Voila: A Dance Libretto

It is beyond dispute that no character in fiction, even if conceived as an ape, a beetle, a fantasm, is without connection with real persons experienced by the writer within contact of sight, sound, and touch, or second-hand through experience recorded by others in one medium or another, and whether or not the writer is always aware of this. . . . For this creature, formed from the material and immaterial—what has breathed upon the writer intimately, brushed by him in the street, and the ideas that shape behavior in his personal consciousness of this time and place, directing the flesh in action—this fictional creature is brought into synthesis of being by the writer’s imagination alone, is not cloned from some nameable Adam’s rib or Eve’s womb. Imagined: yes. Taken from life: yes. What do we writers have to work on as looters in that fragmentation of the possibilities of observation, of interaction, of grasp, in the seen and unseen, constant flux and reflux, the conscious and unconscious defined as “life”?

—Nadine Gordimer

Setting:

The prologue is read aloud by the choreographer who is sitting at a table with a quart-size jar of water. While reading she intermittently stops to drink.

Prologue:

Eight performances of Voilà ran for two consecutive weekends in November 1995 at the Public Domain, a performance venue on Congress Avenue, three blocks from the state capitol in Austin, Texas. The theatre was on the second floor of a two-story building. Its aesthetic similarities to performance lofts in New York City were not lost to the choreographer nor many audience members. Three days after the performances ended, the choreographer packed her bags and flew to Acapulco to visit a friend.

Four days into her Mexican holiday she began writing a dance libretto for Voilà but before she started, the dancer felt compelled to document three Acapulco street scenes she witnessed the day following her arrival.

Scene One: At a crowded market, on one of its narrow crumbling sidewalks busy with the very poor, an old man stood holding himself upright with one hand pressed into the doorway of a women’s clothing shop. He seemed dazed although it appeared he wanted to get inside. Black cotton pants circled his ankles. No other clothing covered his body. His slightly yellowed skin was sprinkled with brown spots and scabs. The area around his coccyx was hollowed out. Aside from a few schoolchildren who stood off giggling, no one stopped marketing. The American choreographer thought that maybe the old man’s daughter owned the dress shop.

Scene Two: On the return to her hotel, from the window of a taxi at a busy crossroads at the edge of the market, she spied a barber shaving an old man angled backwards in the barber’s chair. His bony head, at the end of a skinny neck, lay turned toward the street. The rest of his body lay hidden by a white sheet. Pleasure radiated from behind his closed eyes. He stayed that way.

Scene Three: From the balcony of her eleventh-story hotel room she was transfixed by tourists who departed the sandy beach via a parachute pulled by a speeding motor boat. For ten minutes they drifted above the bay and shoreline, secure in a harness fitted to the flyer’s chest. She could feel her own body lifted, legs dangling, heart trembling, pulled through space. Her fascination included the memory of a photograph of her daughter who made the same leap years earlier. That photograph, turned upside down, became the title page for the choreographer’s dance score, The Aviator.

The original draft of the libretto was written under a glass-domed cabana on the roof of an historic building overlooking Parque Mexico in Mexico City. She wrote at a small table beside an unused swimming pool on which specks of plant life alone floated. The house was rented by the Australian Embassy for one of its government employees. Rebecca, a young, vivacious correspondent for the embassy lived in luxury on the first floor. The choreographer’s friend lived in a small room on the...