Dance
DANCE
by
Stephen M. Larson
It doesn't really matter what city it was. It was Seattle, perhaps, or Phoenix; maybe Chicago or Atlanta or Miami; or, yes, even New York. It was large, whatever name it went by, and the plaza at the foot of the high-rise office building in the midst of that city was also large--although the sculptures, the fountain, and the potted trees tried to impose a false intimacy on it. Theirs was a gentle, touching failure, one with a certain beauty of its own that was not completely lost on those entombed in the surrounding buildings. On nice days they would come forth, their computer-paper winding sheets laid neatly on their desks, carrying their lunches and their hungers, to borrow what life they could from the plaza.
The plaza attracted the crowds, and both attracted the street entertainers to delight those who had already suffered four hours of their own entertainment and were confronting the bleak landscape of another four. Sometimes a street theatre staged a scene or two; sometimes a juggler whirled odds and ends borrowed from purses and pockets; sometimes mimes in white, startled faces told silent stories; and once a poet cried love and death and the ozone layer in free verse from the depths of his soul and the base of a squat, ugly metal Picasso. But it was mostly musicians who threaded the urban canyons and the traffic to this concrete stage: A solitary saxophonist standing beneath a drooping sycamore, translating its pathos into sighs and sobs of melody; a string quartet from a nearby conservatory, slipping in a little Bartok and Mozart between the egg salad sandwiches; a group of 19- and 20-year-olds, feeling the pressure of age as they sought the Big Break, and still trying to decide whether to play classic rock or hip-hop; all these and more came with their own hungers for expression and recognition and whatever spare change might float their way.
One particularly fine fall day, when the cool breeze had blown the haze and smog to the west and allowed the warm sun to shine through unfiltered, the pale, noontime crowd found a percussion ensemble already playing by the fountain when they emerged. The variety of performers--young, old, black, white, brown, male, female--was matched by the variety of their instruments. A few were immediately recognizable--the congas, for example, or the tambourines, or the claves and maracas and chimes; others, such as the steel drums or the small gamelan, were identifiable only by some. But many were known only to those who had studied the smaller cultures of South America or Jamaica or Africa or Indonesia. The rhythms and permutations had seen other suns as well, and the snatches of melody were as exotic as the instruments from which they emerged. And all was played against the visual and aural backdrop of the fountain, the hiss of the water being woven into the tapestry of the music, the flashing droplets merging with the flicker of brass and copper and steel, until the audience stood swaying almost imperceptibly and chewing in time to the mesmerizing pulse.
The young man standing atop the low, Miro mosaic-tiled wall was, at first, unnoticed. No one had marked his arrival, although he certainly had not been there when they had first gathered. But now, heads and eyes were turning from the percussionists to the figure beyond the fringe of the crowd, drawn by the electricity of his immobility. He stood, but not at rest. He crouched ever so slightly, his knees bent, one foot a little ahead of the other. His black pants stretched tight across his thickly muscled thighs. His long-sleeved, black shirt clung to his wiry, tightly muscled torso. His arms hung by his sides, but not at ease--they were held a little away from his body, the hands curled into loose claws, one held an inch or two higher than the other. His gaunt, expressionless face was clean-shaven, his blue-black hair moderately short and brushed back. The shadows between his high, sharp cheekbones and his deep-set black eyes could have been artificially applied, but weren't. Against all this darkness, his pale skin gleamed like the midnight moon.
He stood as if he were a part of the mosaic wall and the sculptures, unblinking, his gaze fixed somewhere above the crowd, until the percussionists paused. Less than a pause, actually; it was a gasp, a startled break in the rhythm, but not in the sound. From somewhere in the midst of the musicians rose a piercing, bloodless, wordless cry. It sliced through the clatter of echoed percussion and splatter of falling water, seizing the breath from between the jaws of the listeners, snapping their heads around. But before anyone could even think of focusing their senses on those by the fountain, even as their heads were twisting to the front, a visual explosion pulled their eyes back to the mosaic. The black-clad figure leapt from the wall.
