THE BACCHAE

Act One – Scene One

The Greeting

Stage Direction: You push the beds apart in your flat, set a book upon his nightstand and pirouette down the floor on soft socks and slight feet when all of a sudden you feel the urge to strip down naked and run through the apartment door down the stairs and into the street. But then you bend over in pain, overcome by a throbbing worse than menstrual cramps; achy and moon-faced you walk through the loft window and out onto the fire escape to watch as your guests arrive, making their way up the street.

Begin

It’s Easter in New York and her husband has chosen a couple for a change. As they make their way up the five flights, Marissa’s disembodied face appears above them floating in a shaft of sun from the skylight at the top of the stairs. She wears her copper-colored hair short and parted on the side like a boy, pinched cheeks and a pointy chin like a fox, vulpine her first dance teacher called it, hazel eyes overarched by thick blackened eyebrows. She wears a translucent white caftan with delicate embroidery down the front, silver brocade wildflowers, a wide blue leather belt cinched about her narrow waist and beaded Minnetonka moccasins on her feet. She kisses the guest both wordlessly as they arrive upon the landing and turns with a wave to follow as she disappears into the doorway with a swirl. Smiling at this intriguing gesture the two guests follow and nod to one another, smiling secretly at her duck walk, her feet splayed in the dancer’s waddle from years at the barre, whispering across the parquet floors. Without turning, Marissa’s says over her shoulder, “Throw your coats in the bedroom. We’re in the kitchen.”

George laughs and looks from one end of the high-ceilinged loft to the other. The kitchen is not a room but a sink and appliances set against one brick wall, the rest of the loft sub-divided by furniture into a maze of living spaces: a few soft chairs and a sofa for entertaining, an old-fashioned enamel table and straight-backed chairs for dining, the sleeping quarters two small beds set apart divided by a night table.

“I guess they sleep apart,” Bridget whispers as she shrugged her coat onto one of the beds.

“Perhaps this is why,” he says nodding at a book on the nightstand entitled “Beyond Monogamy.”

“Hmmm,” Bridget murmurs. “I wonder if they think we’re dessert.”

“Come on,” he says laughing as he throws his arm over her shoulder.

They find Marissa pulling the lid off a blue enameled pot on the stove emitting a delicious fragrance of the Mideast filled with blended spices of cumin, cardamom, and nutmeg. Her husband, Andre, chops onions on a wooden block by the sink and waves at them with a swirl of his knife. Andre is dressed in tight black pants and an oxford button-down shirt. He is dangerously thin with pronounced boney wrists and ankles. He is barefoot. Except for the hair color, his honey blonde, and the differing tastes in clothes, the pair could be twins, the same slim physiques and flamboyant gestures.

Bridget and George work with Andre at the probation office as social workers handling young offenders who are given a second chance by the county justice department to get their acts together before they have to do hard time. Andre is their supervisor and he’s asked them over to discuss volunteering with their dance company called Trompe L’oeil. He’s the business manager in his spare time and asked them if they’d like to help behind the scenes. “Grunt work really. Move the props around and pick up the dancers. They’re famously late! None of them carry a watch. I think most are too dumb to tell the time.”

When he asked Bridget, she scowled and said, “I don’t know. It doesn’t sound all that interesting.”

But Andre was insistent, “Oh it can be whatever you want. We look for people outside of the dance world to look in and see if we’re being pretentious. Wait,” he added excitedly, “I know, come over tonight and meet my wife, Marissa. She’s, our choreographer. We can discuss it over dinner.”

“Hope you like Cous Cous?” Marissa asks from the stove as Andre hands them goblets of red wine.

“Let’s go into the living room,” Andre says and leads them to the front of the loft where a huge window looks out onto the Bowery.

