DANCING IN THE HAIR-TRIGGER SUMMER

The water is out in Murder City. The heat and the shootings are up. It is the “Hair-Trigger Summer” of 1986, and three hundred and seven people have been blasted in July alone. You park the green Plymouth Duster you inherited from your Nana on Van Dyke Avenue on the East side of Detroit a half-block from the huge vertical letters VAN DYKE above the three-sided marquee surrounded by three hundred broken light bulbs.

The Duster door creaks open to a wall of hot-rot-fruit. The gutter jumbles with needles, broken glass, and McDonald’s wrappers. The junkies line up in front of the old Bay Furniture Store waiting for their morning methadone.

You scurry past in a black unitard and flip-flops, yank open the side door, clomp up two sets of dark, soft-worn stairs, and burst into the third-floor ballroom. Whorls of hair-tangled dust tumble the edges.

Inhaling motes, you claim a four-by-four space in the center. Everyone is “warming up” even though the ballroom is a hundred degrees already. Liquid limbs elongate.

Judith Jamison floats in, six feet of smooth and sinew. The dancers collect themselves in the center of their squares. Jamison won’t open the windows for fear you’ll catch a draft.

The djembe starts: um-pu-pu, um-um-pu-pu.

Bare feet grounded on smooth old floor. Heart goes um-pu-pu, um-um-pu-pu. A hundred arms swoop up, come down to the right in two segments. The rib cage can’t help getting involved. Up-left-down-down.

We all know the warm-up.

The Batá adds: ta-ta-un-un-ta-ta, ta-ta-un-un-ta-ta.

Through warbling windows, sun throws white-hot spotlights on wet bodies.

You’re on the floor now, legs spread in near-splits. The knees bent up, feet flexed, then straighten, feet point.

Add the arms and twist the torso. Scoop right with knees-and-feet flexed, sweep through and up, legs straight, toes point. Scoop left, sweep through.

~

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater spends the summer of 1986 in Detroit. The City courts the company for permanent residence after it’s lost its space in Manhattan. Detroit puts the dancers up rent-free in the Louis Kamper Building, an Art Deco skyscraper tucked behind the Fox Theater, and arranges no-cost rehearsal space in the defunct Van Dyke.

You’ve graduated from high school, bound for the University of Michigan’s modern dance program, when your mother reads in the Free Press that Ailey will hold its summer intensive four miles from your house. This is a chance to take class daily with the company and perhaps earn your place amongst its members.

No one but your mother knows you go to that audition. Both of you are jealous of the suburban girls in your class who would have killed to go, especially Ericka, your ex best friend. Senior year, Ericka dances the part of Beyoncé while the rest of you back her up or get the axe like LaToya Luckett. You’re smoldering that Ericka is going to U of M’s dance program too because she stole the idea from you. But the relationship is even more combustive. Because she’s jilted you for drugs, alcohol, felonious men, and fast girls? Because, when she shimmers, you shrink?

What is it about adolescent girls’ friendships? They run so hot and cold.

Yours are like love affairs gone wrong.

Your mother’s pettiness in not telling a soul, you’re sorry to say, pleases you. She drives you to the audition and watches you learn sequences alongside hundreds of other dancers. “You’ve got something,” she says after, and you believe it because yours is the kind of mother who asks, “What’s it supposed to be,” when you hand her a Mother’s Day art project. When you say, “A clay figure of a dog,” she says, “Oh,” as she tosses it in the trash or, when especially buoyant, stuffs it in the junk drawer.

You’re isolated that summer; the heat-and-no-water-thing makes you crazy. And oddly ashamed. You’ve just finished being the scholarship kid at a prep school in Grosse Pointe, but you don’t ask anyone from school to use their shower.

You don’t spend the night at anyone’s. There’s never a question of them coming to yours.

You tell no one save your mother when you make it into the 1986 summer intensive and start taking class for four hours every morning with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

In the evenings, you steer the Duster toward the Louis Kamper Building and stand in the street, head canted back, searching the eight-foot windows for a flicker of the limbs that leap your dreams.

~

You fell hard in love with Jamison the first time you saw Cry in 1982 at the Music Hall, a 1701-seat theater commissioned by Matilda Dodge, widow of John Dodge, half of the Dodge Brothers, Detroit auto royalty and original investors in the Ford Motor Company. Your fellow prep school graduates were the Dodges and the Fords; their fortunes endowed your scholarship.

You discovered Ailey when your teacher, a principal for Martha Graham, took your freshman class to the Music Hall. The glass and gild your schoolmates regarded with cool remove blinded you.

Jamison blasted you into your custom-made velvet seat in the middle of the first row of the mezzanine where an indentation of your fourteen-year-old body remains.

~

In Cry, for sixteen minutes and three movements, Jamison is alone on a bare stage.

The curtain rises to the double-base line in Alice Coltrane’s Something About John Coltrane. Ba-da-da ba-da-da-da. Ba-da-da ba-da-da-da-da. Jamison, in a plain white long-sleeved leotard and ruffle-bottomed skirt, appears in spotlight on an otherwise dark stage.

Jamison looks to be shrouded. She’s so far upstage, it’s hard to tell.

As Alice Coltrane joins on piano, Jamison lifts her shroud straight into the air with her two-and-a-half-foot arms. Slowly, they descend to waist-level. Jamison walks downstage, opening the shroud. It is a long white strip of the same sheeny cloth as her skirt, perhaps twelve feet long because Jamison has a six-foot wingspan, and the cloth is much longer.

The record goes scratch, scratch in the silent spaces.

Jamison twirls upstage, garment flaring.