His feet were bare. Those closest to him could see those feet as he arced past, could see them later as in a photograph, a frozen instant in their memories. They were long and slender, incredibly delicate looking, yet with thick yellow calluses dark against the blue-veined marble of the upper skin. They were beautiful, and those who could see them most clearly bit their lips as those beautiful feet struck the pavement. The crash of drums that accompanied the meeting of flesh and concrete made the watchers wince as though the graceful arches and ankles themselves had shattered. Then the feet began moving in white, blurry streaks as the percussionists took up the jungle rhythms again.
The pulse of the music, powerful and exotic before, was now barbaric. It seized the young man and whirled and threw him across the plaza. He jerked back and forth, arms and legs thrusting, scything the air, pressing against the crowd. Now there. Now here. His fever-heat drove them back until they formed a wide arch, its ends anchored a dozen feet from the fountain. Within this arena he danced his wild bacchanal, his body slung like a puppet wielded by a child in the throes of a tantrum. He danced in a passion, but a passion without fire, for his face remained empty of emotion, his lips held rigidly apart just far enough to allow his breath to hiss through. There was neither anger nor joy, desire nor despair in his eyes, and his watchers wanted to pull away from his icy violence. But the hypnotic savagery of the music and the dance held them in an unbreakable grip, and they trembled as they watched.
Then, suddenly, a change. The volume dropped and the opening motif returned in the instruments. Once again they mingled with the unceasing melody of the fountain. The dancer came to rest in a perfect echo of his opening stance atop the wall. He stared at the crowd and they stared back and both panted, though not for the same reasons. And then, with slow, jerking steps, he advanced.
The blankness of his face had not changed, and yet it was transformed. For although the rest of his features remained as lifeless and cold as the buildings that now seemed to stifle the plaza, his eyes were alive. No--they were beyond alive; they were themselves living creatures that reached out in hunger as he slowly paced the perimeter of the arch, burning each face they touched, defiantly flinging raw emotion at these professional mannequins. And as the eyes touched them, each watcher felt something stir in a carefully hidden place. For one it was anger; for another, fear; for still another, desire. But from the dancer himself, the men felt only a contemptuous challenge, as though it were automatically assumed that the challenge would go unanswered, while the women felt only a compelling command to step forward, join the dance, and--what? They didn't know. But they, like the men, pulled back, shivering.
He started at the center of the arch and worked his way to one end, then crossed to the other. And when he had returned to the center, she was there. Her arrival, like his, had gone unmarked, although she must have slipped through the thickest part of the crowd. She stood just within the edge of the arch, and when his eyes locked on her, he froze. His body was once again a near-perfect echo of his first position. This time, however, his right hand was extended to her.
She smiled and stepped forward, the fringe of people parting before her. Her left hand was extended to his right, but he retreated just before they met. She advanced, matching her languid, flowing steps to his taut, jerking ones. They reached the center of the arched arena, where they paused for the watchers to study her.
She was a deep, rich black with red in its depths. Her hair, nearly as dark as her skin with flashes and sparks of that same red, was gathered tightly at the base of her skull, then allowed to spill luxuriously down her back past her waist. She was as slender and as tightly muscled as he, but hers was the supple slenderness of a swan's neck to his lightning-bolt sharpnesses. She wore a white leotard and a soft, loose, white summer dress that swirled like the foam in the fountain. On her long, thin feet were soft, white slippers. Her body was like liquid, and her face was a dance in itself.
They stood frozen in mid-pace. Then she began to sway back and forth; just a little at first, then a little more, until she was suddenly gliding across the concrete. The percussion line rippled and swirled with shimmering shivers of wind chimes and bell trees. She was a creature of the air, her existence a playful celebration. She was a leaf, plucked and joyfully spun to and fro. She leapt, she twirled; she was bound to the earth only by the technicality of gravity. And though her slippers regularly brushed the concrete, she seemed always to float just above it. She darted around the watching human arch, drawing the heart of now one, now another, into her exultation. And then, as she passed in front of the young man who seemed somehow to have conjured her, he sprang once more to life.
