I was living in a sublet I’d arranged in those NYU faculty buildings between 3rd Street and Bleecker. Some people referred a little facetiously to these buildings as “The Compound.” They were built in the ’50s, and they actually look kind of like Soviet bloc architecture. In fact, I kept being reminded of them when I was riding from the airport to downtown Zagreb.
I hadn’t been there very long, but it already felt sort of like home. Of course, my capacity to feel “at home” under provisional and precarious circumstances is something I’ve developed over time. A dancer has to – and in fact, so does an academic. We don’t really choose the places we live. We go where the gigs are. After I got my undergrad degree at SUNY Purchase, I bounced around for a while until I landed in Stockholm. I was with the RSB from 1988-2004, which may seem like a long time, but as you can perhaps understand, I always felt a little bit like a visitor.
Nils gave up directorship of the ballet in ’93. I worked under Simon, Frank and Petter, and finally Madeleine Onne, who was the one who gently suggested I might want to begin thinking about transitioning to teaching. No hard feelings. I liked Madeleine. I heard she recently took over direction of the Hong Kong Ballet. I wish her well.
Anyway, that was when I moved to Evanston to do my PhD. At least I was already used to the cold. Sven and I worked it out so that I’d visit Stockholm in July and January, and he’d visit me in April and October. The PhD went by in something of a blur. It was good to get back to reading so much. I like theory. Academia suits me. I actually wrote the dissertation pretty quickly. My advisor said dancers were disciplined. It’s true, I’m generally pretty good at setting myself tasks and then following through. It’s just the book revisions that have been holding me up. I had no trouble mounting a theoretical argument. But how to make it more accessible to a broader audience? I felt like I’d hit a wall.
Still, I had no business feeling sorry for myself. It was considered something of a coup that I got this post-doc. It wasn’t the most auspicious time on the academic job market. There was really nothing in the way of academic jobs in Sweden for the kind of thing I did.
Sven and I kept deferring the conversation about what all of this meant for us.
I was also lucky to get that sublet. It was a studio apartment, but fairly spacious, with a balcony. Nearly everybody in the building was NYU faculty, except for some really old people who were already living in the buildings before NYU bought them in 1964. One of the more ancient denizens of the compound lived on my floor. I’m sure she’d seen a lot of NYU tenants come and go, probably some with little concern for the old timers, so I wouldn’t have blamed her for feeling suspicious of recent arrivals. Whenever I saw her I tried to be especially polite. I held the elevator for her as she inched down the hallway with her walker. Sometimes it took her a good three or four minutes. The elevator would start making a honking sound to indicate that I’d been holding it too long, but I persisted. She was hard of hearing so I guess she wasn’t particularly bothered by the obnoxious elevator alarm. Once she’d gotten in safely, I’d smile at her and nod. Then she usually said something accusatory, like, “DIDJOO LEAVE DOSE STINKY BOTTLES IN DA GAHBAGE? SOMEBODY LEF’ SOME STINKY BOTTLES IN DA GAHBAGE!” She screamed on account of her hearing difficulties. I’d try gently to assure her that I wasn’t the culprit, and she’d say, “WHAT?! YA GOTTA SPEAK LOUDAH! MY EAHS AH SHOT!”
After several of these encounters, though, it seemed like she was starting to take a shine to me. At least she started broaching other topics than the accusations. One day we were coming up together in the elevator, and she shouted, “YA KNOW, MY BWUDDA WAS A VEWY IMPAWTAN’ POYSON.”
I shouted, “EXCUSE ME?”
I thought maybe I’d misunderstood her, but she said it again: “MY BWUDDA WAS A VEWY IMPAWTAN’ POYSON.”
I shouted, “OH REALLY?”
She said, “YEAH.” She paused and looked me straight in the eye. “MEL BLANC.”
Perhaps appropriately, I drew a blank. And then it dawned on me: Mel Blanc. The voice of Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, and Tweety Bird. She was Bugs Bunny’s sister.
I said, “WOW. HE WAS IMPORTANT.”
She said, “YEAH. I KNOW.”
After I got back from Zagreb, I did some laundry, went over to the Morton Williams to get some basic provisions, showered, and did a few ballet exercises holding onto a chair for the barre. It might have been more productive to take class, but given my financial situation that seemed like an indulgence. That day I did my routine to the Frank Sinatra album Only the Lonely, in my underwear: pliés, relevés, tendus, dégagés, ronds de jambe, battements. I like to do just the basics, but really slowly. That’s why I put on the Sinatra. He’s so concentrated.
My sublet faced south, and I guess the people living in the north-facing building on the Bleecker side of the superblock could see me if they really wanted to. I mean, they’d need to use binoculars to see much, but if they were determined, they could probably catch me doing these exercises in my underwear. Of course this made me think of Miss Torso in Rear Window, the exhibitionistic ballet dancer across the courtyard. Thelma Ritter’s character predicts she’ll end up “old, fat, and alcoholic.” Hm. Sven and I had watched this movie together when he came to visit in April. Sven was on a film noir kick. We got a few things from Netflix. I hadn’t seen Rear Window in years, though I read an essay about it in a graduate seminar on feminist spectatorship. It was fairly unsympathetic to the Jimmy Stewart character.
I had a flashback to that Jimmy Stewart look-alike in the Arcotel in Zagreb.
What was it with that guy, and what the hell was he doing in Zagreb? I was pretty sure he wasn’t part of the conference – he really didn’t seem to fit in with the PSi crowd – but he was definitely passing through.
Well, I had been, too.
After I finished my barre exercises, I fixed myself a snack (hummous and raw vegetables) and sat down at the computer to move some more commas around. I did that for about forty-five minutes before I decided to let myself go on the Internet for a minute.
Famous last words. At this point, it won’t surprise you that I ended up back on YouTube watching that Satie dance again. I knew as well as you what I was doing, and I knew it meant my “productive” time was over for the day. The moth’s video was up to forty-three hits. Who was watching it? I looked at the column of related videos – unsurprisingly, plenty of Satie, a few just piano solos, and a couple of other choreographies, none of which were of particular interest. There was, however, a video of Natalia Makarova dancing The Dying Swan to Saint-Saëns. It was posted by Schoevia. I clicked on it. It’s pretty shocking. It’s Fokine’s choreography, as you may know, but Makarova’s interpretation is unique, and people tend to have fairly extreme responses to its convulsive qualities.
The comment section was volatile. BubbleChikk14 started it off: “HER ARMS ARE BEAUTIFUL!”
But arakhachatran responded “No her arms are not beautiful. Thats her worst part in thisperformance. You dont understand anything in ballet but try to act like a smart ass.”
That really pissed off yuliya1995 who shot back: “how do you know she has very gentle arms and i bet you cant do that so who do you call a smart ass? its you who is a smart ass who think they know about ballet.”
A few others weighed in, mostly outraged at arakhachatran’s philistinism. Somebody named ahamayoisac took a more Solomonic attitude, acknowledging that the arm movement was not elegant in a typical balletic way, but was expressive of genuine agony and for this reason “perfect.”
Frankly, I love it, but I think arakhachatran had a point. It’s practically spastic.
And then I saw it: a recent comment – dated July 27, 2009 – by falserebelmoth. She must have been watching this video, which might explain its popping up as “related” to her own. Of course, superficially, they were utterly unrelated: Makarova’s emphatic