Act One - Scene Two

The Audition

STAGE DIRECTION: You wonder if it’s too much, too soon, whether the pretty boy with the small mouth or the butch redhead with the muscular arms and tight thighs might be a good fit. It’s only been a few weeks. But you decide to let them in, see what happens. The stage is set. The living room part of the loft is rectangular, not very wide but long, ending at a bay widow with three ceiling-high panes of glass. Yet to get to the window and the overstuffed couch in front of it they have to wade through the jungle of objects you’ve collected, a thousand arcane items dredged from the waste bins of the twentieth century. There are flounced pillows and crocheted doilies, ceramic Hummels and small bronze statuettes, which compete for space on ancient carved tables, velvet Victorian furniture, leather ottomans, and divans surround the loft, more suitable for capturing a fainting lass with the vapors than sitting. The upper walls are papered to look like an English Garden, the lower walls covered with a blue ‘lincrustia’ type of wallpaper made from embossed cardboard and meant to look like delicate plasterwork. The overall effect of this explosion of knick-knacks and nineteenth century memorabilia makes the front of the loft visibly contract as we enter it, like walking into a Chinese puzzle box, vistas ever smaller, objects vanishing points to a canvas of my own making. There are pictures of dancers on every wall including one of you dressed in a feathered headdress and buckskins and held aloft by two half-naked Indian bucks clad only in loincloths. Another shows Andre in his Flamenco costume half-turned to the camera, hips and shoulders oblique, one leg bent in that classic Spanish cleated stomp as he stares out from beneath the flattened brim of his Picador’s hat, chin on chest with those glowering eyes.

Begin

Turning from the photos, George looks to the bay window and through the jungle of hanging plants that filters submarine light through trailing lianas and flowering spines. A high-backed couch is wedged within the bay alcove before a mahogany coffee table filled with oversized dance books. Sitting down on the couch Bridget looks up at Andre and says, “When you said you were dancers, I was thinking tutus and tights. What’s all this about?” she asks, waving her arm at the photos.

“We were trained as ‘Denishawn Dancers,” he says, pointing at a theatrical poster with the name Ruth St. Denis emblazoned on it in flaming red letters above a woman’s disembodied face that seems to drift mystically in a black void surrounded by a halo of platinum hair.

Marissa sits down on an oversized cushion by the coffee table and says, “Our teacher trained with St. Denis and Ted Shawn in the thirties. Ruth was a figure in the American Metaphysical Movement, a feminist before there was a name for it. She started as a skirt-dancer in the Coney Island arcades dancing for pennies, then a hoochie-coochie girl in the Roaring Nineties. Very naughty!” Marissa adds, flipping her caftan up like a Can-Can girl.

“It wasn’t really ballet?” George asks.

“No! Ballet and modern dance aren’t the same thing at all,” she answers with a coy pout.

“Dance is more visceral and gutsier,” Andre adds. “Ballet is an affectation really. It’s dishonest.”

“Ruth toured with Sarah Bernhardt in Vaudeville using Shakespeare and folk tales in her choreography,” Marissa says. “There were rumors that Bernhardt and St. Denis were lovers.”

Andre picks up a picture book from the table and places it in Bridget’s lap. As he turned the pages George notices him rubbing against her breasts with his forearm. Glancing at Marissa he sees a slight smile crease her lips at this flirtation before she abruptly gets up and goes into the kitchen

Bridget throws George a desperate look, so to distract Andre he asks, “Where does Ted Shawn come in?”

“Oh, St Denis hired him to spice up her act. He was a downtown cabaret dancer doing ragtime and tangos, which he merged into her style. He was the first male dancer to be taken seriously and not some hunk to prop up the ladies while they did their ethereal thing” which he demonstrates with fluttering hands across his chest as if he’s a dying swan.

Marissa comes back carrying a soup tureen and raised her eyebrows at Andre’s drag act then directs them all to sit at the table where she ladles food onto the plates.

“Shawn loved ethnic dances,” Andre continues, “and wandered all over New York City crashing immigrant weddings to get ideas for his choreography. His style was completely masculine with epic tableaus involving Spanish conquistadors, American Indians, even Egyptian Pharaohs. He founded the first male dance company in America.”

“Of course, that was before he partnered with St. Denis,” Marissa says pointing her fork at Andre. “Solo act he was a curio; with her he became a legend.”

Andre reddened at the jibe but ignored this comment as he adds, “Shawn didn’t like classical music in dance. He felt music should come from the streets.”

“I think music gets in the way of dance,” Marissa says, “I believe the best choreography comes without the crutch of music.”

“But isn’t it the pulse of music the dancer follows?” George asks.

“Not necessarily,” Marissa replies. “When I choreograph, I usually do it in total silence. Of course, I might add music to the basic steps later on.”

“But sometimes the deepest inspiration comes from melody,” Andre protests, glaring at his wife. “I’ve always wanted to choreograph Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,” he adds, turning to his guests with a theatrical shake of his head.

