Dropped Threads 3 (9 page)

1:00 p.m. Lunch. We pull on shorts and line the sidewalk, backs to sun-warmed brick, legs bent into triangles, knees to the sky. Chestnut trees in full leaf cast shade. We eat sandwiches from brown bags or visit the old-fashioned corner deli to spoon lentil soup from thick, white bowls.

1:45 p.m. Back to the studio. Repertory class demands both spontaneity—we sometimes improvise to find movement—and persistence, as we repeat phrases over and over to polish them for presentation. The choreographer, a tiny woman with birdlike alertness, encourages wildness yet insists on precision. When we wilt in the heat, she urges us not to succumb. “Don’t sink into the floor. Find it in yourselves to pull up and push through it, and you’ll feel much better.” I respect her words: she knows what it means to be rehearsing tired, into your sixth hour in the studio.

3:15 p.m. The end of the day. Many head off to their wait-ressing jobs; I can barely exit the building. Today I hobble to Carlton and collapse on a park bench to drink iced tea. Riding home afterwards strains me. Although I believe in gritting my teeth through repertory, what am I trying to prove by cycling home? Tomorrow I’ll treat myself to the streetcar.

RAIN

I leave the Free Times Café on College and catch the High Park streetcar back to Roncesvalles, where I sublet a long, narrow apartment that overlooks Queen Street. Rather than transfer, I walk, so that I can buy Epsom salts, fruit and bread. The sky has clouded over, and I slip on an extra shirt. When I emerge from the drugstore, it’s drizzling. At the
bakery a few doors down, braided clerks address customers in Polish. I point to a loaf of sourdough rye and raise my eyebrows hopefully.

As I continue south with my bread, the downpour redoubles. Eaves are dripping, puddles collecting, umbrellas mushrooming. When I stop for bananas and nectarines, the proprietor suggests waiting in the store. I decline the invitation and pursue my path, pack on my back, shopping bag swinging in my hand. With every step my shoes become more waterlogged. They squelch and the dye starts to run. Rain flattens the hair to my head, plasters shirt and shorts to my body with form-hugging transparency. Pedestrians have gathered under awnings and in doorways. Arms folded, they watch the storm—and me.

Nobody stops for rain on the West Coast, where the showers aren’t fierce and momentary but steady and relentless: you would wait all day. Unaccustomed to rain that halts the community, that draws people into neighbourly clusters, I resist when it would be wiser to conform. The price of my initiation: a soaking and a ruined pair of shoes.

REPERCUSSIONS

Body being worked so hard I’m pushed to some verge, of breakdown or breakthrough, exhaustion, despair, tears, exaltation.

Today in barre class, I couldn’t master the combination so I threw myself into it, channelled my frustration into intensity. A good way to cope, but it means that my body ricochets with aggression. My muscles rip and rebuild daily, an industry at the cellular level. Irritated flesh resents change, and I experience its mood: pugnacious.

“Injury comes to those who go for it,” I overheard in the change room. There was an odour of menthol.

Pinched hip and inflamed hamstring sear my left leg, and this wooden chair aggravates them. I shift in vain, much like my brother at family meals. His joints swell; his bones disintegrate. His habitual expression, a wince. Pain has come to him uninvited; some would say I asked for it. Still, my desire to train persists.

Later:
Feeling better, no thanks to the Epsom-salts bath or the tiger balm or the cold pack or the tennis ball massage or the mild bike ride to High Park, or even the cathartic effects of writing—though I have done all these naturopathic things, have assiduously cared for myself tonight. No, I attribute it to the Tylenol I took half an hour ago. I don’t regret it. I can’t justify dancing full-time if it means I have to suffer like this.

PERSPECTIVE

Our technique teacher, Lynn, stresses that parts of the body oppose each other. When you draw in a leg in the openings, for instance, the torso does not simply turn toward it. There must be a fight. Lynn herself looks tough and sinewy as an animal that has been fighting for survival all its life. Her body resists itself to such an extent that it can express only private struggle. Never ease or pure affirmation.

But today she reminds us that the high lift in the floor work expresses ecstasy, and that at our level, everything we do should look like or, more importantly,
feel
like dancing. “You’re past the stage of forming letters of the alphabet between the dotted lines. Now you’ve got to write beautiful poems!”

She has us repeat a combination on single counts, fast, so that we’re forced to abandon ourselves to instinct. She keeps up a stream of exclamations: “Yes! Oh! Now
that’s
a different story!”

Lynn has danced professionally for twenty years—no one would dance that long without love. What appeared to be severity I now recognize as the capacity for
work
that sustains any intense endeavour. The Graham technique arrives at emotion through discipline, for even the desire to dance wildly cannot be realized without a vocabulary of movement and a strong, flexible body. Depth of feeling does not suffice: impulses need painstaking artistry in order to be rendered with power.

PROGRESS

Unseasonably cool weather means that early air stirs fresh against a moving form. Most mornings I cycle up the alley, turn on Sorauren, then follow College straight across town. As a cyclist I join the urban groove in a way bus passengers don’t. I thrill with danger when I signal a left turn and cross streetcar tracks in the rain.

Pain in my left hamstring and hip has diminished. And today I make a breakthrough in the floor work: as I rotate out of contraction, I feel my spine spiralling, twisting in segments like something you manipulate with your hands. Achieving the positions requires so much effort that when their logic infiltrates my body, I am gratified. On almost everyone in class, I see the elegance and beauty of the neck long, the shoulders dropped, the chest and back wide and open, the head turning on top of the spine, energy rising up the torso and pouring into the ground behind. I can now understand those who maintain a daily practice for years. It is devotional. For dancers in this converted church, the ritual of Graham floor work serves as prayer, or meditation.

