Hello from a social distance, my friends —
I’ve barely left the house all week. I’ve gone to the supermarket (they’ve rationed hand sanitizer to two tiny bottles per person) and to the gym (they’ve doubled up on their disposable wipe use, which probably doesn’t do a whole lot except accelerate the environmental toll of this pandemic). To therapy, to the dog shelter where I volunteer, to the supermarket again.
This is about how I’d planned for my week to go. It turns out that living in a nascent pandemic and writing a book are materially not that different. You don’t leave the house that much.
I did go to one big gathering, right before all the big gatherings here started getting canceled. It was a one-night-only performance by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, one of the world’s finest contemporary dance companies. I’d had the tickets for months, and my soul was hungry. I took a calculated risk.
Ailey is one of the touring-est companies in the nation; they go all over the country and world and, as I’ve learned writing this book, their contract is one of the best in the industry, because it guarantees the most weeks of work.
You see, dancers don’t get paid all year round. Their contracts guarantee a minimum number of working weeks, which might be rehearsing weeks or performing weeks (or both), interspersed with unpaid time off. Some companies give you 42 weeks of work a year. Some are more like 30. The rest of the time, you are on “lay off,” meaning you don’t have rehearsals or performances, but you also don’t get paid. And, while you’re technically on a break, and your body really needs it, you have to stay in pretty good dancing shape by taking dance classes or doing gym workouts, which probably aren’t covered by your company. It is a hard existence.
With Broadway theaters shut down and ballet companies cancelling performances left and right, suffice it to say that lots of dancers have just been thrown a financial curveball they weren’t planning for. Lots of them live in expensive cities where rent is still due, even if their performances are cancelled. If you’re a ballet dancer living in New York City, dancing full time, making about $40,000 a year — as is the case for one member of a well-regarded contemporary dance company (not Ailey) who I interviewed for the book — how do you weather a storm like this?
I’ve been lucky enough to see Ailey perform many times, and most of those performances have included the company’s defining work, Revelations. This performance in Iowa City was no different; they closed with Revelations after performing works by Aszure Barton and Jamar Roberts.
Revelations, which was inspired by Ailey’s childhood in the Black baptist church in Texas, is a ballet about suffering, faith, joy, community, and redemption. It premiered in 1960, and somehow doesn’t show its age even a little. I never get tired of it. I always see something new, hear something new — and I always know that, because of who I am and the life I’m living, there’s so much about it that I don’t see and can’t hear. I try to sit with the mystery and remember that not everything has to be for me all the time. A little bit of this ballet is enough.
What was new for me this time was that I was watching it with someone who had never seen a live dance performance. This was her first time. Fix Me, Jesus, and I Wanna Be Ready, were her first exposure. As she said to me afterward, “Sinnerman, holy shit!”
It was surreal and sad to sit in the University of Iowa theatre, watching a company I’ve seen so many times, thinking, this could be the last dance performance I got to for a long time.
But you know what? It’s a good way to go out. I mean, Sinnerman. Holy shit.
What to read while you’re waiting
I have some suggestions for people who are staring down long days that need to be filled with books and movies.
Books:
Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, by Camille Laurens. Translated from the French, it’s about what we know, and don’t know, about the scrawny and impoverished Marie Van Goethem, the ballet dancer and part-time model depicted in Edgar Degas’s famous statue.
Alvin Ailey, A Life in Dance, by Jennifer Dunning. Learn a lot more about Revelations, and about what it was like to found one of the few Black-first dance companies that has survived in the U.S.
Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today, by Simon Morrison. Stalin! Acid attacks! Dancing, occasionally! If you like Cold War history and geopolitics with a splash of ballet, this one’s for you.
Movies:
Center Stage, obviously. It’s on Netflix, so you can watch it for what I assume is the 27th time.
Dance Academy. Also on Netflix. It’s an Australian teen dance drama, filmed in Sydney at the very studios where I took classes as a teenager. The acting is not very good and it doesn’t really matter.
Red Sparrow. I watched this for book research and it is very dark and only marginally about ballet. Content warning for murder, sexual violence, torture, and bad Russian accents.
Documentaries:
Ballerina, dir. Douglas Watkin (2015). About Ella Havelka, the first Indigenous dancer to join The Australian Ballet.
First Position, dir. Bess Kargman (2012). About six ballet students from around the world as they prepare for the finals of the Youth America Grand Prix competition.
Danseur, dir. Scott Gormley, (2018). About the lives of boys and men who dance ballet, often in the face of homophobia and bullying.
That’s it from me. Take care of each other, and of all the people you don’t even know. Until next week,
Chloe.