The majestic red curtain is closed. The buzz of the audience begins to die down as the last minute stragglers climb over people to reach their seats. The booming voice of the stage manager announces the show and kindly reminds everyone to please silence their cell phones, locate the nearest emergency exit, and refrain from using flash photography. Then, the lights fade to black. The audience erupts into cheers.
Slowly, the curtain parts in the middle, revealing the dancers onstage. The stage lights come in, the music blasts; the show has begun.Just five minutes earlier I was backstage, sneaking peeks at the audience from behind the curtain. It’s Friday night. Last semester we didn’t quite sell out, but this semester, we did. I go to my place off stage, ready for my entrance, where I jump around a little to get the blood flowing and then do some last minute stretching.
Since it’s the Friday night show, the videographer will be here, which means there is extra pressure to make everything perfect, every move even crisper, even more energy pouring out. I was wondering how much the audience was going to like the show. Would they be a good crowd and yell really loud? If we all put a lot of energy behind each move we will give the audience something to feed off of, and then they will have energy that we will in turn be able to fed off of, creating a powerful dynamic that we always strive to achieve in every performance. That is the best feeling in the world to me, to perform for an audience that is involved and engulfed in the performance.
The funny thing is that everyone will sit there for two hours and then leave, hopefully, with his or her spirits slightly lifted from a great performance, but then that will be that. They will wake up the next day and their lives will be the same; they would have forgotten most of the details of what they had just seen the night before. They will probably download a few of their favorite songs, but then just continue with their lives as normal, worrying about what homework they have to do, how much longer they can put off their laundry, and what time the next sports game is on. Hopefully somewhere in the back of their minds they will have the intention of coming to the next Dance Ensemble show.
The way I see it; life is like a river that flows and is riddled with obligations and work. Every form of entertainment is a temporary step out of the vicious flow, but it is easy for them, as the audience, to hop back into the riff of things. For me, it is not that simple.Waiting backstage for the pre-show announcements, I reflect on my week thus far. I realize that my reality was altered in the week leading up to the opening night, what is referred to as “Tech week” because finally the music, lights and dance all come together on the stage. My life no longer revolved around going to class, meeting friends for lunch, and perhaps watching a few episodes of The O.C. with some of the girls on my floor. Instead, my life became dance. It was, without a doubt, a whirlwind of an experience.
Throughout the week, my friends thought I had fallen off the face of the planet because the girls I dance with became the only people I saw. My access to the outside world was put on hold. I had stepped out of that flowing river. The blinders were on and nothing was going to take my focus off of the show. It hits me that it is already Friday night, our last show of the year tomorrow. It seems like it was only yesterday that we were sitting in the dressing room. It was the beginning of tech week and we were just waiting around, watching the time slowly tick away, wondering when the next dance would be called so the choreographer could set all the lighting cues.
Our “freshman” section of the dressing room was littered with plastic containers from the dining hall, water bottles, overflowing dance bags, costumes hanging on the lockers, make up, and hair supplies while an interesting aroma of food and hairspray lay static in the air. Everyone was munching on something, carrots, chocolate covered pretzels, or wheat sticks with hummus. As the night ran later and later we all became more and more tired, laughing at anything and everything. We were acting out of character, quoting lines from “Rejected Cartoons” (some even acting it out), taking pictures with really silly poses and faces, and singing obnoxiously loud to our favorite songs when they came on the radio. Occasionally, someone would prance in and announce “Bonjourno Principesa!!!” then walk back out again as we all echoed it back to her in unison. We made fun of each other’s quirks and no one got upset because it was all in good fun.
The music comes on and I snap back into the present. The nerves return as I anxiously await my cue. I hear it, strut on stage, and the nerves disappear once I hit the first move. In my mind, there is no longer anything else except the audience and me. Faster than it began, the show comes to a screeching halt as we hit our ending pose, the lights blackout and the curtain rushes closed and the audience erupts again. In the darkness, we feel around to form into two lines and join hands for bows. The curtain opens once more and the audience, still clapping and cheering begins to stand up. We raise our hands up and bow and I feel a sense of triumph, relief, and bliss mixed in with a sense of wonder as I look at the standing ovation. This is what I live for, being able to bring happiness to people doing something I love.
The standing ovation is my validation for all the hard work, the endless rehearsals, the lack of sleep, the muscle fatigue, the weeks worth of undone homework, and the eyelash glue that is going to take the next week and a half to get off. My only sense of grief that remains in the back of my mind as I bask in the brilliance comes from the fact that our last show is tomorrow. The curtain slowly closes for the last time of the night, breaking my connection with the audience, leaving me empty. After the curtain closes we all come together and embrace, cheering, “We are…DE!” at the success of the show. Then everyone goes their separate directions to go hang up their costumes and gather their things to go home before we go out to meet the crowd, a sea of familiar faces. I meet up with my friends and family and by their ecstatic reaction I can tell that they understand why I have been non-existent all week. That in itself is also a validation and I walk back stage with a satisfied grin that it wasn’t all for nothing.
As I gather my belongings, I know that waking up the morning after the last show is going to be so disappointing, because I will feel exactly what I feel after every last show: aimless. That’s the one thing they don’t tell you about performing, the emptiness felt when the last show is over; the utter shock of being thrusted back to reality. The blinders come off and now there is a week’s worth of homework to face, notes to get, lectures to catch up on, laundry to do, and a room to clean that still has Monday’s clothes scattered on the floor.
It’s like stepping off a Tilt-a-Whirl ride. Once you step off, you feel as if you should continue moving. You feel woozy, bewildered, and almost slightly confused. There is nothing to lead you in the right direction. All you can do is wait a bit until the world stops spinning before you can walk straight again. Walking out of the theater, which had become my home for the past week, I become conscious of the fact that the only thing that will make my world stop spinning, get me walking straight again and able to jump back into the river of obligation is to find something to fill the emptiness. I am comforted by the fact that everyone else on DE will be going through the same feeling of emptiness tomorrow night. This idea, along with the joyful anticipation of being able to hang out with my friends again and the lulling dread of making up work will fill the space a bit. At that point, I will be able to jump back into the riff of things, however, a lingering sting of emptiness will remain and I will merely get used to the feeling and become numb to the pain until DE reconvenes. Only then will I feel my true sense of belonging and delight.
I am a master of dance, a lover to music, an enchantress of the stage, and a slave to the audience.
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