They hit the deck, dealing with the cables. Five snaked down from every boom stand and they had to be precisely lined up at the base and thoroughly taped to the Marley floor. “If a dancer trips on a loose cable,” Leo said, “I will blame you.”
Threatened, hungry and manic, Erik and David got progressively obsessive about the job, arguing about the best and least circuitous routes from the bases to the circuit panel. Yet for all their grouchiness, they worked well together. They chatted as they taped, about music, basketball and theater. Will passed by and pretended to peel up an edge of their sweated-over labors. David leapt up and gave ferocious chase through the wings, threatening to strangle Will with a safety cable.
And Daisy brought Erik the world’s most perfect turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips and a brownie.
*
“Look how Tamar does this phrase,” Kees spoke lowly, leaning on the back of the seat beside Erik’s.
“All right,” Erik said, his eyes on the stage, one ear on Kees and the other taking notes from Leo.
“See how she comes out of the turn. Now look how Daisy does it. Watch. Did you see?”
“I think so. It looked smoother? I don’t know.”
“Don’t worry if you can’t say what it was. I just care if you noticed something different.”
They were watching the girls’ quintet. Daisy was good, no question, but Erik hadn’t the means to articulate why. Like a benevolent Svengali, Kees was giving Erik a crash course in dance appreciation. Erik might have resisted had Kees not been such an excellent teacher, and had Daisy not been so relentlessly compelling. He needed help if he was going to speak this girl’s language.
During the alternating runs of the Siciliano pas de deux, Erik strove to take apart the mechanics of partnering and peppered Kees with questions. “How much is the girl balancing and how much is the guy holding her? How does he spin her? Or is she spinning herself?”
Kees was delighted. “He supports her. Watch their hands. She nearly always takes his, not the other way around. He’ll throw her off balance if he grabs her. No, she’s turning herself. He’s there to make the turn come to an attractive finish and possibly coax another revolution out. If he’s any good, that is.”
Then the lifts fascinated Erik, provoking more questions about how much these girls weighed and if the male dancers did any weight training.
“All of them do,” Kees said. “Mandatory.”
“Still, how much is lift and how much is the girl jumping?” Erik asked. “They are jumping, right? They can’t just give dead weight to be hoisted.”
“The trick is all in the plié, how she bends her knees before the lift. It’s the springboard.”
“But they’re dancing slow,” Erik said, a corner of his mouth twisting up in doubt. “How do you get spring without speed?”
“You just do,” Kees said. “Lot of power in a plié if you do it right. And anyway, with lifts it’s not the going up that’s so hard. It’s the coming down.”
On a break, Daisy came and sat down in the aisle by Erik’s seat. She took off her pointe shoes to rest her feet. Erik picked one up.
“Careful, those are pretty gross,” she said.
“I just want to see how they work. Is there wood in here?”
Just as patiently as Kees, she showed him how the shoes were made, with layers of canvas, satin and glue. More terms for him to absorb: box, shank, vamp and binding. He watched her re-tape the toes on her right foot. Most girls wore full-footed tights or socks, but Daisy went barefoot in her shoes, saying she could feel the floor better. She did put a gel spacer between her big and first toes to take the pressure off the bunion joint. Re-shod now, she stood up and rolled through her strong, bare feet, onto her pointes. He watched, mechanical curiosity satisfied.
The more dire interest in her legs, however, had yet to be assuaged.
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