Adrienne Sharp’s “White Swan, Black Swan,” opens with an image
capturing the sublimity of the dancer’s body in motion. New York City
Ballet (NYCB) dancer Joanna is watching from the wings as her boyfriend
Ridley performs a pas de deux from George Balanchine’s “Jewels.”
“He’s so beautiful, truly soulful, when he’s moving; he has an
absurd kinetic confidence that lets him skim cream through any role,
his body magically and alternately built for speed and gyration,
elongated for purposes of carriage and line,” she says.
While Joanna is enraptured by the lyricism of Ridley’s
dancing, she expresses her frustration with her inability to be “there
with him” as his pas de deux partner can be. This polarizing divide
between performer and spectator is one with which any theatergoer is
familiar.
Can we know what dance means for the dancer that we ogle? The
answer offered by Sharp’s debut collection of 12 interlocking short
stories is a resounding yes.
Alternating between first person and third person omniscient
narration, Sharp vividly renders the inner lives of both 20th century
legends—Balanchine and his muse Suzanne Farrell, Margot Fonteyn and
Rudolf Nureyev, among others—and her own fictive characters—primarily
figured as members of the real NYCB or American Ballet Theater (ABT).
She lends an aura of verisimilitude to her readers’ vicarious
participation in the lived experience of dance.
“Swan Lake,” the classical ballet from which Sharp’s text
takes its title, figures prominently throughout the individual stories
as a metaphor for the resolution of conflicting human desires through
the formalized tensions of dance.
As the narrator of the climatic title story asserts,
“[Audiences] wanted to see a love story, and this was the big one,
‘Swan Lake,’ four acts of love, regret, death, and absolution.” Indeed,
when ABT principals and lovers Lexa and Robbie dance the roles of the
Swan Queen Odette and her prince Seigfried, they exhibit a perfect
“erotic synergy.” Odette’s desire for her prince ultimately defeats the
evil sorcerer von Rothbart, who would keep them apart.
Offstage, the rather less romantic image of Lexa and Robbie’s
relationship is one marked by post-performance pill popping, thrown
punches, and Robbie’s infidelity with ingénue corps member Sandra. The
collection’s expansive cast of dancers all exhibit very human
frailties, struggling with eating disorders (“In the Kingdom of the
Shades”), flirting with drug use (“Wili”), and succumbing to AIDS
(“Departure”).
Sharp’s figuring of professional ballet as a ruthless
taskmaster demanding bodily sacrifice in the pursuit of an artistic
ideal is not a new insight.
Yet “White Swan, Black Swan” exhibits an evocative vibrancy
resulting from Sharp’s privileging of experiential description over
critical terminology: “Like balsa bent into a bow, I am rocked into an
impossible backward C, Nilas holding my arms and one leg above us,
stringing me up. Then I am lashed beneath his body. My leg is extended
high and pressed between us like a sword. Our pelvises meet and pulse.
The audience takes a collective breath.”
This punchy, almost breathless cadence is seductively
accessible to the balletomane and casual observer alike. Sharp adroitly
collapses the distance between performer and spectator, suggesting that
we can all relate to the pas de deux’s pursuit of perfect synchrony
between individuals.
White Swan, Black Swan
By Adrienne Sharp
Ballantine Books
Out Now
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