Sleight (26 page)

“[UNTITLED]” REVIEW

BY ALDEN KEIRNAN, REUTERS

JANUARY 2001, 10:16 GMT

CAPE TOWN (REUTERS) — Revolution. There is no other way to say it. The two most lauded American sleight troupes, Kepler and Monk, joined forces yesterday in a performance that must be seen to be comprehended, and perhaps not even then. There is no question that the achievement is extraordinary, but how to parse it? I shall work chronologically, as I can think of no other method of organization, although after my experience at the theatre last night, time strikes me as largely irrelevant.

I entered the lobby. I was anxious, as the hype for this performance was unprecedented. The questions in my head, however, were petty: Would West continue to get away with his experimentation? Would the bad boy of sleight produce something that would finally get his troupe ousted by the International Board? Would his endless novelty sport any substance?

And what did I receive for my skepticism? A novel substance. An actual “original thing.”

First, I took a playbill from an usher, noting as I did that the sleight had no title. I was initially put off by West’s pretension, but the work earned this lack. Conversely, he supplied the audience with the names of the sleightists—unheard of! And beside each name was printed the name of a color. Although he didn’t divide the sleightists into their respective troupes, this level of identification alone was astounding. Since its inception, sleight has operated as an art form of coordinated anonymity. West color-coated his sleightists like Easter candy, and the effect was nothing less than psychedelic—if that word has retained a meaning other than its quaint reference to lava lamps and LSD. How he kept the color from separating them into various provinces of action I do not know, but the sleightists continued to function singly. They were rush-hour headlights in rain, an urban blur of neon trails, phantasmagoria.

I suppose this is the moment to recognize the stand-out sleightists, though I’ve never before had the occasion nor the information available to me to do so. Clef Scrye performed a central role, almost a solo (!), although the other twenty-three sleightists remained on the stage. Her technique was unparalleled, and thus rarely visible. With flaming hair, when she wasn’t wicking, she was a blue matchstick setting fire to the other sleightists, who—because of the doubling of their number—had to deal with more complex structures than have ever been seen on a sleight stage. To be commended are: Kenichi Baba, EmmanualVega and Montserrat Jones, for their superb work in purple, gold and green.

The links’ cunning surpassed that of all sleights heretofore witnessed by this reviewer. But the wicking, as always, was the measure of the experience. No other sleight performance has ever supported such sustained, simultaneous wicking. The illusion’s effect was breathtaking. Somehow, the visual removal of webs from the sleight was accompanied by a reduction in the white noise normally produced onstage, but in its place, the pattern of silences became the score. Incidental noise faded in and out through the evening, and as the silences grew closer, the noise between seemed to grow louder, until by the end of
[untitled],
I felt as if I had been trapped in one of those horrifically thumping clubs that have infested major cosmopolitan centers since the early seventies. Even as it was happening, I wondered why I didn’t hate the phenomenon, the racing sensation in my chest—most especially that. But I felt only young. And it was during this violent rejuvenation that I realized that the links and the precursor, both separately and together, were heartrending. I was at the tip of myself, worried for the work’s resolution. I was twenty again. Moved.

I have finally arrived at the center: West’s
[untitled]
tells a story (sacrilege!)—the fable of the art form’s inefficacy. West has heralded the death of sleight. I watched a Mardi Gras dirge last night, and was transported by its displaced percussion—its trumpeting of sleight’s poverty. I felt, but could and cannot say for what. West has made a blaring, pounding triumph out of his art form’s inability to speak to the modern audience. West has shown us the Carnival of what is not possible. Sleight can go nowhere from here. And this great turning in on itself—this is revolution.

West was devastated. It did not. Had not. He had watched from the lightbox as all went according. The seven roving spots had worked. The sidelights and gobos. The cyc, perfectly modulated. The timing. The colors blindingly ratcheted. No sleightist faltered. The precursor gouged. Clef’s navigation couldn’t have been more. But the audience had been floored, not flickered. Their ovation—the typical pindrop. They sat and sat and sat after, except the ones standing, and those ones stood a long time, and no one exited. At that moment he knew failure, but didn’t know the extent.

