Sari Wilson: Girl Through Glass

We dig into the choreography—“jagged,” “one-dimensional,” “awkward” are the words they use. They note the turned-in legs and feet, the angular arms, the lack of plié. “Clearly a reaction to classical dance,” says Jen, normally a quiet girl.

“Right,” I say. I tell them that Nijinsky’s dancers were often in open revolt at his choreography. “He made them use their bodies against every bit of training that they had ever received in the ballet academies of Russia and France. He asked them to betray everything they’d worked for.”

“It’s good Diaghilev’s weight was behind him,” says Michael.

“You mean on top of him,” says Karl, the other gay guy in the group. The class titters.

“Private life aside, what is Nijinsky trying to do here?” I ask.

“I think he, Nijinksy, was just listening really, trying to fit the movement to the music. It’s so fierce and so totally devoid of compassion. These are people who have been stripped down to nothing by the fear of the cosmos.” Sioban’s eyes open wide, as if she is just realizing the truth of what she is saying. “That’s what he’s trying to say in this dance. It’s like Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad — it’s about hate and fear and the savagery of the human heart, you know?”

They’ve been waiting for her to speak, passionate tawny-skinned Sioban who is just discovering modern dance, and is imbibing it with a missionary zeal. Classically trained, she danced professionally in the corps of a regional ballet company for a while. But she is also a neuroscience major and has an impressive bunch of scholarships, of the kind for “nontraditional students.”

Michael jumps in. “It’s camp! That girl’s Godzilla stare — come on! It’s totally over the top!”

Sioban stares at me, waiting. She has a long bony face and a constellation of acne scars across one cheek. She has curly black hair, which she wears in a high ponytail, and light blue eyes that look almost crystal. Her beauty is hard to find the source of. I remember she’s a refugee from the world of ballet, that cult of beauty and perfection that I disappeared into for years of my life too.

My heart starts beating faster. I flush. I don’t like to defend one student over another. But we’re onto something here. “Well, let’s not forget the audience’s reaction, which was discussed in the article you read — near riots, remember? Can camp explain that powerful a reaction?” This is what I love about teaching — when some truth rises out of necessity, a truth that feels for a moment unshakable. Sioban’s truth this time.

“This dance was deeply unsettling to a public still schooled in Romanticism. They wanted a fantasy of exoticism, not an encounter with our own deepest pathos.” I’m walking around the edge of the star shape. Their heads crane to follow me. “Yes, it is a deeply unsettling piece of art. And it was very serious about its intent.”

They — my students — bring me out, they bring me alive. I feel their eyes on me. They are waiting for something more. I drop my awareness down into my psoas muscles and envision energy into my legs. I feel my toes on the floor. For years the greatest challenge of the academic life for me was the lack of physical motion that went along with it. But I’ve learned that stillness has power too.

Then the words arise.

“Modernism wasn’t just a response to what came before, but it was also a reorganization of self in relation to a changing world. So what is this world? A world that must confront the darkest parts of its own psyche without the aids of fantasy, of beauty, of escapism.”

Before they leave, I remind them that spring break is coming up and that their take-home midterm will be available tonight, and due by Friday at midnight.

Now comes the deflation after class — the synapses have been firing, my temperature rising — and I’m back out in the March gloom, a shell of a person, my insides flayed and carted away. Teaching is an extension of my early performing.

The slushy ice crackles under my feet as I head toward my office on the top floor of Johnson, the looming stone and wood mastodon of a building built in the 1920s. I shudder, hurrying along the frozen sidewalk.

At Johnson, I stop by the program office to pick up my mail, then I swing by Bernadith Lissbloom’s office. Bernadith is one of my supervisors, a history department head, a Russian history specialist, a lesbian, and a raiser of Rhodesian ridgeback dogs. She has been a supporter of me and my work, but she’s old guard, comes at it from a social historian’s angle, all materialist, Hegelian. No gender studies, no Lacan, no Derrida.

Her door is open, I poke my head in. “Any news?”

Her quiet, flush-cheeked bulldog self barely looks up. “Not yet. End of spring break we should have a decision.”

Why do university administrators so much enjoy the power of withholding? I’m coming on the end of a one-year visiting professor appointment without a clear sense of where I’ll be in the fall. Again. For the third year in a row.

Last November, when they announced the Pell, a new tenure-track cross-disciplinary position they were creating in performance studies, I thought, Yes! I feel a kinship with this small town, its frozen driveways, its bright gray lid of a sky, its timid attempts at downtown beautification, its inveterate army navy store, its cluster of local-food restaurants for the visiting parents. My self-destructive tendencies are in check here. In the past, my exacting nature has cost me popularity among my colleagues.

I hope I get the Pell. I pray for it.

Kate, I say to myself. Do not fuck up now. There’s too much of me, or too much desire, or desire of the wrong kind. Whatever it is, when I let go, I ruin things. I need to keep myself contained, buttressed.

I’ve learned that the hard way.

At the end of the summer, Mira’s mother takes her to Selba’s. Selba’s is in Manhattan, but all the way east, on a block of stores with names like Wetzel’s Hosiery Outlet and Abraham and Son’s Brassieres. Even if you go in the middle of the day, there are few people on the street.

They walk from the subway in the afternoon sun. Only the occasional car passes, stirring up the fetid water from the gutter. Men in tall black hats with curls of hair flowing from their ears peek out of the tiny storefronts. Above hang the black tentacles of rusted fire escapes.

And there is still the stench, the smoldering that’s been in the air for weeks after the blackout. The smell of charred rubber and plastic hangs over the empty lots they pass. It makes Mira cough. The overgrown grass has been replaced by husks of bottles turned dark and cloudy from flames, scorched bricks, the flesh of tires. “The smell of the apocalypse!” her mother says, laughing. Mira holds her nose.

Inside the store, round women with stiff piles of hair guard the bins of cellophane-wrapped leotards and tights. They loudly tell customers to keep their underwear on, hand them stretched-out samples, and point to the dingy curtain. All the clothes in this store have something wrong with them — sleeves of slightly different sizes, crooked seams, or puckers in the fabric.

Her mother likes old things, used things. That is why Mira spends so much time at the dusty Salvation Army on Atlantic Avenue while her mother shops for plates, silverware, clothes. Selba’s is one of those places where Mira’s mother shops, not out of poverty but to prove a point to the world.

Her mother! Mira’s mother is not like other mothers — and especially not like other ballet mothers.

Ballet mothers pack tiny, neatly wrapped sandwiches of sardines (good for the bones), little plastic bags of celery and carrot sticks, and yogurt with prunes. They name their daughters Danielle, Isabelle, Vanessa, something that sounds like a flower or a bell. They dress in one of two ways: in flats, Capris, and demure cable-knit sweaters — like grown-up versions of their daughters — or in fur and perfume, carrying shiny leather appointment books for their daughters. They wait in the dressing room for their daughters to finish class, crocheting or gossiping.