“That would be epic,” George says, holding back a laugh at Andre’s Rudolph Valentino affection.

“Unfortunately, you’d need a hundred male dancers to do it justice the way you think, Andre dearest,” Marissa says with another pout.

“If we’re talking epic proportions,” Bridget says, “did you know that dance as an art form was originally a religious rite at the Olympic Games dedicated to Dionysus the god of wine?”

“How do you know that?” Marissa asks, a wry grin creeping across her face.

“Oh, I know a lot of arcane things that no one else is interested in. For example, did you know that comedy originated as slapstick phallic dances performed between the Greek tragedies to keep the people in their seats.”

“We studied Classics in college as well as social work,” George says. “In fact, Bridget was the only woman in our department known for its old boy clubbiness.”

“I was constantly being asked to translate female leads in Greek recitation,” Bridget says. “Even though there were a number of gay guys in the class who could have pulled off Medea without a hitch.”

“Bridget and I saw the ‘Bacchae’, a Greek tragedy by Euripides at an outdoor theater in Athens last summer,” George adds. “During the prologue two choruses enter from both wings singing contrapuntal anthems, hunched over and dragging their knuckles like apes on the ground, weaving in and out, sweeping the floor with their feet, making this unearthly shushing sound, a sacred dance accompaniment to the text.”

“And on every third beat they’d hiss like snakes,” Bridget exclaims delightfully. “Yes, it was the most unnerving thing. Singing, dramatic characterization and dancing all blended into this horrific story about King Pentheus who dresses like a woman to spy on his wife’s religious group called the Maenads, all women of course, and is punished for his crime by being torn limb from limb by his wife and daughters.”

Marissa gets up abruptly from the table and began clearing plates. She says, “That’s drama not dance. Dance integrates both the male and the female within us. It doesn’t tear them apart. I think God, if there is a God, dances a kind of worship like Shiva with no meaning, no truth, only exquisite destruction.”

“Dance as chaos?” Bridget asks, as she gets up and helps Marissa collect the dishes.

“Yes, the point is to transcend the body and take flight through the skin,” Marissa says as they walk into the loft space defined as the kitchen, but really no more private than a low cubicle in their office back in the heights.

“Have you ever seen the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii?” George calls as they walk into the kitchen area. Through the opening in the shelves, he sees Marissa embrace Bridget from behind and press her body against hers whispering fiercely into her ear, a strange expression spreading across Bridget face as she tries to break free, but the more she does the more Marissa holds her tight and pleads into her ear.

Andre asks George if he’d like to see some scrapbooks in the bedroom area but George quickly gets up and carries his plate into the kitchen.

“It’s a two-thousand-year-old Roman house buried by the explosion of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD and perfectly preserved,” George blurts out, brushing between the two women to place his dishes in the sink.

“What house?” Marissa asks perplexedly as Andre follows them into the kitchen.

“The Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii,” he says, pulling Bridget under his arm. “The walls are covered with frescoes, plaster painted murals that show a young girl’s initiation into the cult of Bacchus or Dionysus as he’s better known,” Bridget says. “The life-sized images on panels surrounding the room show her being drugged, stripped of her clothing then flagellated, brought before a man dressed as the priapic god Bacchus who whispers secrets into her ear, secrets so powerful that she breaks away in terror and dances naked in the last mural with this look of absolute ecstasy on her face.”

“It’s almost a complete reversal of the Denishawn motif you describe,” George says thoughtfully. “Instead of draping the body with costumes, the dancer in the Villa is stripped of her clothing and her protective sense of shame, then told some unbearable mystical secret, which both terrifies and liberates her. All she can do in reply is dance.”

Marissa glances from Bridget to George with a quizzical smile on her face then asks, “Will you help us with Trompe L’oeil, or not?”

“I guess” Bridget says looking at George.

“Why not, as long as there’s no flagellation,” he answers.

