Totus

A Story by marianas

I'm on stage, hovering around uselessly while the crew wrestles with the huge, white swan sculpture. I have never seen an abstract swan before and it looks like an origami crane: all straight lines and hard edges, yet still evocative of a smooth, graceful shape.

The light is in my eyes and I know, though I cannot see them, that there are others on the marley covering the stage, calling directions to invisible workers on the box-booms and catwalk. The light is harsh and blinding, not softened by any gel or filter, bringing out smooth lines of shadow along the swan's back and the floor upstage. The light enhances the definition of the swan's shape: every edge is clearly outlined, but the smooth faces of the crew are washed out to invisibility, made even worse by the blinding light, which makes it impossible to look directly at anyone, anything. What I know is from glimpses, not constant peering.

White dress frames are brought on. Tutus without dancers, they still move with a certain stately grace, stately like a swan boat, as if filled with ghosts of primas past, giving form to satin and tulle, inanimate fabric. They fill the stage, taking their proper place in the limelight and I am pushed even further out of the way, upstage until—DON'T TOUCH THE SCRIM—I veer left and offstage, behind the deep black of the upstage leg and into the wing, where the darkness blinds instead of the light.

The flyrail is ahead; the faint bluish glow lets me see the ghostly shapes of tall white ropes looming out of the blackness, but nothing else. I turn left, unconscious of the force guiding my feet. The shadows gain definition: black and blacker, but the silence remains absolute. Just behind the blackout curtain there is a whole mischief of men and machinery mounting the sculpture onto rails, counterweighing it and hoisting it to 9 feet, 5 inches. Burly men high above their heads, where light is permitted, haul simultaneously with gloved hands on the tame white ropes that seem so ghostly twenty feet below. Just behind the through the into the down the rabbit hole wardrobe hedge curtain. So close yet separated by time and color, worlds away in the mind. Here, I am alone in the world, for totus mundus agit histrionem and its opposite. No one else exists, only the ghosts of those who trod the boards in years past, phantom piano music and applause, but always silence, silence so deep it echoes, so strong it would conquer noise, defying ~~gravity~~ the ~~rule~~ ‘darkness is only the absence of light; silence is only the absence of noise.’ The dark, the silence, they are entities in their own right, with power…

Then I am back in the light/dark of the wings. Shadows upon, within shadows, but the stage in an orange glow: R37. There are dancers whirling about on stage. I don’t see them. I don’t want to. Who cares to look at sweaty bodies when their shadows spin with them? Each body is split into four, five dancing abstractions of darkness, shifting shape against the ropes, moving with unearthly grace not even hinted at by the heaving bodies on stage. That is beauty. There is music now, piano that is clearly spinning too; anyone can dance his hands down a keyboard and produce a beautiful sound, but it takes a true master to make the music imitate the dancers imitate the music.

The piece is ended. The spinning ceases. The swan is lowered. It’s progress is smooth, no hint that men and not machine manipulate it. Over the rustling breath of an audience eight hundred strong and the heaving pants of exiting dancers, over the downbeat of the next piece, I hear the click of levers being pushed into place and the metallic rattle of the locks. Sounds are too real, too alive.