They moved together, yet separately, as the music changed again. Her long, sensuous line now wove its subtle way between his jarring syncopations. She dipped smoothly beneath his outthrust arm; he darted and leapt around her silken arabesques. She sketched caresses over him; he slashed and stabbed at her. Yet, theirs was not a dance of anger and antagonism, but one of completion, for it soon became clear that each was echoing and responding to the other--his mad whirls were her arabesques given power; her caresses were his thrusts given tenderness. Though she was as sensuous as he was mechanical, though he was as icy as she was passionate, they blended into a wrenching whole.
They danced! They flung themselves at each other with reckless precision. They sent wave upon wave of raw energy crashing through the plaza while the watchers struggled for each strangled breath and clutched their brown paper sacks in an effort not to drown. Black and white, white and black, they offered themselves to each other, inviting any and all to share their blazing intimacy, without ever once touching each other. Every step, every twist of a hand or a shoulder or a hip shouted an invitation to join them, but the freer their dance became, the more the onlookers felt their own feet sink into the pavement, the more they felt the iron links chaining their own hands to the concrete. Tears formed in many eyes, but even these were too heavy to rise and spill over the rims.
And still the dancers spun in ever-tightening circles, oblivious to all around them. The music grew more frantic; the yearning of the crowd swelled and deepened, all pressed inexorably toward some explosive release. And then--it was over. As quickly and abruptly as that, it ended. The dancers slammed to a halt, motionless except for one final swirl of her dress and hair, the last echoes of the percussion faded into the splashing of the fountain, and the people were left feeling as though the ground had dropped away, taking their stomachs with it. They stood blinking, disoriented, staring at the dancers, waiting for something to happen. But the dancers did not stir. They stood within a finger's width of each other. His left foot was flat on the concrete, his right heel was raised. His entire body reached up, twisting slightly to the right, bending forward. His left arm was thrust behind him; his right was curved over and around her. She crouched slightly, her right leg forward, her left stretched behind her. Her back was arched. Her left arm curved around his hip, her right hand reached for his left. They still did not touch. But their faces were the most arresting part of the picture. He, whose features had been so lifeless, now stared at her with desperate desire, lips parted, eyes pleading; she, whose features had revealed her heart and soul, stared past him, her jaw clenched, her eyes cold and dead.
The silence stretched as the audience slowly struggled out of their trance. A few hands were raised but never met; applause did not seem right. The musicians were quietly packing up their instruments, neither speaking to nor looking at one another. Still the dancers stood, frozen. The crowd drifted apart. People looked at watches, murmured to one another, carried their half-eaten sandwiches and untouched desserts back into the building. Someone laughed, but it was quickly stifled. And still the dancers stood, motionless.
For the next ten or fifteen minutes, anyone in the building who glanced out a window and down at the plaza could see the two dancers like a new sculpture--a study in black and white, a study in passion and ice--and for a moment he or she would be back under the sun, the percussion pounding through his or her body, the yearning pulsing deeper than that. Many tried to ignore the tableau, but found themselves watching anyway as the dancers vanished and reappeared in the new crowds that hurried across the concrete to some other life. Then a particularly large group of Japanese businessmen on their way to a meeting engulfed the pair, and when the businessmen had vanished, so had the dancers.
It took the rest of the day, but those in the building could finally pass a window without glancing out and down. When they left for home, most were able to cross the plaza without a slight shiver. And the following noon, the audience greeted a surprised and grateful ventriloquist with extra loud laughter and prolonged applause.