West had been fourteen when Fern had put him, at the end of one summer, in the academy performance against his will. He wasn’t good. He shouldn’t have been there at all, let alone been trusted to work with others, but she’d said there weren’t enough men—he had no choice. Within the first minute of the forty-five-minute work, he had dropped his architecture. A sleightist does not. Does Not. He dropped it once. Twice. Then, he dropped it while linking. While
linking.
All the parents of the other, deserving students tried not to look away. Four. Five drops. Six. But he saw their faces—they weren’t angry that he’d ruined their daughter’s or son’s performance. They pitied him. Fern made him stay after, during the meet-and-greet. She said to him firmly, no—he was wrong, they didn’t pity. So many came up with their cookies, with their punch, to tell him how well he’d done. So very many. More than for any other student. He was Fern’s grandson. She was right—these parents weren’t showing concern. They were taking, from his humiliation, their glee.

Cape Town had not drunk. Cape Town’s aristocrats and tourists. Critics and students. They picked up purses and playbills and started mumbling until the mumbling was a roar and a leaving, and he watched them exit the theater. Common, common. Whores. From it, he watched them, all their walking, whorish walking, away. They’d shown up for spectacle: an evening, a dinner, a movie, and gone. A fix. Napkin refolded. But during—during they had been there, flaunting their absence. Zombie, zombie. Television. He had done no damage. Not a single audience member was altered, hurt, woken, freed. It was incomprehensible. All he’d poured, and they’d chosen against. It had been any other sleight to them. Like all the rest, if a bit more. A little bigger. More American maybe. Excess of the same.

The cowboy was guffawing at West from under his ten-gallon. Slapping his great big American knees, leaving streaks of blood and bits of flesh on the white chaps. Only his mouth was dark with tobacco. Only his fingers and his teeth decaying. It was his face and hands that had ever frightened West. Worse and worse as he drew close. And West—curled helplessly on the floor with his rattle, his rattle. His noisemaker.

The sleightists knew West was unhappy. That Clef was tired. They knew something had happened to Lark—she’d stopped speaking. She hadn’t come to the second and third performances in Cape Town. Lark had stayed at the hotel. When they boarded the bus to Johannesburg, she sat alone in the very back with a small wooden box in her lap.

After Johannesburg, they were to fly on to Athens. West had tried with no luck, because of security, to get a booking in Tel-Aviv. Next would be Florence, Rome, and Barcelona. They were scheduled to appear in Lisbon. West would give interviews, go on cultural talk shows. He would smile a great deal, but after Cape Town there were no more stage notes, and he soon abandoned his evenings with Marvel.

Marvel was high. For him, nothing could have gone better—and it made him unbearable. In Cape Town, each night he painted the sleightists, it was more painfully. Their surfaces were overwrought. Backstage after the show, they removed the paint and then lotioned and oiled and mint-jellied, they vitamin E-d and aloed, but nothing helped. Where mirrors were glued, some of the sleightists developed sores.

As they deboarded the bus in Johannesburg, a young girl, maybe eight, ten, walked right up to Haley. The girl was tall, almost up to Haley’s shoulder, but curved like a bow. She wore a white cotton sundress with brown flowers embroidered at the hem. She was beautiful, withered. Her skin was dusty, her eyes large, almond shaped, and dull. “Excuse me, but are you American?” The girl spoke English with a melodic lilt. Haley nodded yes. The girl slowly reached up then, and barely brushed the lesion on Haley’s left cheek with two impossibly long fingers. The girl’s hand drifted down and Haley noticed just then that the sides of the girl’s mouth were swollen and cracked. “Why, if you’re an American,” the girl asked her, “do they let you have AIDS?”

It wasn’t until their second night in Florence that T brought Byrne back to her room. It was unexpected. The tour was getting dimmer and dimmer, and that night she took his arm and he went. She bathed him, soaped him clean of his blackblood, and he applied an ineffective balm to her thin abrasions. It was as if she’d been bound with the aluminum lashings of real tinsel. Her body, in its so-many pieces, made him uncomfortable. But she was kind. They took care: he pretended to make love to her, and she pretended to not notice him pretending. They cross-soothed—a sexual civility. The two of them, after all, didn’t dislike one another. T disliked Marvel, who hurt her with color. For handing her over to Marvel, she loathed West. Her husband was a lawyer who fucked other women. But she liked Byrne, or had once. Byrne only wanted Lark. For that night, T and Byrne were each other’s safest and softest choice.

