And yet, throughout the rest of the rehearsal, whenever she wasn’t dancing, Daisy kept coming back to their rows of seats. Coming, it seemed, to sit somewhere in Erik’s general vicinity.
“Well, now, Keesja,” David said after one such visit. “We know Daisy never comes to sit with me.”
“We know she’s not after me,” Kees said, grinning. “Sunday’s my gay day.”
In unison, they turned eyes to Erik.
“She must like you,” David said with a sigh.
Coax Another Revolution
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” David said to Erik as they arrived at the theater Monday afternoon.
Leo gathered his crew for a short meeting. “What do you see before you?” he asked Erik and Allison Pierce, the two freshmen. They exchanged confused glances, looking for a trick question within the obvious.
“A stage?” Allison said.
“Wrong. David?”
“A fish tank,” David said, sighing and cleaning his fingernails with the tip of a screw.
“Exactly. Dancers live in light as fish live in water. Jean Rosenthal, The Magic of Light. If you haven’t read it, read it, and if you’ve already read it, read it again. Erik, stop writing things on your hand. Learn to trust your memory.”
Erik sheepishly put his pen and his hand down.
The normally laid-back Leo was pacing briskly. “If you’ve never lit a dance concert before, forget everything you thought you knew. This is all different. It will take us half an hour to hang all the instruments on the booms. To focus them? If we’re lucky, we’ll get out of here at midnight. In fact, if you have pressing business at the DMV or a root canal scheduled, I’d go now and have a better time. This will be tedious, boring work and the dancers are going to be grouchy. Stay out of their way because they kick high, they kick fast and they kick hard. Any questions?”
None. The stage techs rose. Unless perching on a bar or crawling on your stomach on the catwalk qualified as sitting, nobody sat again for three hours.
“On a lighting boom,” Leo said, working with Erik and Allison, “the lantern lowest to the floor is called the shin buster. Which is self-explanatory. An inexperienced dancer will bump into them. And they will blame you when they do. We just knock them back into line.”
“The dancers?” Allison asked, wide-eyed.
“The lanterns,” Erik murmured.
“Booms can have a low-and mid-shin buster,” Leo said. “As you can see we’re wiring a mid-lantern for all eight.” He went on explaining how these two lowest fixtures were the most crucial. They kept the light on the moving bodies without reflecting off the floor, allowing the dancers to appear floating in space, not unlike fish in an aquarium.
True to Leo’s prediction, the booms were hung in no time and hoisted to attention in the wings when the dancers arrived. They were all somewhat sloppily dressed. None of the girls had their pointe shoes on and a lot of them wore their hair down.
“Business casual,” David said.
Indeed, the company exuded more the air of a pajama party than a rehearsal. As the lights were being designed and focused and the cues recorded, the dancers had little to do but stand in the generalized areas of each piece’s choreography and be bored.
Erik quickly learned dancers hated nothing more than standing still and being bored.
Meanwhile, eight boom stands divvied among six techs and two ladders meant a constant do-si-do backstage and across the stage. The potential to trip over something or someone was a constant threat. Multiplied by the seven Bach Variations over two hours, and Erik began to wish he’d eaten a more substantial lunch.