THE END
Copyright ?2001 by Stephen M. Larson
For more of my work, please visit Acoustic Words.
by
Stephen M. Larson
It doesn't really matter what city it was. It was Seattle, perhaps, or Phoenix; maybe Chicago or Atlanta or Miami; or, yes, even New York. It was large, whatever name it went by, and the plaza at the foot of the high-rise office building in the midst of that city was also large--although the sculptures, the fountain, and the potted trees tried to impose a false intimacy on it. Theirs was a gentle, touching failure, one with a certain beauty of its own that was not completely lost on those entombed in the surrounding buildings. On nice days they would come forth, their computer-paper winding sheets laid neatly on their desks, carrying their lunches and their hungers, to borrow what life they could from the plaza.
The plaza attracted the crowds, and both attracted the street entertainers to delight those who had already suffered four hours of their own entertainment and were confronting the bleak landscape of another four. Sometimes a street theatre staged a scene or two; sometimes a juggler whirled odds and ends borrowed from purses and pockets; sometimes mimes in white, startled faces told silent stories; and once a poet cried love and death and the ozone layer in free verse from the depths of his soul and the base of a squat, ugly metal Picasso. But it was mostly musicians who threaded the urban canyons and the traffic to this concrete stage: A solitary saxophonist standing beneath a drooping sycamore, translating its pathos into sighs and sobs of melody; a string quartet from a nearby conservatory, slipping in a little Bartok and Mozart between the egg salad sandwiches; a group of 19- and 20-year-olds, feeling the pressure of age as they sought the Big Break, and still trying to decide whether to play classic rock or hip-hop; all these and more came with their own hungers for expression and recognition and whatever spare change might float their way.
One particularly fine fall day, when the cool breeze had blown the haze and smog to the west and allowed the warm sun to shine through unfiltered, the pale, noontime crowd found a percussion ensemble already playing by the fountain when they emerged. The variety of performers--young, old, black, white, brown, male, female--was matched by the variety of their instruments. A few were immediately recognizable--the congas, for example, or the tambourines, or the claves and maracas and chimes; others, such as the steel drums or the small gamelan, were identifiable only by some. But many were known only to those who had studied the smaller cultures of South America or Jamaica or Africa or Indonesia. The rhythms and permutations had seen other suns as well, and the snatches of melody were as exotic as the instruments from which they emerged. And all was played against the visual and aural backdrop of the fountain, the hiss of the water being woven into the tapestry of the music, the flashing droplets merging with the flicker of brass and copper and steel, until the audience stood swaying almost imperceptibly and chewing in time to the mesmerizing pulse.
The young man standing atop the low, Miro mosaic-tiled wall was, at first, unnoticed. No one had marked his arrival, although he certainly had not been there when they had first gathered. But now, heads and eyes were turning from the percussionists to the figure beyond the fringe of the crowd, drawn by the electricity of his immobility. He stood, but not at rest. He crouched ever so slightly, his knees bent, one foot a little ahead of the other. His black pants stretched tight across his thickly muscled thighs. His long-sleeved, black shirt clung to his wiry, tightly muscled torso. His arms hung by his sides, but not at ease--they were held a little away from his body, the hands curled into loose claws, one held an inch or two higher than the other. His gaunt, expressionless face was clean-shaven, his blue-black hair moderately short and brushed back. The shadows between his high, sharp cheekbones and his deep-set black eyes could have been artificially applied, but weren't. Against all this darkness, his pale skin gleamed like the midnight moon.
He stood as if he were a part of the mosaic wall and the sculptures, unblinking, his gaze fixed somewhere above the crowd, until the percussionists paused. Less than a pause, actually; it was a gasp, a startled break in the rhythm, but not in the sound. From somewhere in the midst of the musicians rose a piercing, bloodless, wordless cry. It sliced through the clatter of echoed percussion and splatter of falling water, seizing the breath from between the jaws of the listeners, snapping their heads around. But before anyone could even think of focusing their senses on those by the fountain, even as their heads were twisting to the front, a visual explosion pulled their eyes back to the mosaic. The black-clad figure leapt from the wall.