In Rome, in a café, Kitchen tried to talk with Clef.

“I know you’re pregnant.”

“So? I want this espresso.”

“Clef, let me be with you.”

“Why?”

“I love you.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“What do you mean?”

“I love Lark. Lark loves Nene. How is it helpful?”

They had debuted
[untitled]
in Cape Town. They’d gone to Johannesburg, then to Athens, Florence, Rome. When Marvel asked why not Israel, West reminded him—there was a war. War was, of course, an inconvenience to an American artist, an unpleasant limitation. Marvel nodded. Why not Scandinavia then? Everywhere they went, the sleight was acclaimed, and something new: they were asked for autographs. The sleightists were disconcerted. It was big, but it wasn’t what they thought, and West’s disappointment was contagious. The troupes flew to Spain but didn’t perform there.

In Barcelona, West received a phone call. They were at the airport, standing around the luggage carousel. He spoke for only a few moments. Hung up. He turned to the troupes.

“Fern’s dead.”

He retrieved his bags and walked swiftly toward ticketing. They stood around the carousel, feeble, unable to do anything with their loss but grope. All of them except Kitchen had at one time or another been her students at the academy. She was, in many ways, their heart—the kind of teacher whose sharp vitality focuses others’ passions. Some of them tried to lessen the way their arms suddenly felt emptied of blood and bone by picking up their suitcases. Others stared at the slatted rubber curtains, the mostly empty conveyor belt, an unclaimed floral carpetbag cycling through over and over. There were weak attempts at comfort/contact. Haley put unanswered arms around Clef. T looked to Byrne, but Byrne hadn’t known the woman. She went over to Lark, but Lark’s eyes told her not to touch.

West canceled the rest of the tour. They were supposed to appear in Barcelona the next night and for the rest of that weekend, then go on to Lisbon. They never left the airport. West found them seats on four separate flights, and they went home.

NEW YORK CITY (AP) — The Grande Dame of sleight, Fern Early, onetime director of the sleight troupe Kepler, mentor to two generations of sleight performers, and daughter of produce distribution mogul Chester Early, died yesterday. She was 88. She is survived by her son, Calder, 65, and grandson, West, 41, the current artistic director of Kepler.

Ms. Early died in Sanctuary Hospice, in Manhattan. She had been in residence there a little over three months. “She passed in her sleep,” a hospice worker said. “She didn’t have many visitors. She asked that we not disclose her presence to callers during these last weeks.”

Ms. Early’s lawyer, Cecily Holmes, said Ms. Early had been battling cancer for some time. “She was ill, but she remained involved up to the very end with her philanthropy,” she said. In the late nineties, Ms. Early helped to found a women’s center for factory workers outside the city of Juarez, Mexico. In an interview, she explained, “It is a place where young women can live and take night classes while earning money to send back to their families in rural villages across Mexico. Many of these women have left loved ones behind in order to support them.”

The beloved Ms. Early performed as a sleightist for a decade in the forties before returning to the academy to study and become one of the few female hands in sleight’s history. The five sleights she drew—
Womaning, Ach Grace, Deployed, Paroxysm Station,
and
Ungotten
—are some of the best-loved and most often performed works of her era. In 1959 she took over direction of Kepler and over the next 35 years solidified her reputation as a female pioneer in her art.

After handing over direction of Kepler to her grandson West, who moved the troupe to Pennsylvania, she continued for several years to teach at the academy in Boston during the summers. During the rest of the year she resided in Manhattan, a highly visible patron of the arts.

Fern Early was born Fern Trethorne Early on November 13, 1922, in San Diego, California. The only child of Chester Early, a distribution giant infamous for his ruthless quashing of migrant-labor organizations during the twenties and thirties, she and her mother spent most of their time on the East Coast, where Fern was provided with tutors, took private lessons of all kinds and developed a lifelong love of music, art and theater.

Ms. Early never married and never disclosed the name of her son Calder’s father, causing a scandal for her parents during his youth. Calder Early was raised mostly by his grandparents, Chester and Veronica, as Ms. Early continued to perform, touring extensively in the years after her son’s birth. Despite much speculation to the contrary, when they passed, the Earlys left the bulk of their fortune to their daughter.

