Out Loud: A Memoir - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Morris was born on August 29, 1956, in Seattle, Washington. He formed the Mark Morris Dance Group (MMDG) in 1980 and has since created over 150 works for the company. From 1988 to 1991, he was Director of Dance at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. In 1990, he founded the White Oak Dance Project with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Morris is also an acclaimed ballet choreographer and opera director.
 
Wesley Stace has published four novels, including the international bestseller Misfortune. He recorded 17 records under the name John Wesley Harding before reverting to his birth name for Self-Titled in 2013. His show Wesley Stace’s Cabinet of Wonders has been a fixture in New York City and beyond for ten years.

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One

Verla Flowers Dance Arts

I asked for dancing lessons when I was nine.

My mother-I called her Maxine-used to take me to see various touring companies at the Seattle Opera House, a series called Sol Hurok Presents. On one of these outings, we saw the great flamenco dancer JosŽ Greco, a gorgeous New Yorker with a big nose and a big basket. Flamenco excited me-it was sexy, virtuosic, stylized, and very alone-and, perhaps inspired by my mother's love for all things Spanish, my immediate reaction was "I want to do that!" My sister Marianne, nine years older, may also have been influential. She'd had some ballet lessons, doing jazz numbers to boogie-woogie, and was just starting pointe classes, which was also when she stopped. But that technique caught my eye. After one of her classes, I crammed my feet into Tupperware juice glasses so I could imitate her by walking on pointe in the front room. My sister thought I was going to die.

So my mother, seeing I was serious, opened the phone book and found a teacher, Verla Flowers, who taught Spanish dancing. Verla-always just Verla-was from the old school, the Depression era. She'd danced on the vaudeville circuit and studied with famous people, including Matteo, the American-born choreographer, a master of Spanish dance (who only recently died at ninety-two). There's a Verla Flowers in every single town in America, but her school wasn't just "Dolly Dinkle," the term embarrassed dancers use for their hometown dance school, a phrase I've never liked. Verla was well connected in Seattle, with friends who ran Cornish College of the Arts, the preeminent performing arts establishment.

Verla had an amazing beehive that was loopy and tall-it wasn't one big puff-bold, big, and auburn. Her hair was done fresh once a week, and you could tell what day of the week it was by how far it had collapsed. She wore comfortable muumuus-this was a long time ago-and had different shoes for every dance: black character shoes for Spanish class and big silver tap shoes with jingles. She'd taught herself a lot of the classic repertoire on the piano. Her daughter taught also, and there was a devoted husband, Ted, who did odd jobs and drove people around.

She seemed old to me because I was young (she was fifty-two when we met, older than my mother), and we were friendly in that intergenerational way. Though flamboyant, she was old-fashioned, big on manners like a strict mother who makes her children wear neckties to church. Above all else, however, she needed to keep her students, so she couldn't afford to be one of those vicious ninety-year-old classical ballet teachers from Russia, the kind you can't ever get rid of. There aren't a lot of the crazy ones left anyway, because you can't touch the students anymore, let alone hit them with your walking stick.

She taught all over Seattle in satellite studios, church halls, and so on, but her own studio-Verla Flowers Dance Arts, where she taught hula, tap, and "toe dancing" (as people used to call dancing on pointe)-was north of the zoo in the Greenwood area. At my very first lesson, a private lesson, we learned a well-known flamenco solo form called a farruca, traditionally performed only by men, a dance of intense footwork and quick steps. I learned a couple of phrases a week. I still know most of them, and thirty-five years later, some of that very first dance made it into my own dance Four Saints in Three Acts, to music by Virgil Thomson.

Verla's Spanish dancing lessons, every Saturday for an hour and a half, were so exhilarating, so much fun, that I couldn't stop practicing on my own time. I'd do a move forever until I got it down. Immediately, I was a full-on committed perfectionist, purely because I was doing something I really liked. Verla saw something in me right away and quickly picked me out. I was new, I was eager, and I was a boy. Basically it was pretty much free-and it often is if you're a young male, because there's a paucity of dancing boys, partly because you're required to wear tights and therefore everyone thinks you're a sissy. And I was a sissy, but I was bolder than everyone else. I was also gifted, a quick study, good rhythmically, and smart, and she soon tricked me into taking ballet classes to keep me interested and busy. There was also some kind of arrangement with my mother for making and sewing costumes, the barter system in action. And as soon as I was old enough to know more than the other students, Verla had me teaching. She didn't teach ballet herself; she had other young ballet dancers for that. And if there was a ballet number in the recital, I'd get the only boy's part.

The fact is Verla saw in me a prodigy, someone worthy of her extra attention and time. While my mother was working, I spent all day at the studio; I'd help Verla teach, take classes myself, or simply wrangle the younger kids. At the end of the day she'd take me to the greasy spoon around the corner for a grilled cheese or a patty melt. Somebody told me there was always a secret bottle of vodka in her desk. I never saw her take so much as a sip.

There had been earlier performances.

In kindergarten, we did a production of The Three Billy Goats Gruff-my first performing experience. I was a Billy Goat, but I did something naughty and found myself relegated to Troll under the Bridge (which I would now consider a better part). This was the first in a litany of humiliating theatrical demotions.

In another show, a journey quest, I played the part of a wise old owl. Someone asked me, "Are you my mommy?" My line was "No. Please go over there and ask them!" But instead I improvised a joke: "Scram, Scrambled Eggs!" I got in terrible trouble and ended up recast as a rock. Not until the third or fourth grade did I manage to keep a part: the unnamed narrator, the victim, in The Pit and the Pendulum.

So I started putting on entertainments of my own, improvising scenes and doing shows in the living room or the backyard. I cast all the neighbor kids and forced my parents to watch. I was very bossy: that was me.

My sisters remember a big hit when I was about ten, at Franklin High, the school down the street where my father taught and that I was later to attend, for some kind of international dinner-these were the days of pancake breakfasts and spaghetti feeds-at which they'd fix different foods and present some examples of "international" entertainment. I was quite good at Russian dance by then, and I think Dad, who'd been with the family to see me dance and play balalaika at the local Russian center, suggested that his son represent Russia. Grandma and Maxine sewed me a costume with balloon pants, and I kicked my legs very high, to my parents' pride.

By the age of ten I must have had the requisite ballet chops, because Verla drove me down to Portland, Oregon, to audition for a bit part with the Bolshoi Ballet, the legendary Russian company that often visited America. During their tour, the Bolshoi would come to a town and audition local children, a good public relations idea to this day. The particular piece I was auditioning for, Rehearsal, starts at the barre in the studio with little kids, progresses through training, and, as if in time-lapse, ends with the adult professionals from the company. The real draw would have been Swan Lake; Rehearsal would have been part of a repertory show.

It was a big trip away from home, and I was in Verla's charge, which my mother wouldn't have worried about for a moment, even though it was my first time out of town without family. We shared a room-Verla was strict with lights-out and said her prayers, which I didn't like-and she took me to the audition. I got the gig; we rehearsed for a week and then performed.

I've since met dancers all over the world of every age who were in Rehearsal. Richard Colton, a great dancer with Twyla Tharp, did...