Act Two – Scene One

The Rehearsal Hall

Stage Direction: You drop a bit of hellebore into some maiden-head soup, have a sip, put on a pair of old leg warmers, a leotard, and a large comfortable sweater that reaches to your knees with a comforting caress, a gesture like your mother placing her hands over your breasts to see if they’ve come in yet. You’re only thirteen but you want to be grown up, seek other ways to make her love you. You shake off this atavistic sensation as you enter the rehearsal studio in Chelsea, a loft overlooking Twenty-Third Street and 10th Avenue in New York City with ceiling high mirrors running down the interior wall and casement windows open to the night air on the other. The parquet floors are smooth and polished from thousands of dance shoes sliding along their boards over the years, the mirrored walls bracketed by ballet barre and hangers for coats and bags. Posters of past performances hang haphazardly on the inner walls with a grand piano near the door and a music deck attached to a series of small speakers.

Begin

Marissa and Andre lead George and Bridget into the studio hall and both seem to expand with each step like gamecocks entering a pit. Marissa runs to the end of the room to embrace a young dancer while Andre introduces them to the other four dancers who are beginning their warm-ups. After the greetings, George and Bridget are led to a corner of the hall where they’re asked to sort costumes and props. While waiting they can’t help but eavesdrop on the quartet and learn that dancers love to complain.

To Bridget it seems a bit childish, mostly defending their dignity against the vagaries of chance. She hears them complain about, ‘Who gets the best solo, the longer encore; the eternal struggle with staying slim, to keep the bruises from showing in the spotlights.’

George whispers to her as he pairs colored leotards to tops, “All these complaints, seems like egos run rampant, some form of verbal aggression for people who normally use their bodies to speak, don’t you think?”

Bridget shrugs and watches with fascination their elaborate preparations.

Darna, a willowy sylph with long limbs performs leg lifts against the side of the baby grand piano. She then pulls herself up onto the lid as if she’s reclining on a divan, her long body covered in oversized sweatshirts, muscular legs squeezed into purple tights and woolen leggings that roll up over black jazz Capezios. She’s complaining about the cold. Dancers are always cold she it seems, forever warming-up then cooling-down, fighting cramped muscles brought on by mysterious drafts and sudden drops in temperature. Defeating the vagaries of weather is a science to them, almost a mania. Every draft in the rehearsal hall is a challenge met by towels stuffed into door cracks, every change in humidity battled by strips of petroleum jelly placed under their noses.

Daniel is of medium height, cocoa-colored skin and adorned with dreadlocks that fall to his shoulders like a mat of black seaweed. He performs jetes on the barre’ while carrying on a monologue directed at a sullen looking young woman stretching on the floor next to him. This borderline catatonic woman we learn is Diane. She has orange frizzy hair that sticks straight out as if she’d placed her finger in a light socket. Andre informs us quietly afterwards that she is bipolar, a pain in the ass, but absolutely wonderful on the dance floor (when she is up, meaning manic and not depressive).

Daniel’s one-sided conversation with Diane concerns the wonderful world of Rolfing or vomitus; a cheap way to pig-out and diet at the same time. It seems that the second biggest concern of dancers is weight control. They know every bit of folklore on how to crash diet and keep their svelte figures (desired by choreographers for lean lines). Dancers in general are pathologically bulimic; secretly bingeing on junk food then Rolfing it up before the old intestines get a hold of it.

Marissa comes over and introduces us to another, much younger dancer. “George and Bridget, this is Estelle. Lovely, isn’t she?” at which she twirls the girl in a pirouette.

Estelle! How to describe her without being trite. She looks like a Maxfield Parrish water nymph, a Nyad, no more than five feet tall with a heart-shaped face and jungle green eyes, raven black hair that she’s tied into a French braid. She is shy and distant as we talk, as if in her mind she’s hiding somewhere else, possibly in a flower strewn meadow or wandering a forest stream alone and not really in that noisy room.

“Estelle is my prize student,” Marissa says, as if the girl is a brood mare instead of a dancer.

“Our sole creation,” Andre adds proudly.

Estelle blushes at the praise, her modesty an unexpected pleasure after the muscular hubris from the other dancers.

“How old are you, Estelle?” Bridget asks.

“Sixteen,” she answers her voice a raspy whisper amidst the cacophony of the clattering crows.

“Her mother brought her to me when she was seven, Marissa says, which sounds more mercenary than artistic. “She’s miraculous on the dance floor, and wait till you see her solo Bridget. I think you’ll find it especially interesting.”

Act Two: Scene Two

The Solo

Andre hands George a stopwatch, leads him to an X marked on the floor with tape and says, “This is Estelle’s starting point. She’ll both start and finish here. I need you to sit on the floor and as soon as she lifts into her first move, push the timer. She should take fifteen minutes precisely.”

