The Last Dance – Ophelia

 

I am deeply grateful that my last premiere was with Val Caniparoli’s ballet, Ophelia.

I was to play Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother who weds Claudius, the brother of the murdered King Hamlet. She is the source of part of Hamlet’s distress and disgust. She is a shamelessly shallow and sensual woman. She is blamed for following her voracious lust in marrying too quickly after her husband’s murder.

She is portrayed as self-indulgent in the play, but if one reads deeper, there is much more going on there, even though she is (to Hamlet) an antagonist and the root of his despair and melancholy.

On the deeper levels of this play and ballet, she is a Queen with deep insights into the workings of politics, and she is no fool.

She knows that her marriage has caused Hamlet pain, and she her approach is direct and insightful. She is intelligent and knows her authority in situations. She is a shrewd observer, but she falls into the role of the passive wife and will do what her husband wants because she thinks dedication to her husband requires her to trust his judgment, even regarding her own son.

She is caught in a world of opinions and struggles to find her own definition of who she is … when she is forced to confront the realities of the situation.

She did not want to admit or see that Claudius could have killed King Hamlet.

She is a character in the middle of a moral awakening within a crisis of power that surrounds her. In dancing, this character, she becomes the expression of her own suffering at this realization, and it shows that this awakening causes her true remorse and deep grief.

She realizes that she has to keep Hamlet’s sanity a secret and the knowledge that Claudius murdered Hamlet’s father … also … a secret.

She is a tortured character that awakens to the truth of her situation and then must act.

As you can imagine … she is me.

 

I was in my own moral awakening to the situation of my own reality. I am suffering and seeing where what is being murdered … are the cherished illusions that I carried within from my own childhood. I am awakening to where I had been complicit in my own suffering by trying to ignore what is going on obviously in the external reality and then realizing that below the surface, my own level of denial had been crippling me.

As I was the dancer leaving the company, I did not get to have an opening night, but I would still have my own opening night, and that would be my big moment to shine brightly one last time before my light would leave this particular chapter and book of my life.

If I was to go, I decided to burn out on this stage at the Capital Theater that I had loved so dearly.

I could not help but notice how this would be a fitting completion and a full circle to the karma that I carried from being the ballerina, Emma Livery, in France … so very long ago. As she literally caught her tutu on fire in performance and eventually succumbed to the terrible burns, she suffered.

In this scenario, I got to make the choice to walk through the fire and become the sweet curling smoke that fires imaginations and, hopefully … dreams.

This character was the embodiment of what seemed to be my tortured existence that had been this last year in Ballet West.

It was so deeply important to me to do this ballet the justice it deserved and for me to completely surrender into this character and let out this woman inside who was sensual and powerful, blind and intelligent, passive and, in the end … protective. I needed to finally … be honest with myself. Just like Gertrude.

The emotions that were rolling through my body in rehearsals were so intense that there were moments that I literally had to go numb to protect myself from the truth of such a deep pain that kept trying to surface. It threatened to choke the very life and breath out of my body. Such levels of emotion in a rehearsal studio are not easy to navigate but on a stage … that would be another matter entirely.

I knew this last moment for me was so very important. I knew that I needed and deserved something special from my mate at that time, the doctor. I asked repeatedly for him to make sure that I got a huge bouquet of flowers for this last premier.

 

At first, he was less than thrilled at my request. He was a very self-absorbed person, and the world revolved around him.

Just like Gertrude, I did not see the behavioral indicators that glaringly showed me that he was a narcissist.

After all, I was in love.

But I did see his resistance to my request. I made that request, over and over again, because I knew that if he did not hear my deep need and the plea at how important this was going to me, then I would not be able to be with him.

It was that intense of a moment.

I even told him all of that directly because I was putting everything on the line to do this transition.

If he did not get that, then I could never be with him.

As a dancer, we understand that others do not get the level of total commitment that art such as ballet requires.

All artists know what I am talking about and are currently nodding their heads in agreement.

I have a pattern that has existed in my reality for as long as I can remember. That pattern is that during a performance … I am completely calm, never nervous, and absolutely centered and clear.

 

But a week before, I am a wreck. I was a wreck a week before the ballet, “Rite of Spring, Mistress of Sorrows, Allegro Brilliant, Giselle, Don Quixote Pas de Deux,” and many more.

This moment was even bigger, and it was not going to be an exception to that rule.

Remember, beginnings and endings in my reality are dramatic.

This was both. An ending to a fine career in ballet, an end to my childhood and youthful innocence, an end to a world where I intended to believe that “Everything is beautiful at the Ballet!”, and a beginning to discover who I really was, discover my inner adult and woman, discover my sexual self in the external world, and discover that I had much more to give. Just in other ways.

The pressure was unbelievable as I tried to find a balance in a world that made me feel like a pitcher with my water in it, starting to tilt and everything that I thought I was, getting ready to pour out.

I did not know if there was something that would be there to catch me on some invisible other side. It was a moment of total trust and surrender.

It was so stressful that a week before the performance, we did a rehearsal, and I went home, tired and exhausted.

Then when I woke up in the morning, I was covered head to toe in pimples, hives, and red-blotchy patches all over my body. They were even under my hair and on my scalp. I had never broken out in this way before.

I looked at myself in the mirror … stunned!

Shockingly it did not hurt (though dancers have an enormous tolerance for pain).

I now looked like the stress case outside that I had been feeling on the inside. My face revealed to me the hard truth that I had been trying to avoid feeling. I was beyond stressed!

 

The truth was clearly on my face.

 

There could be no denying it. Whether to myself or others.

I tried to cover it up with makeup, but that proved futile. No one could cover this up.

So embarrassed, humbled, and uncomfortably vulnerable, I went to the theater, class, and rehearsal to show the raw and real truth about how I was really feeling to anyone awake enough to notice.

