Ranting Details: Just Another Citizen

I didn’t expect to make my return to the stage so soon. Or in quite the manner that I am about to. Yet here I am, standing next to my old colleagues in the wings at New York’s City Center, preparing to walk on stage in jeans and a sweater. Stage left at this particular theater has to be the most cramped backstage I’ve ever encountered—less than four feet of space before a wall of ropes—and as I wait, anxiously tapping my Converse on the ground while other dancers file in around the light booms, part of me wants to grab hold of one of the ropes, release its hook, and fly up into the rafters.

All evening people have been asking me if I’m “going to do it.” The piece going on right now, Citizen by Lauri Stallings, had its world premiere earlier in ABT’s season. I was sitting in the audience during the dress rehearsal when various stagehands, dancers, and children wandered on stage behind the ballet’s performers (at the direction of the choreographer) and stared out at the audience. I didn’t know what to make of it when I was sitting out in my seat, and now I am about to become one of those stragglers, whose population has been growing with each passing show. It will be the first step I’ve taken on stage during a performance since April 2007.

Everyone around me is making jokes. One boy is stripping down to his boxers. Another has a kilt on. Someone even has a video camera to capture all of the action. For them, it’s just another night to try a new and outlandish way to draw attention. To me, it is a reentry into a world I left without choice. I feel myself falling back into my perfectionist-micro-managing dancer mindset as I ask all the particulars about our entry: when do we go? How long do we stay? What do we do? It’s less than thirty seconds on stage, I tell myself. One of the newer corps girls, a face that wasn’t on the roster when I departed from the company, is kind enough to answer a few of my questions and explains to me that we walk out and stare at the audience “when the dancers freeze, and the orchestra hits a loud, prolonged note.”

The pace of the people around me is quickening, as they make last minute adjustments to their outfits. I align the Velcro of the bag on my shoulder, which holds the camera that has become my true companion over the past year; it reassures me things are okay. It’s coming. “It’s soon,” the young blonde says to me. I see my friends on stage, dripping sweat down their costumes of shimmery fabrics and sequins as they execute the frenetic choreography, wrapping arms around each other and propelling their bodies into splayed positions before freezing in a tableau.

“Now,” she says. Strings swell—always my favorite sound out of the orchestra pit—as dancers, technicians, and bystanders emerge from the wings. I feel my posture change; my neck extends, head cocks, and my breath escapes me. The audience is barely visible, as the lights lining the front of each balcony in the auditorium shine in our faces, and I am suddenly a performer again. Part of me wants to sit on the stage for the remainder of the ballet and feel the energy rise up from the floor and into my body. Part of me wants to take a picture. And part of me wants to scream.

Instead, I back into the wings with everybody else, walk out the stage door, and take a breath of the autumn air. Just another citizen.