“OK, that seems pretty straightforward,” George says as he sits down on the floor and leans against the wall.

“There’s no music to the piece,” Andre adds as he walks away, “so she needs to count the steps in her head. Dancers tend to get off tempo, speed up then slow down without music. When she's done, she’ll return to this X and you stop the clock.”

Andre joins Marissa, the other dancers, and Bridget by the piano as Estelle walks slowly from the dressing room wearing a terry cloth robe. She seems surprised to see George sitting on the floor and drops her head toward her feet which he notices are shoeless. Stopping on her mark, she turns and drops her robe. She is naked underneath. Taken aback by the girl’s derriere a few inches from his eyes, George looks quickly across the room at Bridget and blushes like a child. He sees Andre and Marissa staring at the Estelle and smiling, or were they staring at him? It’s hard to tell, as they are all in a line.

Estelle raises her arms and crosses them over her head in preparation, then sinks and drops upon her haunches, rotates her upper body to look down on George while barely moving her lower torso, every muscle flexing as if a coiled python. In that frozen moment, before she starts, George has a chance to admire and understand her dancer’s body. She is incredibly beautiful yet strangely deformed in that ironic manner of professional dancers. Above the hips she is small-breasted and slight, with graceful arms and shoulders and a trim waist, while below her torso the thighs and calves are knotted with muscles from countless hours of practice. Her wrists, fingers, and knees are soft and pretty yet her calves are covered with knuckled protrusions from damaged sinews after multiple sprains, her feet small and delicate yet veined and bruised. Naked and taken all together she is the archetypical dancer, ethereal naiad above and formidable athlete below.

George shakes his head and grips the stopwatch, thinks, “Marissa has stripped her of the dancer’s visual armor, the pretty clothes and the slimming tights, the illusion of elongation from extended legs and curving arms. She’s replaced the effete with the stark power of muscular articulation, the imaginary princess revealed for what she has always been, a primal woman unveiled for all eyes to dissolve and savor.”

Estelle lifts into her first move as he pushes the stopwatch.

In an almost impossible move to understand rationally. Like a contortionist, Estelle twists her upper body horizontally to face the ceiling without moving her supporting leg, then reaches backwards towards George with her other foot then sweeps suddenly into a gymnastic walkover placing her hands on the floor followed by her feet to enter the dance.

At first her pacing moves smoothly, the choreography fluid and balletic with small leaps and gestures drawing the eyes to Estelle’s extensions, her finger tips and pointed toes. But then Marisa’s choreography becomes increasingly erratic, almost an inversion of dance, moves that pull Estelle’s center, her fulcrum of movement inwardly to her heart, her pelvis, her breasts, challenging the audience to find meaning in the irrational body movements.

George looks up and sees Bridget watching Estelle with fascination. Marissa is cool and appraising while Andre looks sad, as if he envies Estelle her naked ideation and would gladly exchange places with her.

Estelle races across the floor looking over her shoulder as if pursued then abruptly slides to a stop on one foot, her body crunched into a ball with her torso suspended on one knee. It reminds George of something Marissa said about Isadora Duncan’s choreography, how it could all be interpreted as the entwined emblem of a woman in conflict.

Estelle springs up and turns in midair completing a series of grand jetes but jetes a balletomane would scarcely recognize. Instead of the long graceful wrist of a Balanchine dancer, Estelle’s hands are claws like a Martha Graham dancer seeking revenge, her feet flat and horizontal, no uplifting toe dance but a high wire act fearful of descent, all the stresses heavy and pushing the core of her body ever deeper into the antediluvian soil.

Across the room Bridget thinks of the mad Trojan Priestess, Cassandra, all her prophecies of doom ignored but true. For her prophetic gift she is raped by Ajax at the fall of Troy then murdered by Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra when he brings her home to Mycenae as his concubine slave. Estelle pauses, cradles some imaginary creature to her breast, gazing upward at some phantom her face filled with confusion, indecision, as she wrenches backwards into a series of cyclonic spirals, arm spinning out again and again as if propelled by some maddened daemon.

George thinks she might be Medea murdering her children, punishing Jason for his infidelity and abandonment, his opportunistic marriage for wealth and position.

