Breakage

Aspen. Last piece of the evening and the spotlight comes up center and you're standing there in a wide, wide straddle. There is a line of men spread across the stage behind you, their backs facing the audience, and a sea of women on the floor in front of you. No music, because this is the introductory solo to a Nina Simone piece, so you're going to make the music with your tambourine. You're in it. You invoke the spirits, you consecrate the environment that your colleagues are about to dance in with you, you take it back to the grit. No black choreographer who's ever been to a church could put a tambourine in your hand and not include some thigh-slappage with it. So you slap your thigh.

And on the sixth slap of the rim of the tambourine on your thigh, the wood breaks in two or three places and the new pieces of it fly across the stage.

You don't notice because you are possessed. And it's not until you get upstage to join the men that you figure it out. You've only perfomed the ballet three times in life with little rehearsal, so you struggle to remember how much time you have to collect the shards. Each time you shake the tambourine in an arc from the side of your hip to a reach over your head, small metallic plates (responsible for making the noise) get hurled this way and that, creating more mess to sweep up in less time. Later you're going to ask people what these plates are called but right now you have more pressing matters to deal with.

So you begin to depart from the choreography. You leave the line of men and start to improvise African steps to get you closer to the floor to pick up the plates and grab the huge wooden fracture of tambourine on Stage Left. You've planned to exit behind the curtain of the upstage wing, only you don't account for the long metal pipe extended much further out from the cloth leg it is holding in place.

And when you trip and slide into the wing on your stomach, it wouldn't be so bad except that your foot is still on stage. Technically. Someone can see it, bright and wrong in the corner. You scramble to get up and as Desmond asks if you're okay you stammer yes and then run to the next wing to stand there waiting like a girl timing her entrance into the double-dutch ropes, waiting for a moment to go back on stage.

You make it back on stage and thank God that you are center for the rest of the piece. It means you need not worry about the fact that you are the only man up there with no tambourine. It's okay. You know that these are the moments on stage people remember the most. This is the story that your colleagues can't wait to tell...

Rings

Santa Fe. Posh reception in adobe house with high ceilings and very expensive, gorgeous vases everywhere. Southwestern rugs and authentic ponchos on walls that surrounded rooms interior decorated to the hilt. A zen garden in the back yard. We were all exhausted but went to this sort of plenary occasion where the appetizers were small enough to piss off our hungry stomachs. Dancers eat, forget what you heard. Unfortunately, I've been having problems with my phone, and the ringer seldom rings loudly enough to rescue me from any of the unavoidable conversations I had to indugle with funders/donors/patrons/etc. by ringing my phone, so that I could excuse myself and have a good reason.

Then, the head of the board of the company that invited Complexions to perform here gathered everyone's attention for a toast and introduction of key people (i.e., our directors, their directors, etc.).

And my mother called. And of course my phone played it's ditty as loud as it possibly could to sabotage the moment. And the board director whose speech was severely interrupted stood in front of the quarry rock surrounding the fireplace and tried to figure out how to pretend (along with the rest of the room) that she didn't know it was me. I reached into my pocket and quieted the phone, and realized there was no way around claiming it, the way the owner of the ass that passed the gas can never hide.

"It's always that one dancer in the room whose phone just won't shut up," I said.

It worked. Fortunately they laughed - with me? I looked at the missed call and then shared aloud that it was my mother, which of course nobody believed. It flatlined the awkwardness though.

And as usual, when I called her back, I discovered she didn't want anything imporant.

Blessed
June 29

I don't know if I've ever seen a woman with LaChanze's level of theatrical brilliance. To say that she invokes the ineffable insight of someone like Cicely Tyson when she acts is as close as I can come to explaining the level of depth she plunges to in an instant, whenever it is time for her to once again redefine characterization as an exercise in being vs. performing. Her singing voice is one of those astonishing instruments that can billow and press at full power from her chest without any help from falsetto and nasal acrobatics.

But that's not really the special part. What she's able to do is transcend in a way that only complete human beings with infinite access to who they are can. Pretty words don't do the trick describing this. LaChanze engulfs this part because she is a whole person and I believe her always. It motivates all of us. And she makes me want to dance every minute - even ones I'm not supposed to be dancing in - from that guttural, sometimes painful place that I don't always have the strength outside of performance to visit without leaving there kaput. But I want to go anyway. Everytime she opens her mouth to speak or sing, she makes me want to go there. She makes me want to lose myself and transform.


Reading
July 7

At one point I sat in the semi-circle for the reading of the show and I thought to myself, Wow this show has generated some major interest. Ashford and Simpson, Quincy J and Oprah's good friend Gayle sat looking for the boxes of tissue courteously placed beneath the seats of the 30 or so people who got to see this rough draft.

I couldn't resist looking at Alice Walker. From the moment she walked into the room, I could see that her spirit wore something special. I'm not sure exactly what but it was to be felt and not witnessed. It did not overwhelm her sincerity about being happy to sit and enjoy the her work enlivened in this forum.

During the break between run-throughs, I walked up to her, saw the speckles of green framing the bottoms of her pupils and forming small fragments of crescent moon visible underneath her spectacles. I wasn't sure about her accessibility; I've experienced and heard about the unpleasant moments with other renown black women of her league in various fields from opera to writing, women who have been (sometimes understandably) hardened by the difficulty of their treks to the top. So I had pondered carefully about what I would say, how I'd frame my appreciation before it came out of my mouth.

But she smiled when I greeted her and my togetherness toppled. I thanked her clumsily for giving us this gift and told her it was only divine intervention that brought me into it. She had only to say, "You're beautiful. You're a beautiful dancer."

Made my week. Couldn't imagine a better early birthday present.