played a C sharp. You pointed at me; your leg swung out in an arc; you showed me your wrist and then the back of your hand. It was not quite a song, but it was a measured, considered singing. Then you laughed and shook out your arms and sent the terpsitone into a shriek. “Well,” you said.

“Well?”

We looked at one another. You were on your feet; I was still crouching. We were allies.

“You are better than any dancer,” I said.

“At this?”

I nodded yes.

You chewed your bottom lip. “It’s interesting,” you said after a moment. “Each movement is a choice. Up or down, elbow or knee.” You moved your elbow, your knee. “Sixteen bars is like a sequence of decisions.”

“Would you play it with us at Carnegie Hall?” I asked.

You seemed surprised. “What? How?”

“You’d learn,” I said.

“Leon, I’m a violinist.”

I still had bicycle grease on my hands. I said, “Then we will have a violinist playing the terpsitone.”

I RECALL ONLY THREE MOMENTS from the last time I played Carnegie Hall.

I remember all of us standing in the wings at the beginning of the show. We were half hidden in folds of black velvet. Albert Stoessel, from Juilliard, spoke at a microphone. He said, “The instruments devised by Dr Theremin are instruments of feeling; they are instruments of the heart.” Sixteen friends stood beside me. Ten-year-old Yolanda was the first to go out; she opened the concert alone but for an accompanist, playing Glinka’s “Lark.” She was as tall as a young maple. I remember I had a screwdriver in my right hand, which I had used to replace one of the fingerboard theremin’s vacuum tubes. I dropped it to the stage floor as we all began to applaud.

The second moment was yours. You crouched in black on the terpsitone’s platform, as if you were praying, centred in a spotlight. Carlos, the harpist, sat beside you. In the wings, I held my breath.

You stood, slowly, staring into the room’s rapt silence. You arched your back. You were a black-barked cherry tree. You were my one true love.

With Carlos you played Bach and Gounod’s “Ave Maria.” Each note was shown in a beam of light. I had built a loudspeaker, covered it in twill, raised on a simple mount above the stage. Your music pushed like breath against the cloth. It trembled and then sang. You danced, choosing every moment, guiding the melody with a rolled shoulder and the tilt of knee. At the clubs you had not danced like this.

The third moment was hours after the concert, eleven o’clock or midnight. We had just crossed the street, you and I, arm in arm. Our bellies were full of champagne, blini, and chocolate. We were headed to the party at Little Rumania, where we would drink more champagne, toast Wagner and Grieg, listen to old Moskowitz behind the counter, conjuring Gemenc herons on his dulcimer. On the street corner, beside a closed-up newspaper stall, we met a man. He wore an overcoat despite the balmy air. He had a square jaw, wide shoulders. He seemed a full foot taller than I. He had hands like the paddles of a boat.

“Clara!” he said. You stopped and turned. I could not see your face.

“Robert,” you replied.

“Late night at the office?” he asked. He gave an isosceles smile.

You said, “Leon, this is my friend Robert Rockmore. Robert — Dr Leon Theremin.”

“Pleased to meet you,” he said. As we shook hands I imagined pivoting as I stepped forward, raising the elbow of my arm, striking this man across the chest, then releasing his hand, hooking his right leg with my right foot, and shoving him the rest of the way to the ground, to where the pavement was stained black.

I wonder if you felt some tensing of muscles. You did not seem to change but there was a subtle adjustment of body language, a rearrangement of planes, and in that second I sensed that we two were one thing and he was another.

Your hand was on my arm. “Robert,” you said, “we need to run.”