“Mmm.” Worse and worse. Suppose Einstein had had aphasia? “Why couldn’t you have been a rotten dancer? That’d just be irony. This”—I pointed to the tape—“is high tragedy.”
“Aren’t you going to tell me I can still dance for myself?”
“No. For you that’d be worse than not dancing at all.”
“My God, you’re perceptive. Or am I that easy to read?”
I shrugged.
“Oh Charlie,” she burst out, “what am I going to do?”
“You’d better not ask me that.” My voice sounded funny.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m already two-thirds in love with you. And because you’re not in love with me and never will be. And so that is the sort of question you shouldn’t ask me.”
It jolted her a little, but she recovered quickly. Her eyes softened, and she shook her head slowly. “You even know why I’m not, don’t you?”
“And why you won’t be.”
I was terribly afraid she was going to say, “Charlie, I’m sorry,” but she surprised me again. What she said was, “I can count on the fingers of one foot the number of grown-up men I’ve ever met. I’m grateful for you. I guess ironic tragedies come in pairs?”
“Sometimes.”
“Well, now all I have to do is figure out what to do with my life. That should kill the weekend.”
“Will you continue your classes?”
“Might as well. It’s never a waste of time to study. Norrey’s teaching me things.”
All of a sudden my mind started to percolate. Man is a rational animal, right? Right? “What if I had a better idea?”
“If you’ve got another idea, it’s better. Speak.”
“Do you have to have an audience? I mean, does it have to be live?”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe there’s a back way in. Look, they’re building tape facilities into all the TVs nowadays, right? And by now everybody has collected all the old movies and Ernie Kovacs programs and such that they always wanted, and now they’re looking for new stuff. Exotic stuff, too esoteric for network or local broadcast, stuff that—”
“The independent video companies, you’re talking about.”
“Right. TDT is thinking of entering the market, and the Graham company already has.”
“So?”
“So suppose we go freelance? You and me? You dance it and I’ll tape it: a straight business deal. I’ve got a few connections, and I can get more. I could name you ten acts in the music business right now that never go on tour—just record and record. Why don’t you bypass the structure of the dance companies and take a chance on the public? Maybe word of mouth could—”
Her face was beginning to light up like a jack-o’-lantern. “Charlie, do you think it could work? Do you really think so?”
“I don’t think it has a snowball’s chance.” I crossed the room, opened up the beer fridge, took out the snowball I keep there in the summer, and tossed it at her. She caught it, but just barely, and when she realized what it was, she burst out laughing. “I’ve got just enough faith in the idea to quit working for TDT and put my time into it. I’ll invest my time, my tape, my equipment and my savings. Ante up.”
She tried to get sober, but the snowball froze her fingers and she broke up again. “A snowball in July. You madman. Count me in. I’ve got a little money saved. And… and I guess I don’t have much choice, do I?”
“I guess not.”
II
The next three years were some of the most exciting years of my life, of both our lives. While I watched and taped, Shara transformed herself from a potentially great dancer into something truly awesome. She did something I’m not sure I can explain.
She became dance’s analogue of the jazzman.
Dance was, for Shara, self-expression, pure and simple, first, last, and always. Once she freed herself from the attempt to fit into the world of company dance, she came to regard choreography per se as an obstacle to her self-expression, as a preprogrammed rut, inexorable as a script and as limiting. And so she devalued it.
A jazzman may blow Night in Tunisia for a dozen consecutive nights, and each evening will be a different experience, as he interprets and reinterprets the melody according to his mood of the moment. Total unity of artist and his art: spontaneous creation. The melodic starting point distinguishes the result from pure anarchy.
In just this way Shara devalued preperformance choreography to a starting point, a framework on which to build whatever the moment demanded, and then jammed around it. She learned in those three busy years to dismantle the interface between herself and her dance. Dancers have always tended to sneer at improv dancing, even while they practiced it, in the studio, for the looseness it gave. They failed to see that planned improv, improv around a theme fully thought out in advance, was the natural next step in dance. Shara took the step. You must be very, very good to get away with that much freedom. She was good enough.
There’s no point in detailing the professional fortunes of Drumstead Enterprises over those three years. We worked hard, we made some magnificent tapes, and we couldn’t sell them for paperweights. A home video-cassette industry indeed grew—and they knew as much about Modern dance as the record industry knew about the blues when they started. The big outfits wanted credentials, and the little outfits wanted cheap talent. Finally we even got desperate enough to try the schlock houses—and learned what we already knew. They didn’t have the distribution, the prestige, or the technical specs for the critics to pay any attention to them. Word-of-mouth advertising is like a gene pool—if it isn’t a certain minimum size to start with, it doesn’t get any-where. “Spider” John Koerner is an incredibly talented musician and songwriter who had been making and selling his own records since 1972. How many of you have ever heard of him?
In May of 1992 I opened my mailbox in the lobby and found the letter from VisuEnt Inc., terminating our option with deepest sorrow and no severance. I went straight over to Shara’s apartment, and my leg felt like the bone marrow had been replaced with thermite and ignited. It was a very long walk.
She was working on Weight Is A Verb when I got there. Converting her big living room into a studio had cost time, energy, skullsweat, and a fat bribe to the landlord, but it was cheaper than renting time in a studio, considering the sets we wanted. It looked like high mountain country that day, and I hung my hat on a fake alder when I entered.
She flashed me a smile and kept moving, building up to greater and greater leaps. She looked like the most beautiful mountain goat I ever saw. I was in a foul mood and I wanted to kill the music (McLaughlin and Miles together, leaping some themselves), but I never could interrupt Shara when she was dancing. She built it gradually, with directional counterpoint, until she seemed to hurl herself into the air, stay there until she was damned good and ready, and then hurl herself down again. Sometimes she rolled when she hit and some-times she landed on her hands, and always the energy of falling was transmuted into some new movement instead of being absorbed. It was total energy output, and by the time she was done I had calmed down enough to be almost philosophical about our mutual professional ruin.
She ended up collapsed in upon herself, head bowed, exquisitely humbled in her attempt to defy gravity. I couldn’t help applauding. It felt corny, but I couldn’t help it.
“Thank you, Charlie.”
“I’ll be damned. Weight is a verb. I thought you were crazy when you told me the title.”