This Spam situation may sound egregious, but it wasn’t unthinkable as far as I was concerned. I’d finagled a small research travel grant to get to the conference, but I was living that year on a badly paying post-doc at NYU, with no guarantee of renewal. My dietary choices were often influenced by financial considerations. That evening I made do, politely nibbling at the meat delicacies with a plastic fork, pretending to be hanging around waiting for Chassna to start spinning, even though it was pretty obvious the technical difficulties would be insurmountable. After a while, even those bearded drama professors abandoned their jug of Bull’s Blood or whatever it was they were tussling over. I wiped the corners of my mouth with a paper napkin and headed back to the hotel.
Despite my inauspicious entrée to the Zagreb scene, I was trying to appreciate the relative luxuriousness of my situation. The Zagreb Arcotel is a more upscale establishment than I was accustomed to, really – though it had a kind of Eastern European slight offness about it. Or maybe I was projecting. The rooms had hipsterish curtains and throw pillows decorated with black and white caricatures of iconic artists and intellectual figures both historical and contemporary. Richard Strauss, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf – but also Manu Chao. There was somebody who looked a little like Slavoj Žižek, but it probably wasn’t. He was smiling.
There was also a figure that looked a little like Michael Jackson, but on closer inspection it turned out to be Egon Schiele.
I was using my cell phone to take this picture when it started to vibrate with Sven’s incoming text. I don’t know if I was taking the picture to send to Sven or if I just wanted to remember the moment – but my little exercise in documenting my Eastern European corporate hotel room suddenly paled in comparison. The text really threw me for a loop. I stared at it for a few minutes before sending my generically inarticulate response.
I’d had an uneasy feeling, ever since the luggage incident. But I’d been unprepared for something like this. Because of the time difference I was wide awake – especially after this news flash – and that’s why I decided to go down to the lobby of the hotel, where there were a couple of big flat-screen computers set up for guests. I settled into a comfortable chair facing one of them and typed in “michael jackson.” A flood of news items appeared. I quickly combed over the most recent ones and ascertained, more or less, the global response to the situation. It was immediately evident the scale of the catastrophe. I glanced up at the several conference-goers chatting on the couches and chairs scattered around the lobby. A few had cocktails. No one seemed to be registering this cataclysmic event.
I went to YouTube. This was, increasingly, my first resort in dealing with questions from the practical to the unfathomable. Of course the platform when it first emerged was a terrific boon to those of us who research live performance, but as you know if you’ve spent any time on the site, which surely you have, there’s all kinds of other useful information people share there. Also not so useful information, and opinions. Sometimes I’d find myself getting absorbed in the weird comments viewers would post on other people’s videos. Sven had recently begun ribbing me about the amount of time I was spending on YouTube. He wasn’t thoroughly convinced that it was “productive.”
My first thought was to watch a couple of Jackson’s music videos, but when I typed in his name an avalanche of MJ-wannabes popped up. I started clicking through them. The vast majority had posted their work long before his demise. Instructional moonwalk videos are a genre unto themselves. There were people trying to dance like him all over the world: in Singapore, Sidney, Slippery Rock, São Paulo. A few began or ended with little testimonials. There was a really heartbreaking one posted by a young guy from Belarus. It said, “Small dancing clip for Michael Jackson. I have no possibility to be in the USA. My communication is the Internet. I hope to you will be pleasant this video audition from Michael Jackson.” He was a pretty good dancer, and the production values on his video were surprisingly good. Some friends must have helped him shoot it. There was a lot of screen text in Cyrillic, but the official YouTube description was what I just typed, in English. It seemed so sad. He’d obviously invested a lot of hope in the possibility of MJ seeing this video and asking him to perform with him. Even though this had probably always been a long shot, his prospects for such a scenario had now clearly bitten the dust.
I sat there for two hours, from one until three, watching these wannabes. A few were genuinely virtuosic. Some were embarrassing. White people can be so unself-conscious. It’s offensive, charming, and pathetic, all at the same time.
One was very weird. At first I couldn’t figure out how it found its way into the “michael jackson” related videos playlist. It was called “modéré satie” – and indeed, it was set to Satie’s fifth Gnossienne – one of my favorites.
A woman in a black leotard, her dark hair pulled back, was dancing a subdued dance in an interior space – her living room? There were some peculiar paintings on the wall. One of them appeared to depict Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. The dancer wasn’t looking at the camera. Her eyes were turned down throughout her little choreography, which was also quite peculiar – not balletic, exactly, though oddly proper. She demi-pliéed in plunky time to Satie’s moderate little melody, alternately lifting her arms as if to mark the count. Her gestures became more and more idiosyncratic and mysterious, as though she were trying to communicate some information.
Perhaps I should pause to explain that I was at this conference to deliver a paper on semaphore mime in contemporary ballet choreography. I’m a former ballet dancer. I’m learning to say that. Like many male dancers, I started my training relatively late, and ours is not a line of work known for its longevity, so my stage career, such as it was, was pretty brief – and not particularly noteworthy. My longest gig was with the Royal Swedish Ballet in Stockholm. I came in under Nils Ake-Häggbom, and stuck around for as long as it seemed to make sense. I’m trying to transition into teaching, which is why I decided a few years ago to get a doctorate in performance studies, which led to the temporary and somewhat precarious post-doc I’ve already mentioned.
I was supposed to be revising my dissertation into a book. I had recently been granted a post-doctoral fellowship to support this project. The major revision I’d thus far accomplished was changing the title. The dissertation had been called, Semaphoric Mime from the Ballet Blanc to William Forsythe: A Derridean Analysis. By “Derridean,” I meant to indicate that even when a dance appeared to be relaying a very clear message, it was always already saying something altogether different. I knew that title might be a bit off-putting to a general audience, so the book was going to be: I’m Trying to Reach You. This seemed to have more crossover potential, although the manuscript was probably a little over-specialized for the lay reader, and maybe a tad theoretical. I knew I had to take out some of the extended endnotes, which had nearly the same word count as the actual text, but so far I’d only managed to excise a few commas. I have a slightly pathological attachment to the idea of the “hors-texte.”
So, it’s not exactly as though I believe in singular interpretations, like I could “get” this little Satie choreography if I only had a key. But the dance looked like a message in a bottle. It seemed to have some sort of secret code – the big mystery, of course, being what the hell it had to do with Michael Jackson.
Some of the references were pretty clear: the mudra-like hand gestures (“okay”), which morphed into antlers, and then something like a map of her ovaries; a little Charlie Chaplin walk, ending with a swat at her ankles; a delicate circling of her index finger over her head, as though it were a phonograph needle sounding the clunky little score. And then I saw it: looking down at her feet, she swiveled to the side, and discreetly moonwalked backwards across the floor.
It definitely wasn’t virtuosic, but it did have a hint of the uncanny, as the moonwalk inevitably does.
The video ended with her head still down, arms open in a gesture of apparent offering.