Dancing towards the end.
2nd Installment of my dance training at the ill-fated North Carolina School of the Arts
There was a commotion and a stream of girls running through the small dorm hallway- a girl across the hall had tried to kill herself.
It was week two of our first term. She was in my section and I didn’t even know her name yet. We watched them take her down the hallway, followed by our hushed whispers and speculation.
“Anne just tried to kill herself- she wasn’t tough enough to make it.”
A girl a few doors down from me rolled her eyes and stepped back into her dorm room, acting as if this was a normal occurrence.
Well, apparently, it was.
Anne was mentioned only one other time the following day in technique class, when someone asked (how did they even muster the courage, I wonder now), and Kuch waved off the questions with a flick of his hand.
“She doesn’t matter. Floor work.”
And turned to establish himself in his teaching spot – draped lazily on the floor, pressed up against the mirror, legs splayed out in front of him where he yelled at the room — “and body and body” as we sweated, moaned and stretched, and reached inside for everything we had to please him. To show him we had “it”. That we could Dance.
Life moved quickly on from Anne and her troubles, and we were absorbed with memorizing the floor work routine that began every class.
I was sixteen — a senior in high school, and I was a student at North Caroline School of the Arts, the best dance school in the world. This was the place you went to in 1988 to be recognized and trained by the best dancers modern dance had produced.
Richard Kuch and Richard Gain were original members of The Martha Graham dance company, and Merce Cunningham Dance Co., respectively. They were the Kings that ruled mercilessly — there was no way their subjects would question them.
Classes began early each day, as we had to cram all of our high school work into a school day as well as technique, character, Ballet, choreography, and Pilates. We were required to sign up for a studio each night, individually (not together, they would check), and practice for an hour.
Both, Richards — Crotch and Groin, as they were affectionately called — would roam the cigarette smoke filled halls of the studios, and open the doors to check that we were in there, actually practicing.
I remember desperately trying to lock the door ( which had no lock), and resorted to covering the glass with paper — I felt hunted. I didn’t know what would happen when Kuch or Gain would poke his head in, but I knew it would not be pleasant.
Slowly, we all began to acclimatize to the grueling schedule — I remember vividly, that first week of classes, I could barely walk up the stairs my legs shook so intensely. I had to have friends swoop their arms under me, and help me to dance class.
We laughed, of course — we were seniors in high school, and we were going to be dancers in NYC.
Through the Fall, as classes progressed, cliques formed.
Dancers were becoming self ordered from best to worst, there was a rumor that in January something intense would happen to us — it had happened to all the classes before us. Slowly the details unfurled like terrible fortunes, and we came to know that we would be taking part in “bikini class”, in the dreaded, cavernous, and cold Studio A starting in Winter term.
The main conversation, in between classes and meals, was “what kind of bikini are you going to get?”, and how to manage to cover up as much as possible while adhering to their strict guidelines of what needed to be visible.
“All of your muscles”. “We want to see all of them”. (For some reason, whenever I hear Kuch’s voice in my head, he sounds Transylvanian — but he was probably from Kansas).
On reflection, this had to be strange, not only for us, but also for our parents, who presumably had to go and purchase this weird item for their high school senior in a store — in the fall season — a bikini for their sixteen-year-old to wear at dance school.
The mind boggles — did any parents ask questions?
It isn’t like we could just order something online — our parents had to know, didn’t they?
Did they fil out a waiver? This was the 80s — they might not have even noticed, honestly.
The experience was odd — me being in high school, and yet my classmates were all freshman, or even sophomores in college, and some of our classes blended with the young adults earning their BFAs.
I remember taking one of the best classes of my life around a conference room table, being introduced to poetry, with college students.
The only boundary we had was that the doors closed and locked to our small dorm at 9pm, and we had better be inside.
Flash forward to the following spring, and I remember being in a rage, and storming out of the building the glass door swinging behind me — and no one came after me.
I went into the dark, on my own, and grabbed a ride from some group of college elders who always seemed to be opportunistically lurking in the parking lot around the dorms. We drove in the warm dark to the most popular spot in Winston Salem, Dunkin Donuts. There, we would smoke cigarette after cigarette, and drink coffee, and cry, and philosophize, usually over the latest boyfriend drama we were enduring.
That fall of my senior year was a strange and hallucinatory blend of grueling and glorious. There was an electricity to the school — everyone there from all over the world was the best of their area — had ambition that burned intensely in every step, and we were all determined to make it big.
We were larger than our limitations, and we had no idea what would be coming, or that decades later we would be holding the school accountable for what it knew, and did nothing to stop.