The tour will utilize two thirds of the company’s dancers and require the ministrations of: the artistic director, the makeup artist and the physical therapist, among others. I am there to give the preperformance talk, as I also do when the company dances in New York.
The plane takes off in late afternoon, heading away from a city where ordinary days, as it used to be said, are transformed into events, a city where anything can happen, and where people are too energetic or too restless to tolerate even a mild degree of boredom.
The next morning in Kansas City we wake to find that an ordinary New York day has been transformed into an event. By 8:30 a.m., Kansas City time, the company gathers backstage, huddling around a dusty 10-inch TV. A thousand miles away, bodies are falling out of the sky. In the city where anything can happen, the towers were burning.
An hour later, both towers have fallen. The country is shutting down. Still, in Kansas City, countless calls reach the presenter. Please, the callers say, don’t cancel tonight’s performance.
The presenter speaks to Kevin McKenzie, the artistic director. She wants the performance to go on as scheduled. McKenzie agrees. He goes backstage to tell the dancers.
They refuse. The dancers are young, newly devastated. They want to show respect for citizens of their own city. They do not want to put on costumes and dance a Paul Taylor ballet in front of a backdrop of the New York skyline, circa 1932. This is well meant, but pointless in the way that any gesture is pointless if it requires you to do nothing. If they dance, on the other hand, this unthinkable day would end with a small but undeniable triumph. It would be a way of saying no one can break us. To dance is to inspire.
The dancers hurry to their dressing rooms. Minutes later they reappear in the wings. The women wear classic tutu’s each of which is a different hue. The first ballet, “Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1,” is a neoclassical work for eight leading dancers and a corps of 16. It was created in 1987 by an ABT dancer, Clark Tippet, who died a few years later.
The house lights go down. The stage goes dark. The dancers step onstage and take their places.
On the house side of the curtain, the silent audience anticipates the moment when the curtain will rise. On the stage side of the curtain the silent dancers anticipate the same moment. They are all waiting in the dark. This is the one time in the evening when there is no difference between what is happening among the audience and among the dancers.
The house is filled with the women and men who felt a need to be here. Ballet is a haven, where lovely women and handsome men do what cannot be done in the ordinary course of things. Tonight, of all nights, havens are necessary.
The curtain rises. Onstage, the dancers assume a simple, classic stance: feet slightly apart, backs straight, heads raised. They begin to move. Each step they take is a step that dancers have taken for 300 years. Every step binds them to centuries of tradition and, by extension, to all the women and all the men who struggled to create what is lovely. At the close of the nation’s most dreadful day, they give us a stay against reality; in the wake of devastation they give us Order. In the wake of brutality they give us Grace. In the wake of horror they give us Beauty. In the face of senselessness they give us meaning. These wraithlike creatures are spiritual warriors. What the terrorists sought to take from our world is precisely what they return to it.
