Stardance
by Spider and Jeanne Robinson
“In order to find one’s place in the infinity of being, one must be able both to separate and unite.”
This one’s for Luanna Mountainborne, who may well make prophets of us one day...
Stardance
I
I can’t really say that I knew her, certainly not the way Seroff knew Isadora. All I know of her childhood and adolescence are the anecdotes she chanced to relate in my hearing—just enough to make me certain that all three of the contradictory biographies on the current bestseller list are fictional. All I know of her adult life are the relatively few hours she spent in my presence and on my monitors—more than enough to tell me that every newspaper account I’ve seen is fictional. Carrington probably believed he knew her better than I, and in a limited sense he was correct—but he would never have written about it, and now he is dead.
But I was her video man, since the days when you touched the camera with your hands, and I knew her backstage: a type of relationship like no other on Earth or off it. I don’t believe it can be described to anyone not of the profession—you might think of it as somewhere between co-workers and combat buddies. I was with her the day she came to Skyfac, terrified and determined, to stake her life upon a dream. I watched her work and worked with her for that whole two months, through endless rehearsals, and I have saved every tape and they are not for sale.
And, of course, I saw the Stardance. I was there. I taped it.
I guess I can tell you some things about her.
To begin with, it was not, as Cahill’s Shara and Von Derski’s Dance Unbound: The Creation of New Modern suggest, a lifelong fascination with space and space travel that led her to become her race’s first zero-gravity dancer. Space was a means to her, not an end, and its vast empty immensity scared her at first. Nor was it, as Melberg’s hardcover tabloid The Real Shara Drummond claims, because she lacked the talent to make it as a dancer on Earth. If you think free-fall dancing is easier than conventional dance, you try it. Don’t forget your dropsickness bag.
But there is a grain of truth in Melberg’s slander, as there is in all the best slanders. She could not make it on Earth—but not through lack of talent.
I first saw her in Toronto in July 1989. I headed Toronto Dance Theater’s video department at that time, and I hated every minute of it. I hated everything in those days. The schedule that day called for spending the entire afternoon taping students, a waste of time and tape that I hated more than anything except the phone company. I hadn’t seen the new year’s crop yet, and was not eager to. I love to watch dance done well—the efforts of a tyro are usually as pleasing to me as a first-year violin student in the next apartment is to you.
My leg was bothering me more than usual as I walked into the studio. Norrey saw my face and left a group of young hopefuls to come over. “Charlie…?”
“I know, I know. They’re tender fledglings, Charlie, with egos as fragile as an Easter egg in December. Don’t bite them, Charlie. Don’t even bark at them if you can help it, Charlie.”
She smiled. “Something like that. Leg?”
“Leg.”
Norrey Drummond is a dancer who gets away with looking like a woman because she’s small. There’s about a hundred and fifteen pounds of her, and most of it is heart. She stands about five-four, and is perfectly capable of seeming to tower over the tallest student. She has more energy than the North American Grid, and uses it as efficiently as a vane pump (do you know the principle of a standard piston-type pump? Go look up the principle of a vane pump). There’s a signaturelike uniqueness to her dance, the only reason I can see why she got so few of the really juicy parts in company productions until Modern gave way to New Modern. I liked her because she didn’t pity me. We lived together once, but it didn’t work out.”
“It’s not only the leg,” I admitted. “I hate to see the tender fledglings butcher your choreography.”
“Then you needn’t worry. The piece you’re taping today is by… one of the students.”
“Oh fine. I knew I should have called in sick.” She made a face. “What’s the catch?”
“Eh?”
“Why did the funny thing happen to your voice just as you got to ‘one of my students’?”
She blushed. “Dammit, she’s my sister.”
Norrey and I go back along way together, but I’d never met a sister—not unusual these days, I suppose. My eyebrows rose. “She must be good then.”
“Why, thank you, Charlie.”
“Bullshit. I give compliments right-handed or not at all—I’m not talking about heredity. I mean that you’re so hopelessly ethical you’d bend over backward to avoid nepotism. For you to give your own sister a feature like that, she must be terrific.”
“Charlie, she is,” Norrey said simply.
“We’ll see. What’s her name again?”
“Shara.” Norrey pointed her out, and I understood the rest of the catch. Shara Drummond was ten years younger than her sister—and a good eighteen centimeters taller, with fifteen or eighteen more kilos. I noted absently that she was stunningly beautiful, but it didn’t lessen my dismay—in her best years, Sophia Loren could never have become a Modern dancer. Where Norrey was small, Shara was big, and where Norrey was big, Shara was bigger. If I’d seen her on the street I might have whistled appreciatively—but in the studio I frowned.
“My God, Norrey, she’s enormous.”
“Mother’s second husband was a football player,” she said mournfully. “She’s awfully good.”
“If she is good, that is awful. Poor girl. Well, what do you want me to do?”
“What makes you think I want you to do anything?”
“You’re still standing here.”
“Oh. I guess I am. Well… have lunch with us, Charlie?”
“Why?” I knew perfectly well why, but I expected a polite lie.
Not from Norrey Drummond. “Because you two have something in common, I think.”
I paid her honesty the compliment of not wincing. “I suppose we do.”
“Then you will?”
“Right after the session.”
She twinkled and was gone. In a remarkably short time she had organized the studio full of wandering, chattering young people into something that resembled a dance ensemble if you squinted. They warmed up during the twenty minutes it took me to set up and check out my equipment. I positioned one camera in front of them, one behind, and kept one in my hands for walk-around closeup work. I never triggered it.
There’s a game that you play in your mind. Every time someone catches or is brought to your attention, you begin making guesses about them. You try to extrapolate their character and habits from their appearance. Him? Surly, disorganized—leaves the cap off the toothpaste and drinks boilermakers. Her? Art-student type, probably uses a diaphragm and writes letters in a stylized calligraphy of her own invention. Them? They look like schoolteachers from Miami, probably here to see what snow looks like, attend a convention. Sometimes I come pretty close. I don’t know how I typecast Shara Drummond, in those first twenty minutes. The moment she began to dance, all preconceptions left my mind. She became something elemental, something unknowable, a living bridge between our world and the one the Muses live in.
I know, on an intellectual and academic level, just about all there is to know about dance, and I could not categorize or classify or even really comprehend the dance she danced that afternoon. I saw it, I even appreciated it, but I was not equipped to understand it. My camera dangled from the end of my arm, next to my jaw. Dancers speak of their “center,” the place their motion centers around, often quite near the physical center of gravity. You strive to “dance from your center,” and the “contraction-and-release” idea which underlies so much of Modern dance depends on the center for its focus of energy. Shara’s center seemed to move about the room under its own power, trailing limbs that attached to it by choice rather than necessity. What’s the word for the outermost part of the sun, the part that still shows in an eclipse? Corona? That’s what her limbs were: four lengthy tongues of flame that followed the center in its eccentric, whirling orbit, writhing fluidly around its surface. That the lower two frequently contacted the floor seemed coincidental—indeed the other two touched the floor nearly as regularly.