Now she’s staggering downstage, head bowed, spine undulating, arms seeking. They pull you in. She runs upstage. On her tiptoes, she beats the air to the piano. She races for different exits. She can’t escape. The skirt vibrates. A leg slices up like a blade, the torso stiff. Then the supple spine returns.

Jamison contracts her diaphragm enough to put her on the floor. There, on her knees, she repeats the movement, head genuflect, spine rippling. She snatches her cerement and runs upstage, skirt whirling. Now she’s on her knees scrubbing the floor with the fabric. Up again, the shroud shackles as she struggles against it. Now it’s a head-dress. Jamison spirals away with her chest high.

When she pulls off the head-dress, she briefly cradles a baby, returns to her knees, and spreads the cloth long across the stage closest to the audience. Jamison retreats.

Pharoah Sanders joins on saxophone. Jamison’s feet are planted. Her arms make sharp angles, then flow. Jamison doubles over. Lifts up. Stumbles forward. Doubles over.

The saxophone and Jamison gain speed. Quivering, thrashing, venerating, subjugating. She exalts to the heavens. Then bows down. Exalts. Bows down. Gathers up her skirts and strides away.

Now her arms are manacled overhead. The bass takes over. Jameson wheels on the floor and throttles the air. She flicks out her skirt, lies with her head downstage, and spreads wide her arms. There is a moment of rest. The music stops.

Jamison bolts up, awakened, as if by the snap of a twig. She stands with her back to you searching the dark for the sound.

~

Something About John Coltrane is the first track on the second side of Journey in Satchidananda and the longest piece on Alice Coltrane’s album released in 1971. No wonder it was on Ailey’s mind that same year when he and Jamison created Cry. They went into the studio and started moving to the music. The music came first. Within a few days, the three-part ballet was finished, which means it was a collaboration between Ailey’s body, Jamison’s body, and the sound that flowed through them.

Like you, Alice grew up in Detroit. She graduated from Cass Tech, where you almost went for dance. Alice was born in 1937, as was Ron Carter, who also went to Cass Tech. Carter is the most-recorded jazz bassist in history, so that was the type of company Alice kept at school.

In 1962, Alice joined vibist Terry Gibbs’ quartet. Touring Europe with Gibbs in ‘63, Alice met John Coltrane. They married in ‘65.

Two years later, John was dead. Biographers believe Coltrane’s demise was his heroin habit, injecting with dirty needles and contracting hepatitis, causing a chronic infection that led to cirrhosis.

Alice had already left a husband lost to heroin, Kenny Hagood, who sang with Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis.

~

Second movement. A warped record reels. Pop. Swish. Pop. Sshhhh.

Laura Nyro’s piano laments.

“Been on a train.”

I saw a man

Take a needle full of hard drug

And die slow.”

Nyro testifies.

“And I’m never gonna’ be the same.”

Just before the ballet’s climactic moment, Nyro whispers the word “pain.” Jamison, doubled over, clutches her gut.

Nyro wails, “NAAA-NAAAH!” Jamison erects then arches back ‘til she’s near-folded the wrong way.

It is the Cry.

You’ve been on the train.

You’ve stepped over the needles in the street.

You’ve scrambled past the scratching dopeheads.

You guard your tender heart, but Jamison and Nyro crack it. The beauty and the blight. Side-by-side. Hold them in the same spine.

~

In the summer of ‘86, Jamison teaches you that the longing for the divine is in the space between the movements. To truly dance, hold no static shapes. The limbs’ eternal reach. That is hope. That is faith.

~

The third movement of Cry is danced to The Voices of East Harlem singing a Spiritual set to a disco beat.

“I want the clouds over my head.

Over my head! Over my head!

I don’t want no store bought bed.

Store bought bed! Store bought bed!”

Jamison switches between boogie arms and torso, traditional African dance, Lester Horton pelvic hinges, and Martha Graham contract-and-releases. Her raiment ripples.

The chorus is ecstatic:

“Right on! Be free!

Right on! Be free!”

Jamison rolls her head and stomps her feet. The long arms are everywhere. She sweeps her skirt forward and back, then spins, sweeps, then spins. In the end, she stands alone in the spotlight waiving her arms like mad.

You are on your feet!

You are weeping.

You seize Ericka’s arms and laugh in her tear-streaming face. Did you see that? Did you see that!

~

You see Cry every chance you get, even when the company is debuting new material. Sure, you’ll see the new stuff on Friday night, but you’ll be back for the Sunday matinee. No one’ll catch you saying, “I wish I had seen Judith Jamison dance Cry one more time.” You spring to your feet on Sunday afternoon, grip forearms with the turban-headed octogenarian next to you, and exclaim, “Did you see that?”

~

During class in the Van Dyke, Jamison puts her long hands on you like a healer and stretches you further and further and further and further. She teaches you to reach beyond these trash-heaped streets. She teaches you to still cry for the junkies. She teaches you to always feel the drum-beat, pulsing like blood.

After class, you sneak over the border into the Vic Tanny’s in the suburbs for a shower. Chin lifted, gym bag slung, you speed-walk the front desk like you’re too important to wait in line. Ignoring the attendant’s protest, “Excuse me! You need to check –,” you fling open the women’s locker-room door and strip your soaked unitard.

Cold water sizzles on flaming flesh, and you wonder, will you forever be the outsider? The interloper? Jamison is alone in the spotlight, flinging rapture and ache. She is singular. Too swift and sleek for the Hair-Trigger Summer. You’re going to make it out of this place. The seed of lonesomeness sown, but also the seed of sight.

Stephanie La Rose is a professor at Michigan State University College of Law where she trains soon-to-be lawyers in the art of written and oral advocacy. Formerly, she was a prosecutor of child abuse and neglect cases. She is finishing a memoir of ecclesiastical trauma. Her work has appeared in the Normal School and Past Ten.