His feet were bare. Those closest to him could see those feet as he arced past, could see them later as in a photograph, a frozen instant in their memories. They were long and slender, incredibly delicate looking, yet with thick yellow calluses dark against the blue-veined marble of the upper skin. They were beautiful, and those who could see them most clearly bit their lips as those beautiful feet struck the pavement. The crash of drums that accompanied the meeting of flesh and concrete made the watchers wince as though the graceful arches and ankles themselves had shattered. Then the feet began moving in white, blurry streaks as the percussionists took up the jungle rhythms again.
The pulse of the music, powerful and exotic before, was now barbaric. It seized the young man and whirled and threw him across the plaza. He jerked back and forth, arms and legs thrusting, scything the air, pressing against the crowd. Now there. Now here. His fever-heat drove them back until they formed a wide arch, its ends anchored a dozen feet from the fountain. Within this arena he danced his wild bacchanal, his body slung like a puppet wielded by a child in the throes of a tantrum. He danced in a passion, but a passion without fire, for his face remained empty of emotion, his lips held rigidly apart just far enough to allow his breath to hiss through. There was neither anger nor joy, desire nor despair in his eyes, and his watchers wanted to pull away from his icy violence. But the hypnotic savagery of the music and the dance held them in an unbreakable grip, and they trembled as they watched.
Then, suddenly, a change. The volume dropped and the opening motif returned in the instruments. Once again they mingled with the unceasing melody of the fountain. The dancer came to rest in a perfect echo of his opening stance atop the wall. He stared at the crowd and they stared back and both panted, though not for the same reasons. And then, with slow, jerking steps, he advanced.
The blankness of his face had not changed, and yet it was transformed. For although the rest of his features remained as lifeless and cold as the buildings that now seemed to stifle the plaza, his eyes were alive. No--they were beyond alive; they were themselves living creatures that reached out in hunger as he slowly paced the perimeter of the arch, burning each face they touched, defiantly flinging raw emotion at these professional mannequins. And as the eyes touched them, each watcher felt something stir in a carefully hidden place. For one it was anger; for another, fear; for still another, desire. But from the dancer himself, the men felt only a contemptuous challenge, as though it were automatically assumed that the challenge would go unanswered, while the women felt only a compelling command to step forward, join the dance, and--what? They didn't know. But they, like the men, pulled back, shivering.
He started at the center of the arch and worked his way to one end, then crossed to the other. And when he had returned to the center, she was there. Her arrival, like his, had gone unmarked, although she must have slipped through the thickest part of the crowd. She stood just within the edge of the arch, and when his eyes locked on her, he froze. His body was once again a near-perfect echo of his first position. This time, however, his right hand was extended to her.
She smiled and stepped forward, the fringe of people parting before her. Her left hand was extended to his right, but he retreated just before they met. She advanced, matching her languid, flowing steps to his taut, jerking ones. They reached the center of the arched arena, where they paused for the watchers to study her.
She was a deep, rich black with red in its depths. Her hair, nearly as dark as her skin with flashes and sparks of that same red, was gathered tightly at the base of her skull, then allowed to spill luxuriously down her back past her waist. She was as slender and as tightly muscled as he, but hers was the supple slenderness of a swan's neck to his lightning-bolt sharpnesses. She wore a white leotard and a soft, loose, white summer dress that swirled like the foam in the fountain. On her long, thin feet were soft, white slippers. Her body was like liquid, and her face was a dance in itself.
They stood frozen in mid-pace. Then she began to sway back and forth; just a little at first, then a little more, until she was suddenly gliding across the concrete. The percussion line rippled and swirled with shimmering shivers of wind chimes and bell trees. She was a creature of the air, her existence a playful celebration. She was a leaf, plucked and joyfully spun to and fro. She leapt, she twirled; she was bound to the earth only by the technicality of gravity. And though her slippers regularly brushed the concrete, she seemed always to float just above it. She darted around the watching human arch, drawing the heart of now one, now another, into her exultation. And then, as she passed in front of the young man who seemed somehow to have conjured her, he sprang once more to life.