Ms. Holmes says that her client requested that there be no formal memorial service. Those who wish to pay their respects may do so by donating to the Dormitory, Ms. Early’s charitable organization in Mexico.

The sleight was all over the papers. It had struck notes in the media, especially coupled with Fern’s death. The no-longer-anonymous sleightists, Fern, Fern’s charity, West: so many opportunities for profiles, for human interest. Clef, because of the initial reviews, had been approached by several reporters just as she deboarded at Dulles. Rather than chance encountering herself on cable news, that night she’d charged a movie to her motel room—
Casablanca,
her father’s favorite. After Rick put Elsa on the plane, evidencing his nascent or latent conscience, Clef looked over at Lark. Her sister hadn’t made it to the end. Clef tucked her in.

West had flown straight to New York. There was a dinner in Fern’s honor at a penthouse suite on Fifth Avenue: an opportunity to secure future funding. The International Board wouldn’t be sanctioning him now.

Everything in York was disarray. The troupes left hastily, returned more hastily. The chambers weren’t scheduled to be cleaned for another week. Winged impressions of sweaty backs and kidneyed palm prints still muddied the mirrors, forgotten warm-ups lay in dung piles throughout the studios, and there was a musty smell—the detritus of the body, shut up for ten days, reintroduced to heat.

Clef had gotten them donuts and brought Lark to the chambers. No one else was there. Clef had suggested the trip to the studio; she wanted what light was available in January, and to talk. Lark let herself be guided, shuffled. She didn’t want to be disagreeable—she just wanted to escape, for a small while, expression. The last time she had lost words, they had been ripped from her. This time, she was cleansing herself. Words were dirt, endless like dirt, turning and returning, and she needed to be free of them.

She hadn’t spoken since Cape Town, and she hadn’t shown Clef her Need, though it was in the box. Clef and Lark sat in the center of the chamber—the box in Lark’s lap, the doughnuts in their hands. Lark was staring at Clef through the mirror, witnessing their one-sided communication collapse. She watched her sister intently, fascinated by the distance that had reestablished itself between them. Only Clef spoke. Lark’s eyes shot back and forth between her sister’s reflection and her own, analyzing. As the daughters of scientists, they had been raised to maintain a certain relationship with failure. Lark knew that in order to learn, to really learn, she couldn’t simply avoid past actions. To make a failed experiment work, she had to repeat it with small variations, and then rinse and repeat. Artistic, scientific, familial, cultural, historical: all errors required her persistent efforts at repetition. What had gone wrong was too often left alone. She knew better. Although it wasn’t comfortable, she embraced failure—took it inside. It filled the space left by her Needs.
I fail. I fail. I fail.
Said enough times in a row it sounded almost like she felt.

“It’s over, Lark. And nothing happened, just a success. The audience didn’t care. Why should they? I wanted … it doesn’t matter. I thought that West, that we, had really done something. And now, Fern’s gone, and …”

Lark watched her sister’s left hand as she spoke. It kept pushing her hair back from her face, and the other hand never brought the doughnut to her lips. A waste. Clef could use the calories after tour; she needed to gain. Lark was prepared to take on all their losses. But her sister was going to have a baby—she should eat.

“You should go home now. I’m sure Drew and Nene miss you. I bet he left that way because he didn’t think he could convince you to come with him. He was right. Right?”

They missed her? What a strange thing to say. Clef couldn’t know—Lark didn’t. They had been so far away for so long. At the party, Nene had been less like an old woman and more like a little girl; age was moving backwards through her. So much about Nene was out of the recommended order. Her daughter had blushed when Byrne asked her to dance—that, at least, was ordinary. Wait. Could she be wishing
normality
on her daughter? Yes, yes she could. When had Lark last blushed? For whom? Nene would be a woman one day, and Lark couldn’t show her how that was done. Not in any conventional way, not in any way that had proved successful. Drew was perhaps right to think he could do better.

“West said in the airport that we’ll still go to the Midwest—they can’t replace us on such short notice, but no California and no New York. We’re on to something else now, Lark. It’s over. Kepler and Monk will split up. I don’t know if Luke will come back, I think he was pretty demoralized. I hope he does, though it doesn’t much matter for me anymore.”

They heard the door creak before they saw him. It was Byrne. He was carrying a small package, balancing it on his rock hand with the other one. He didn’t seem surprised to find them there.