ZEST

A guest teacher, Viv, arrives to teach technique class ten minutes late and sets the clock back by five. She announces her age—sixty—with an irascible slur. Her demeanour unnerves me and my progress is lost. She torques my ribcage painfully on the spiral in second, preceding the long leans: “Take the ribs with you!” Such pulling and twisting make this technique feel taut and strained. My pelvis often hurts as the bones press the floor. Is this the kind of pain my brother feels as he attempts a normal range of motion? Is it worth harming the body to celebrate movement?

By the end of class, we are fifteen minutes over. I feel hot, tired, dehydrated and annoyed that we will have no break. Viv beckons to me and says, “You’ve got to shift your weight. You’re just stepping.” She demonstrates. To shift the weight, it turns out, is a good synecdoche for zest, urgency, emotional engagement—for making the sequence come alive as dance. When I repeat the combination, she says, “What a difference!” and raises a fist in tribute, elbow tucked to her side.

Last Christmas, after witnessing my brother’s rigidity, I had to throw it off in an exultant jog to the waterfront. To compensate for his loss of mobility, to claim motion for both of us, I swung from the gnarled branches of Garry oaks, leapt from benches, flew across grass into handsprings.

In my family, we’ve denied ourselves sensory pleasure—a Protestant legacy. We’ve rejected experience, restrained ourselves, wasted years severed from joy. My brother once chose to hold back; now incapacity stills him. He can no more ripple his limbs than can the Garry oaks, stunted trees that recoil from coastal wind. I can’t bear what has happened to him.

Refusal to follow suit has fuelled my commitment: to move, to thrive, to live. I’ve rerouted asceticism into dance—a discipline that remembers bliss.

COUNTERBALANCE

As the program draws to a close, my spirits falter. Familiar sentiments nag me: dancing this much is self-indulgent. I must hold myself in reserve for more important, serious things in the Real World. I must earn a living, advance in a profession, save for retirement. My shoulders slump as I enter the studio.

In class, we pitch in contraction over a bent front leg, the back leg in attitude. The move feels reckless and abandoned, but safely held by the tight abdomen. It yokes those two opposing human impulses: to risk and to be secure. Pitch yourself over the edge
and
hold on. It expresses my longing to dance full-time, yet maintain a teaching career. This wonderful move demonstrates that paradox does not paralyze. In fact, the Graham technique depends on such tension. As we reach and resist, our gestures gain definition. We don’t simply live with contradiction: it provides meaning.

CULMINATION

Last day at TDT. Barre class ends with leaping from the corner, and even after the signal to stop, people circle back to repeat. At the final moment I too race back, breaking a threesome into two pairs, so my partner and I cross last. The percussionist spurs us to jump higher and longer and to sharpen head and arms. We mirror his swell on the final jeté. The summer concludes with a drumbeat and us in the air.

In the early afternoon
, in the oppressive heat of June, I begin my walk to Kihande—a small village outside of the town of Masindi in Uganda. The red dirt road from my house, barely wide enough for a vehicle, is lined with elephant grass that towers over my head and hushes in the breeze. After the bend, the road gradually widens and joins up with the main road leading from town to Kihande village. The roads are not marked, and I can take a number of different trails and paths; as long as I walk in the same general direction, I always arrive at my destination. I smile as I trek to the village—anticipating my afternoon and wondering what might be revealed on this day with the women of Agabagaya.

Agabagaya is a group of women I meet with for the purpose of a small research study I’m conducting for my master’s degree in women’s studies and education. I’m interested in exploring the ways in which women share knowledge to support their families and communities, and in examining the types of power—although often unrecognized in the public sphere—women hold within society.

My interest stems, in part, from my own childhood experiences. My mother had a strong network of women neighbours when I was growing up in the suburbs of Winnipeg in the 1970s. These women collaborated to share insights, to save money and to reduce their workloads.
They owned kitchen appliances collectively: my mom had the only canner on the block, midnight blue with white speckles; Joyce had the only meat grinder, used for making fancy ham fillings for Christmas hors d’oeuvres. When my mom’s raspberries were ripe, she picked them, froze some and then invited the neighbour women to help themselves. Joyce shared her herbs and Trish snipped plant cuttings from a new variety of geranium she had acquired. The women shared sewing patterns, sauce recipes and apple-preserving techniques.

When the three neighbouring women returned to the work force on a part-time basis, they worked on alternate days so that we kids could still come home for lunch. On Mondays, we all arrived at Joyce’s for homemade chicken soup with noodles as wide as our fingers. At Trish’s on Tuesdays, we’d have ravioli, from a can, no less—unheard of in our house. And in our kitchen, on Wednesdays, the neighbourhood favourite was served: tuna melts, creatively turned into
high wires
as we stretched the cheesy bites across the table between us, letting the melted mozzarella hang and swing in the air. For many years these women, my mother and her two friends, cooked for us, cared for us, scolded us and taught us. And now in Kihande, a village twelve thousand kilometres from home, I witness this same collaborative spirit among the women of Agabagaya.

By the time I reach Kihande, forty minutes after starting out, my shirt is wet where my backpack rests. Sweat trickles down my inner thigh under my skirt, my head is hot under my hat and my sandalled feet are red with dust. Although weary, I am genuinely happy to see the smiling face of Shakillah, the chairperson of the group, as she comes down the path to meet me. She tilts her head as a broad smile
crosses her beautiful brown face, as though she is sharing a secret with me. As I approach, she gently embraces my hand with hers and the lengthy greeting begins.

“How are you?” she asks slowly and intently.

“I am fine, Shakillah. How are you?”

“I am good. How is Masindi?” she asks, as part of the greeting is to ask about the place from where you have just arrived.

“Masindi is good,” I answer.

“And how is your friend Dominique?” she inquires about the Canadian friend I’m staying with while living here in Uganda.