"Spider Robinson and Jeanne - Stardance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

common, I think.”
I paid her honesty the compliment of not wincing. “I suppose we do.”
“Then you will?”
“Right after the session.”
She twinkled and was gone. In a remarkably short time she had
organized the studioful of wandering, chattering young people into
something that resembled a dance ensemble if you squinted. They warmed
up during the twenty minutes it took me to set up and check out my
equipment. I positioned one camera in front of them, one behind, and
kept one in my hands for walk-around close-up work. I never triggered it.
There’s a game you play in your mind. Every time someone catches or is
brought to your attention, you begin making guesses about them. You try
to extrapolate their character and habits from their appearance. Him?
Surly, disorganized—leaves the cap off the toothpaste and drinks
boilermakers. Her? Art-student type, probably uses a diaphragm and
writes letters in a stylized calligraphy of her own invention. Them? They
look like schoolteachers from Miami, probably here to see what snow looks
like, attend a convention. Sometimes I come pretty close. I don’t know how
I typecast Shara Drummond in those first twenty minutes. The moment
she began to dance, all preconceptions left my mind. She became
something elemental, something unknowable, a living bridge between our
world and the one the Muses live in.
I know, on an intellectual and academic level, all there is to know about
dance, and I could not categorize or classify or even really comprehend the
dance she danced that afternoon. I saw it, I even appreciated it, but I was
not equipped to understand it. My camera dangled from the end of my
arm, next to my jaw. Dancers speak of their “center,” the place their
motion centers around, often quite near the physical center of gravity. You
strive to “dance from your center,” and the “contraction and release” idea
which underlies much of Modern dance depends on the center for its focus
of energy. Shara’s center seemed to move about the room under its own
power, trailing limbs that attached to it by choice rather than necessity.
What’s the word for the outermost part of the sun, the part that still shows
in an eclipse? Corona? That’s what her limbs were: four lengthy tongues of
flame that followed the center in its eccentric, whirling orbit, writhing
fluidly around its surface. That the lower two frequently contacted the
floor seemed coincidental—indeed, the other two touched the floor nearly
as regularly.
There were other students dancing. I know this because the two
automatic video cameras, unlike me, did their job and recorded the piece
as a whole. It was called Birthing, and depicted the formation of a galaxy
that ended up resembling Andromeda. It was only vaguely accurate,
literally, but it wasn’t intended to be. Symbolically, it felt like the birth of a
galaxy.
In retrospect. At the time I was aware only of the galaxy’s heart: Shara.
Students occluded her from time to time, and I simply never noticed. It
hurt to watch her.
If you know anything about dance, this must all sound horrid to you. A
dance about a nebula? I know, I know. It’s a ridiculous notion. And it
worked. In the most gut-level, cellular way it worked—save only that Shara