InkStains story -- from the unpublished Series 2 April
Nov 27, 2022 17:29:00 GMT
Brian Keene likes this
Post by johnurbancik on Nov 27, 2022 17:29:00 GMT
17 April
A wide, mostly empty room, the corners and ceiling lost in shadows. Three sets of six chairs made a triangle around the stage area – though it’s fair to say there wasn’t a stage at all. There were three large cubes, maybe a meter in all directions, and spotlights aimed in their general direction.
A wide, mostly empty room, the corners and ceiling lost in shadows. Three sets of six chairs made a triangle around the stage area – though it’s fair to say there wasn’t a stage at all. There were three large cubes, maybe a meter in all directions, and spotlights aimed in their general direction.
Maybe the music started first. Maybe it was the knocking. The banging. The pounding, so strong the boxes started to shake.
Then the boxes started to move, propelled by arms reached out from as-yet unseen open ends. Because we hadn’t explored our environment but took our seats. We didn’t know.
The girls – the dancers – pushed around the stageless stage in their cubes, turning them until finally one faces each set of chairs.
By now, the music – 5 Pianos, by Morton Feldman – was definitely playing, though I can’t say they were specifically guided by its rhythm. They tossed and turned in their boxes. I could really only see the one, and maybe the occasional limb of one of the others.
She pushed at the edges of her box, going upside down and backwards, all angles, until escaping – one limb at a time, first the arms, one leg before the other.
They danced around the boxes. They leapt on top. They pushed them away. They reveled in their new-found freedom. Finally, the dancers broken free of their containers and moved around the room, circling each other and circling the stage, then running to the very edge, right in front of us, the audience, in our small sets of six seats. Scratching at themselves, their faces and bodies, unused to the vast empty space around them. They ran counter-clockwise, each dancer facing each individual audience, until in the end our original girl faced us, arms open at her sides in a statement of vulnerability, a plea for assistance or maybe merely contact.
Receiving nothing, they retreated, all of them, back into their boxes.
As I left, I couldn’t help feel that I had failed my dancer. If I had but opened my arms, in a display of empathy or sympathy, might she instead have taken that one last step and embraced me – me, instead of the tomb/womb of the box?
The dim lights inside the boxes had gone dark – inside the box of my dancer, just as I was her audience. If I had been just a touch stronger, a bit more courageous, I might have saved her.
The Shadow Within, part of FSU’s Days of Dance Program B, 17 April 2015.