I must admit: it's strange not dancing in the front of the room.
I had the time of my life in Blonos's technique class. A substantial layer of sweat from the two and a half hours coats my neck, and I have to resist the urge to pull off my pointe shoes and massage my feet. But it was amazing. Once she finished torturing us with twenty sets of pirouettes, we moved into combinations and about every skill I might come across in a dance. The footwork and leaps we rehearsed were foreign and familiar and most definitely challenging. Blonos found ways to point out errors in our most simple of tasks, from turnouts to plies, mistakes I couldn't have identified with a microscope.
Everybody at the Academy is elite in a sense if they made it in at all. I fell thirty feet onto a hard and unforgiving wooden floor for this, an opportunity to start in the best dance Corps in the world. I won my place, a place sought after by every girl who didn't make it.
Cal and Evangeline are strange exceptions to be Principal dancers at their age. If I somehow survive here, it'll take years and years to earn a position as a soloist, to so much taste a solo in the professional limelight. Maven, too, is just beginning his long and painful journey through the ranks of the dance world, his brother to contend with. As promising of dancers as we both might be, I doubt we'll actually dance together much. Perhaps for practice, for when we're older . . .
It's only strange, nothing I didn't expect.
I was in the front line almost always during my old days of dance—first for my zeal when I was small, and then for my technique when I was older. Once, on a day I went home with a smile that stayed until I fell asleep, my ballet teacher had whispered into my ear that I was her little protégé. I'll never forget that line.
But unless you're Evangeline Samos, you do not simply become a Principal.
As groups took turns across the floor, I watched Cal and the other Principals especially close. For everything he said about ballet, it seems like an utter lie after I've watched him dance. Every motion was powerful, controlled, even as he made it beautiful. About as flawless as a dancer will ever get, with his perfect leaps and a la secondes. He undersells himself.
But so I do, perhaps.
It's only strange, nothing I didn't expect
I arrive at Elara's studio with little time to spare, having gone back to my room to get a granola bar.
Over half of the ladies I had technique with are in the room, and I assume no more will be coming. The principals and soloists have no use for this class, having gone their separate ways to individualized sessions. Off to learn their new parts for the Academy's first performances of autumn. There's no sign of the male dancers of the Corps, either, leaving me to a room of nearly thirty ballerinas.
The room is worth hardly any notice. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's just another studio overlooking Forty-Second. A grey floor, a long panel of mirrors, and barres tucked to the side walls. I have trouble believing Blonos and Elara are ones for frivolous decor, like the inspirational quotes and posters my teacher used to have strung up on her studio walls. Maybe that crap is for the young anyway.
Elara Merandus catches my attention, who happens to be sitting on the only piece of furniture around: a lovely metal folding chair. Like Blonos, she wears all black, but in the form of a dress: with a sweeping neckline exposing the wholes of her collarbones, the dress flows to her knees and ends in an asymmetrical skirt. Elara pours over a notebook in her lap, perhaps choreography notes or sheet music—or something else on the order of dance—and her mouth bent into a slight frown, she rhythmically taps on the paper.
Everybody maintains a good twenty feet from her, as if an arc guards Elara—made of her foreboding aura, probably—and detracts each dancer from her. A warning, if you will. Wife of Tiberias Calore or no, she's scary, to put it simply.
Instead, Corps members warm up. Again. Some have asserted spots at the barres along the room's edges, more are sprawled out on the floor, and others review familiar moves Blonos taught us today. A half an hour between classes is a bit of a maddening break, not enough to leave the Academy and get anything done, but enough to get bored. I bought groceries with my day and half's worth of cleaning money yesterday, so I returned to my room and ate. Though Elara's note to me left no mention to eating, only spelling out that time between classes should be spent warming up.
I roll my eyes. Inwardly, of course.
Finding an empty space near the window, I settle into a lunge. Absentmindedly, I look out the window, right where the floor meets the glass.
So hot out today, the air ripples and distorts in front of me. As much as I hated it, I was accustomed to dealing with the heat as I made my daily pursuits throughout the city. We didn't have an air conditioner at home either, having to rely on fans to keep the air circulating in the apartment. I considered stripping my bed of its sheets countless times this month, Gisa hogging the fan in our room and Tramy and Bree refusing to lend me one of their two fans time and time again. I didn't thrive on it the way Kilorn told he did, one odd person out of a thousand, but I coped with it. Learned to tolerate it, as much as I complained.
I left the building yesterday for food and walked with Maven dozens of blocks on Friday, but already the idea of going outside seems far-flung. Even on Sundays, my one day a week I'll have off, roaming the streets seems like a poor option compared to staying inside the safe coolness of the Academy, dancing and soaking up the AC.
As I gaze downward, sitting into my stretch, the people jump out to me more than they did while I was one of them. They either hurry about the streets or travel dreadfully slow, sluggish because of the temperature. Which one was I?
Did I pass by this place often, before I knew what it was and who could've been watching me through panes of half-silver mirrors? For all of my journeys throughout the city, I struggle in remembering how often I came across this place. I know Forty-Second fairly well, but it's a long street with a lot on it. For all the wallets, all of the eager consumers making their way towards the heart of Times Square, I only paid attention to what served me. Buildings I could duck into, handy hiding places for the times my victims gave me a run for my money—literally—were what I looked to most, and with a security guard outside of it, the Academy wouldn't have been on that list.
The stoplight's red, making for a congestion of harlequin cars below. I can't hear them, but I can flawlessly picture the drivers honking their horns and yelling out their car windows for no reason whatsoever.
I'm driving here!