Estelle suddenly stops and raises up on bare toes, holds an airy arabesque, the stillness more powerful than the frenzy that preceded it, her arms reaching, the long line of her poised movement a muscular thread that reaches from foot to limbs across her flattened abdomen, belly, breasts and shoulders, arms and fingers, pointing upward into the elemental yet fulgent space above her head. Then with an explosion of energy she launches into the air with a series of scissoring kicks on her long naked legs; a wild heron straining for flight, each leap stopped by a backwards glance as she moves inexorably forward, a Bacchante pursuing game through Hyborean forests, leaping across fallen timbers to pounce on unsuspecting prey, suckling wild animals then tearing them to pieces like King Pentheus killed by his own wife.

Estelle sweeps into a series of breathless pirouettes, the naked beauty of her front and back merging into a spectacular blur of flesh, her whole-body crimson, suffused with blood, thighs, the flat of her stomach, her face inflamed with momentum, until finally as she spins one last time and falls upon the X that Andre marked on the floor. George clicks the stopwatch off.

Act Three - Scene One

The Critics

Stage Direction: You enter a room and you see mirrors, ceiling high broken mirrors, your reflection endlessly repeated, cornered and spilt, fragments of your soul like shells upon a beach, footprints edging the surf not your own, but you follow and you want to explode above the breaking waves, scream into the hollow rumblings of the critical surf, chain the apparition, the gaseous creature you created into flesh and blood, looks like you but is not you, the avatar of your terror is dancing alone and on the edge of an abyss, where only the truly mad go, and yet no matter how much you try, the sea fades, the mist over the sun escapes and the sand turns to oaken floor, the undulating mirrors that line your inner soul congealing into the hardened glass of the concrete moment, the secondhand moves and the watch stops, and the dance hall reappears.

Begin

Estelle lay frozen for a moment on the floor, looking into George’s eyes, yet distant and incomprehensive, lost in the afterglow of the movements. He imagines the expended seconds trailing behind her like ghost whispers in some Dionysian drama, blood streaks on her thighs, muddy bites on her arms, the slow effusion of control slipping away like God’s fingerprints dissolving on her chest, slowly losing their possession of her limbs as she returns to the present.

Andre runs over and pulls the stopwatch from George’s hands then looks triumphantly at Marissa and cries, “Fifteen minutes exactly. She held the time perfectly.”

Marissa walks over regally and picks up Estelle’s robe, places it on her reclining form then pulls the girl upright into an embrace, kissing her on her panting lips.

“Magnificent, Estelle. I never doubted you.”

George gets up as the other dancers come over and congratulate Estelle. Bridget trails behind them. She puts her arm around George’s waist and sticks her hand into his back pocket.

George whispers, “That was weird.”

Bridget whispers back, “What a mind fuck! It looks like she took our conversation from the other night and turned it into a Hootchie Choochie show.”

“But have her do it naked? What’s the point?”

“For the sheer blazoness of it, the audacity. I think it’s a control trip,” Bridget says.

“What, that Marissa and Andre can convince this kid to dance without her clothes on? That’s perverse.

“Maybe it’s something to spice up their dreams, test the limits of propriety on the dance floor to make intimacy in the performance space.”

Marissa leads Estelle to them, now back in her white robe, their arms around each other like schoolgirls followed by Andre.

“Well, what do you think?” Marissa asks.

Bridget notices Estelle’s blush, her face redder now than it was during her entire performance. Perhaps having dropped the mask of ‘Terpsichore’ she is back to being a teenager and a little embarrassed.

“It was beautiful,” George says offhand.

“You were meant to rattle her you know,” Marissa says.

“I think I was the one rattled,” he replies.

Estelle laughs and says, “When I saw you sitting there, I got really upset. Like you were invading my space. But I pulled it together, didn’t I?” she adds looking at Marissa.

“Yes, darling, as soon as you began, you didn’t see him anymore, did you?”

Estelle smiles as George asks Estelle, “You weren’t embarrassed being naked, you had no idea that there was an audience out here whose eyes were following you?”

Estelle blushes and thinks a moment before speaking but it’s Marissa who answers, “A good dancer is too busy controlling her body. We all feel naked and afraid while the dance is happening even with our clothes on but are too focused on the movement to stop. It’s afterwards that the doubt comes and we feel like we’ve been walking in the Emperor’s New Clothes. Both naked and vulnerable. But then the applause comes and the cheers and the overwhelming sense of joy and appreciation overwhelms us. Believe me, it’s better than sex.”