They moved together, yet separately, as the music changed again. Her long, sensuous line now wove its subtle way between his jarring syncopations. She dipped smoothly beneath his outthrust arm; he darted and leapt around her silken arabesques. She sketched caresses over him; he slashed and stabbed at her. Yet, theirs was not a dance of anger and antagonism, but one of completion, for it soon became clear that each was echoing and responding to the other--his mad whirls were her arabesques given power; her caresses were his thrusts given tenderness. Though she was as sensuous as he was mechanical, though he was as icy as she was passionate, they blended into a wrenching whole.
They danced! They flung themselves at each other with reckless precision. They sent wave upon wave of raw energy crashing through the plaza while the watchers struggled for each strangled breath and clutched their brown paper sacks in an effort not to drown. Black and white, white and black, they offered themselves to each other, inviting any and all to share their blazing intimacy, without ever once touching each other. Every step, every twist of a hand or a shoulder or a hip shouted an invitation to join them, but the freer their dance became, the more the onlookers felt their own feet sink into the pavement, the more they felt the iron links chaining their own hands to the concrete. Tears formed in many eyes, but even these were too heavy to rise and spill over the rims.
And still the dancers spun in ever-tightening circles, oblivious to all around them. The music grew more frantic; the yearning of the crowd swelled and deepened, all pressed inexorably toward some explosive release. And then--it was over. As quickly and abruptly as that, it ended. The dancers slammed to a halt, motionless except for one final swirl of her dress and hair, the last echoes of the percussion faded into the splashing of the fountain, and the people were left feeling as though the ground had dropped away, taking their stomachs with it. They stood blinking, disoriented, staring at the dancers, waiting for something to happen. But the dancers did not stir. They stood within a finger's width of each other. His left foot was flat on the concrete, his right heel was raised. His entire body reached up, twisting slightly to the right, bending forward. His left arm was thrust behind him; his right was curved over and around her. She crouched slightly, her right leg forward, her left stretched behind her. Her back was arched. Her left arm curved around his hip, her right hand reached for his left. They still did not touch. But their faces were the most arresting part of the picture. He, whose features had been so lifeless, now stared at her with desperate desire, lips parted, eyes pleading; she, whose features had revealed her heart and soul, stared past him, her jaw clenched, her eyes cold and dead.
The silence stretched as the audience slowly struggled out of their trance. A few hands were raised but never met; applause did not seem right. The musicians were quietly packing up their instruments, neither speaking to nor looking at one another. Still the dancers stood, frozen. The crowd drifted apart. People looked at watches, murmured to one another, carried their half-eaten sandwiches and untouched desserts back into the building. Someone laughed, but it was quickly stifled. And still the dancers stood, motionless.
For the next ten or fifteen minutes, anyone in the building who glanced out a window and down at the plaza could see the two dancers like a new sculpture--a study in black and white, a study in passion and ice--and for a moment he or she would be back under the sun, the percussion pounding through his or her body, the yearning pulsing deeper than that. Many tried to ignore the tableau, but found themselves watching anyway as the dancers vanished and reappeared in the new crowds that hurried across the concrete to some other life. Then a particularly large group of Japanese businessmen on their way to a meeting engulfed the pair, and when the businessmen had vanished, so had the dancers.
It took the rest of the day, but those in the building could finally pass a window without glancing out and down. When they left for home, most were able to cross the plaza without a slight shiver. And the following noon, the audience greeted a surprised and grateful ventriloquist with extra loud laughter and prolonged applause.
THE END
Copyright ?2001 by Stephen M. Larson
For more of my work, please visit Acoustic Words.
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