It would be an impossible task to count the number of times an angry New Yorker has yelled that at me as I've walked or ran across a street when I shouldn't have. My adventures in the city this summer have been something else. While boring a majority of the time, I did have my occasional fun: the afternoons I ended up sprinting halfway across Manhattan when my fingers weren't sticky enough; nearly causing car accidents more than once because of those sprints; and my talks with Will Whistle whenever I'd go in to trade jewelry and such, who never failed to entertain me.
Those conversations set a smile to my face I have to force back. Anybody glancing at me will think I'm crazy.
The sun's somewhere over the Academy, at its zenith for the day. It's too far overhead to see it directly on, but its reflection twinkles on the side of a distinctly tall building two blocks down. It's pretty when I don't have to deal with its cruel heat, a bright white light on the side of blue glass.
Just two days ago, it stormed. The puddles are all gone now, as though it never happened.
But ironically, my view of the city is better back on my rooftop at the apartment than this. Every which way I look, a ridiculously tall skyscraper stands in my way. Glassy, translucent buildings versus crumbling, old ones. One can see nothing and the other can see everything.
While the streets of East Harlem are packed with apartments and businesses, they don't reach so high as the skyscrapers of Midtown. Something I probably took for granted, as much as the bustle of Manhattan infatuates me.
"The performances of the Corps de Ballet are the most unappreciated thing," Elara says out of the blue, and almost as if it's planned, all of us dancers from our various positions on the floor, at the barre, and plainly standing up snap our heads to where she's seated.
She's not lying. The star of the show will never be the Corps, despite the fact that without the Corps there'd be nothing. There would be no swans of Swan Lake or snowflakes in the Nutcracker.
"Then again: very few appreciate ballet to begin with."
Her heeled Mary Janes click against the floor as she rises, walking towards us. I never noticed it before, but she isn't a tall woman, two or three inches over me. Yet everything else makes up for the minor shortcoming, between her stick-straight, wiry build; her gothic, dreary clothing; and those deathly cold eyes. Outwardly, Blonos and Elara aren't so different . . . but the former's strict attitude stems from discipline. Elara's comes from something else completely.
Elegantly, she steps over the outstretched legs of dancers and halts in the room's center. Either frozen from uncertainty or respect for their longtime dance teacher, none of the ladies around me move.
"The Corps may not be the most glamorous aspect of a ballet performance, but it sets the stage for the soloists and our Principal dancers. When you were young, you all wanted to be that one dancer: the one in the pretty pink dress at the front of the stage, dancing around two dozen white swans."
I hide my smile, remembering how I danced around the living in bubblegum hair ties.
The women around me do the same, though I can see fissures in the expressions of a few. Eyes that blanch, mouths that twist the slightest bit. Some of them have probably been in the Corps for ten years, whether they've liked it or not.
"Becoming a member of the Academy at all and in the first place is a great honor. You should be proud of yourselves. Yet as talented as you all are . . . not all of you are meant to be soloists. In fact, most of you never will."
A couple nod. Most continue to stare at Elara, eyes almost glazed over. They've heard this bitter diatribe before.
"Some of you ladies have been in the Corps for ten, fifteen, maybe even twenty years. Some of you have enjoyed every minute of it, and others of you have wanted to be a soloist since the day you stepped into the Academy hardly out of high school." She paces now, stepping over more limbs in the process. It's an intimidation strategy, I think, the walking and clicks and getting so close to the girls. To gain their respect and submission, as if she's a schoolteacher who needs it.
Nobody would dare step one foot out of line. Not when we're getting paid to live out our dreams.
"To all of you: I wish I could say ranks were based on seniority, but they're not. In my book, there are those who have what it takes to become a prima ballerina, and those never will. Both are equally important. Those who are willing to be a part of a performance bigger than themselves, play four different roles a night, know twenty minutes of choreography—it's no easy feat, and I applaud you for it."
She pauses, eyes passing over a number of us. Her gaze snags on me, blinks, and moves on.
"Then there are my girls who stand out. The ladies who have the heart of a soloist, as I call it. They're the ones who catch my eye the first time they ever audition. They're the ones who dance late into the night and wake up at dawn to do it all over again. If I were to ask each and every one of you what your passion is, you'd respond with ballet, or dance. I'd believe it, too. But the soloists . . . they're the ones who live for nothing else. They find emotion behind the most elementary steps, and they put everything they have into it. They're not only dancers, but they're performers who could walk into Hollywood and get an A-list acting job."
This time, she's careful to keep her eyes straight ahead on the glass to not give away who she might think has the heart of the soloist.
"This year, I want you all to think about what I'm saying. Let it be your choice, if you desire to stay in the Corps." An outright guilt trip and everybody knows it. "Not all of you can be more special than you already are.
"But find ways to make me notice you. We're one of the best ballet companies in the world for a reason, and it isn't because our pirouettes are any better than the next company's, ladies. Every professional dancer in the world can do a perfect pirouette, regardless of whatever Mistress Blonos preaches to you. It's because of the emotion our best dancers have always evoked from their audiences, that we are among the best."
Her face remains still and austere throughout every one of her words, every part of her lecture. "If you're content to stay in the Corps for the rest of your dancing career, then so be it. Every Corps dancer is as vital as anybody else, and we need a lot of them. But I know for a fact many of you want more than to be a so-called ordinary part of an elite ballet company. You want to be the star of the show, the woman in the pretty pink tutu you dreamed about becoming when you were little girls.
"If you want it so badly then get up early. Stay late. Don't expect it to be handed to you with one audition, and certainly don't sit back and wait for it to be handed to you now. Because it won't."
One last time, Elara steps through the maze of dancers' limbs; she retreats to her chair to grab her notebook.
"Now with that issue off our minds, let's begin."
Following the others, I push out of the stretch I was in all this time. Rise up to my feet, aching to dance.
Because it won't.
No. It won't.