Oh, and everyone noticed!

They are artists, after all.

They are deeply sensitive. That is why we are all here.

Everyone took one look at me and said, “What happened to you?”

There was only one true answer. I told them the truth about how I was feeling. I told them that I was completely stressed out, scared, unsure, and honestly … terrified. And that my ego could not pretend anymore that I was okay. I was not okay, and my body could not handle holding any more stress or me attempting to be strong and to hide the truth from myself or them.

Most were compassionate. That level of honesty made others deeply uncomfortable as they saw something in me that was still deeply buried in them.

Fortunately, it lasted only a few days, and by the dress rehearsals, I was pretty much healed though some redness and bumps were on my body (Thank God!) they were not on my face or chest.

I was super excited for the dress rehearsal.

The dress I was to wear was magnificent. Probably one of my favorite ones from all my years of dancing.

The costume for this character, Gertrude, was a bright, blood-red dress that was heavy fabric with a full circle at the skirt. It fit skintight on the bodice with sleeves, and it flared in that beautiful full circle from the waist down. It was a glorious dress! A perfect representation of my choice to leave the naïve innocence of my ballet world and embrace a more earthy and passionate existence in the “real” world.

In the dress rehearsal, I discovered that when I went up into any turn, the dress acted as a counterbalance, and I could endlessly spin in the dress because of its perfect flow and expanding spin as I danced.

And I mean … spin!

 

Perhaps, it was Goddess Kali at work once again. Perhaps it was the brilliant design of our costume designer David Heuvel.

But I did not care. The feeling was triumphant!

All I knew was that it allowed me to float on the air of that skirt effortlessly and endlessly.

On stage … that skirt allowed me to do an En Dedans Pirouette … forever!

 

I had never … ever done that many pirouettes on a stage or in a rehearsal!

When that dress combined with the emotions I was feeling … I would go around eight times.

 

As I did that first one on stage, I suddenly flashed to that past moment when I remembered the pirouette lessons from Baryshnikov. I remembered all the dreams of effortless spinning. I was spinning around in space and time. I was a planet caught in the gravity of some enormous cosmic game of life, love, and light. It felt eternal. It felt alive. It felt blissful, and it felt … calm.

It was like flying and spinning all at the same time.

It anchored in that this was a perfect moment!

Such moments require a great sacrifice.

One that most people in this life will never be able to offer up or understand.

Such a moment requires a total willingness to … surrender.

At that moment, I knew I was in the perfect place and time. Even if I was not on a stage, I was never going to stop spinning, I would never stop being the light; I would never stop being a beacon of hope. I was a being whose soul intended to illuminate the possibilities that are too often forgotten in this density.

I would only stop when I chose.

And I knew that this moment was my choice to end this expression of my soul.

But there was something deeper also longing to find its way to the surface. I could suddenly see that ballet required too much energy in my limited human form.

It had to be set aside for this moment in time.

Spinning in that dress rehearsal, I heard the angels say clearly, “When you stop dancing, it is essential that you do no ballet, no dancing, no hard exercise that stimulates you the way ballet has. You have to completely put it aside for 3 years. Only after 3 years can you give dance a try again. You will discover that you have moved on and that you can never really go back to that manifestation of your being. More awaits you outside this particular configuration of your soul’s expression. But you must not even say, ‘I used to be an amazing ballerina!’ Let the ego die! Let this manifestation be complete for now. It is time. You are ready. Let go! And we will show you wonders that your mind cannot currently comprehend! Trust us! We have never let you fall through a hole in the floor yet, and we will not be starting now!”

That was what I needed to completely surrender and allow every fiber of my being to complete.

The performance arrived and fortunately, so did the flowers. While I knew that he did it because of my badgering, I did not care. It meant the world to me.

This performance felt like a dream. I was dancing alongside a dear friend Mark Borchelt.  A soul that I could and had trusted with my life … and he had never failed to be there exactly as I needed. A soul that understood the depth that we both felt but also knew that words at that time did no justice to the essence of what we knew intrinsically inside.

In this blood-red dress where magic flowed through its threads and fabric, I had to admit that I was Gertrude. She was I, and together in this performance and on this night … we were going to heal.

In a live performance of this ballet, there are levels of perfection that naturally happen. In those moments, we (as dancers) have to choose what to do. Because the music and choreography needs to continue on, the feeling in those turns needed to suspend time and space within my soul so that, together with the audience, I could capture hearts and souls.

When that moment came, I chose to allow the movement to become immortalized in the ethers and in the memories of the audience. I allowed that spin to continue. Knowing full well that the choreography required other steps. They were meaningless at that moment. It was my moment. It was my last moment. And it was a moment that my soul needed to capture, express, fully feel, and become one with the audience and that special feeling one last time.

I knew I could seize their breath because magic can always stop time.

I knew I could allow them to remember something deeply buried within that is scratching to come out and touch this moment.

I knew that in that perfect moment, they could forget their troubles, the things that they needed to do tomorrow, their responsibilities, and their own identity and ego.

All of us, myself included, needed to forget the past, let go of needing to know the future, and together ride the wave of this moment.

In that spin, our souls intertwined, and together, we took a ride that reminds all of us that none of those attachments were important. The only important thing was the vulnerability of honest passion.

At that moment, we became one in an orgy of shared passions and human longing. We became a symphony of souls demanding to be heard in a moment of unapologetic emotional devotion to all creative obsessions.

In a cacophony of true human frailty and glorious honesty, we became one heart beating … pounding our demand out into the universe to be heard, listened to, respected, and honored in our willingness to dive into this dark world of complex emotions, and we together we reached toward the light that we can now see that we always were.
~Suzanne Wagner~

~Suzanne Wagner~

 

 

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