“This was at my apartment. It’s addressed to Lark. I was going to leave it in the lobby, but here you two are.” Byrne looked at Lark. Clef looked at Lark. Lark was looking into the mirror. She watched herself lick glazed sugar from her blue fingers one by one.

“I’ll take it.” Clef stood. Her right leg hung limp as she lifted a hip—as if by pulley—and the joint popped loudly. She walked over to Byrne. He nodded his chin at the box.

“There’s a note on it from your director. It says it’s from Fern Early.”

Lark,

Here is the Soul you gave me. I have a feeling it’s not mine but yours. You shouldn’t give away everything you make, I’ve learned. Also, I have for a few years kept some information I’ve gathered. I don’t want to keep it any longer. At the academy you came to me, once. You asked a question that had been haunting me, unarticulated, for decades. You asked me how something that could do so much could do so little. You said it must take a lot of work to keep it cycling on empty. Who designed it this way, you asked. And you asked why.

I decided to find out. After I’d heard you quit Monk, after West started producing things I felt were pushing at the edges, after my body started overproducing things I didn’t need and pushing them against the edges of me, I decided to go to Santo Domingo to research Revoix.

In my youth, I was obsessed with Antonia Bugliesi. I modeled myself after her. Rich girl, big father. I thought she was the originator of sleight, but over time I have come to see her as an impassioned collector. She collected beautiful things, things she loved: documents she’d seen in Europe and known enough to become obsessed with, styles of movement, young people— especially attractive but expendable ones—glass,
³⁶
lace, and mirror fragments.

She once called the Theater of Geometry her “living cathedral.” She saw herself as the avatar of a new religion—a religion of favorite things. I suppose there are worse. And the reality of what she created is not so far from that, I think. But her real achievement was to cloak everything she did in mystery and dogma, forging art from enigma. She single-handedly inculcated an order of novitiates. She showed them Revoix’s work and said, “This is our bible and I shall explain it to you.” She reinvented, or at least offered to America, the temple dancer. The vestal.

I spent enough time, sixty-five years, moving in her church, pantomiming her sermons with my body. After your question, I decided to go to the source. Antonia Bugliesi was never tremendously interested in Revoix. He was only a hand to her, a proxy. It was the drawings that mattered, how she could combine them with other media in endless associative play. She was a spiritualist, a collagist, and a crackpot—our priestess.

When I arrived at the mission, I realized that, like Antonia, sleight scholars have been so invested in his documents they’ve ignored the other activities in which Revoix participated. One of his main duties was to baptize the Native Americans, mostly Cherokee, brought from the Carolinas to work the sugar plantations. The traders stopped in Santo Domingo to check their cargo for disease, convert and catalogue it. Revoix had another job, too—to quarantine the sick. The abbot put him in charge of the infirmary. He kept records of all the transactions—I found them in the mission’s vaults. It seems the patients who were admitted to the infirmary were primarily between the estimated ages of six and thirteen. In the records, Revoix described these children in detail: by teeth (age), height, gender, and any other noteworthy physical characteristics. Beside each description was a number—a fee.

The infirmary had a nickname: the abbot’s stable. The nickname is well documented. Local myth has it referring to smallpox, but none of the descriptions of the children include markings consistent with that disease. And Revoix listed too few deaths for smallpox. There were some, but next to these, the causes of death were not recorded. Only more numbers. Replacement costs, maybe. User penalties.

I don’t think Revoix profited from the abbot’s business. I think he was in the position of sending these children to nearly certain death on the plantations, or procuring them for the abbot’s use and the use of his associates. Maybe Revoix saved some, let them loose in the town to fend for themselves. I don’t know. I only know these were the circumstances under which he began to draw obsessively.

The abbot died not too many years after Revoix joined the mission, and another replaced him. The stable was dismantled. I believe that this was when Revoix hid his notes—the structures and the words—only to come across them decades later, after he had worked long and hard, ministering, to forget. It haunted him, what had been done. I looked again and again at the precursors, trying to decipher them. I think originally he may have been trying to translate or to encrypt translations of the children’s Cherokee names. He was a linguist. But there are no names in the infirmary records against which to check my theory. This could of course just be me hoping. That he tried to save—even their names.