They all laugh at this as Marissa squeezes Estelle and smiling lets the other dancers pull her away. The two couples stand there quietly surveying each other, a long awkward moment in the midst of the noisy room. “Well how does it feel to be an insider to a dance company?” Andre asks.

“I bet you won’t get enough of our company after this,” Marissa adds with a lopsided smile.

Act Three: Scene Two

Epilogue

George smiles as Marissa puts her arms through Bridget’s and leads her away, as Andre goes over to join the other dancers around Estelle. His unspoken answer to Marissa’s question hangs on his tongue, burning with sincerity yet checked by decorum. In truth, he feels strangely deflated, as if a door has opened and closed leaving him helpless against some secret that will always evade him. George is a romantic. He loves ballet more so than dance because the fairytale provinces of Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake, Petipa and Balanchine choreography, intrigue and entertain him. He loves the mis-en-scene of Petrouscka where fantastic carnivals exist peopled by dozens of corps de ballet dancers who elevate their partners in dance like wisps of pure air presented on the stage for the briefest of moments, suspending reality as if fashioned from an invisible arc of grace and sweet lines of covered flesh, leaving him in anticipatory delight as to what ethereal movement will come next.

Marissa’s choreography and its world of modern atavistic dance is blunt physicality, the veil of illusion torn back like a ripped leotard exposing the naked limbs underneath and disillusioning. He prefers ballet with its fairy stories of cherry apple treats in a golden arbor instead of the tongue thrust physicality of modern dance or soul-sucking adventures with effete, bed-hopping androgynes.

A while later after the props are put away from the other dances in the rehearsal, he looks for Bridget as it’s time to go home and never return to ‘Trompe L’oeil.’ But he sees Marissa, Bridget, and Estelle in a huddle on the floor, their arms around each other like school girls discussing something quietly while Andre looks on discreetly from a distance. It reminds him of something subliminal, mythical, like the conversation they had the other night. Bacchantes gathering!

Later that night he dreams he is King Pentheus of Thebes on Mount Parnassus from Greek mythology tricked by Dionysus into wearing woman’s clothes and drunkenly loosed into the woods to spy on his wife and her Bacchantes. Maddened by the god of wine, the women run naked through the trees and sweep the forest floor in a divine circle dance, hiss like snakes to keep the beat, their young naked bodies opened to the lascivious wind, hair undone and blowing across bare shoulders, arms entwined as the unheard music of the forest creates a melody for their dance, the branches sweeping overhead and the pine needles soft underfoot, pulling them eventually downwards till they sweetly kiss in the love sanctioned by the God of wine.

At midnight when all are asleep, Pentheus creeps into their fragrant camp, pine-scented and soft-footed, but unbeknownst to him Dionysius had transformed him into a wild boar. The Bacchantes rise as one and tear him to pieces and eat his flesh in devotion to the God of rapture, Sparagmos and Omophagia, the holy delirium of devourment as he dances on in his dream laughing.

Thomas Belton is an author with extensive publications in fiction, poetry, non-fiction, magazine feature writing, science writing, and journalism. His professional memoir, “Protecting New Jersey’s Environment: From Cancer Alley to the New Garden State (Rutgers University Press)” was awarded “Best Book in Science Writing for the General Public” by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/protecting-new-jerseys-environment/9780813548876 His recent short story in 2021 “Seneca Village Arises,” was recently published in the literary journal, Meet Me @ 19th Street,” and awarded first prize in its “Best First Chapter Contest” for a novel dealing with racial inequality. http://www.archstreetpress.org/bargemans-daughter/ He is also a poet and his most recently published poem, “Standing Atop the Fish Ladder” appeared in the Monterey Poetry Review (Sept 1, 2021) http://montereypoetryreview.weebly.com/fall2021-poems-862668/thomas-belton In non-fiction he has published hundreds of scientific articles and essays including his 2021 essay on climate change published in “Superstition Review,” the literary magazine of Arizona State University titled “Sea Level Rise and the Two Cultures.” https://blog.superstitionreview.asu.edu/2020/11/17/sea-level-rise-and-the-two-cultures-a-guest-post-by-tom-belton/