My Body, the Showpiece

Graphic by Andrew Wang

The auditorium seems empty despite the fifty students huddled against the back wall. Most of them are on their phones, faces exhumed by the blue light and thumbs tapping at something or other suddenly more interesting than what’s happening on the stage. Scratch that, the auditorium doesn’t feel empty. It feels exigent, pressing, present. Six of us-- three boys, three high-heeled girls-- stand there under the lights, made inconspicuous by the collective decision not to see. 

It’s a strange thing to stand on a stage before the performance is born, strange to see the black-painted wood without glow-in-the-dark tape or scuffs. The first day of blocking is full of the possibility of being chosen and the dread of what comes with it. Soon, the show will form around us and we can only try to hold our shapes inside of it. 

That’s how I’ve always felt performing musical theater, like the shape of a body instead of a body itself. I think that a body gets to decide when it’s touched. Like a star, it has heat and gravity. That day, the choreographer stood me next to the tallest boy in the cast. We were friends with a history, albeit one that wouldn’t make it into any books or even any Christmas cards. She taught us a simple dance sequence, a few turns, a lift that turned me into a tethered kite on the side of his body, legs jutting outwards in quasi-triangles and our hip bones pressed uncomfortably together. Then she said, now kiss. It doesn’t seem like a big thing, a dishonest kiss. We kissed. She said kiss longer. We put our lips together again and listened as she critiqued our deepness and the angle of our faces. He dropped me into a dip and the only thing left tying me to the ground was the transitory sole of my character shoe.

She counted out loud, each syllable punctuated by a loud clap. One mississippi. Two mississippi. Three mississippi. Four mississippi. Five mississippi. Six mississippi. Our mouths came apart with the sound of a bare leg peeling off a hot car seat. 

It doesn’t seem like a big thing, a dishonest kiss. The director came back the next day and cut the scene. 

Two years earlier, we oozed from the back of the theater like termites from the crevices of a rotten log, save with less agency and more cleavage. It was a production of Les Miserables, and we were the lovely ladies, giggling and rouged with smears of lipstick in a feeble stab at dirtiness. It turns out that it’s not so difficult to parade high school girls as Royaume de France prostitutes if you hike up their skirts and say grimace. It’s also not so difficult to grimace. 

We had stuffed ourselves into corsets. Mine was white and gold. It cost me forty dollars of waitressing money. When it came in the mail, I held it flat across my hands, the untied laces spilling across my right arm like strands of blonde hair, too soft and shiny to be connected to bone. Or boning. My first piece of lingerie, to be worn for a crowd of seven hundred. The costumer brought it out into the black-paved parking lot behind the theater and rubbed it in the dirt. 

Art is intimacy. That’s the root of it anyway-- the act of ripping something from inside yourself, covering it in sequins or blood, and giving it away. But there’s a way to push young artists safely, and it comes with constant communication and checking in. The relationship between the director and the actors is just as important as that between the people that are acting sex or acting connection. It may very well be that in my years of theater, I only experienced safe, caring touch. But we never talked about it; we never even acknowledged it as pure acting. I didn’t know what intimacy blocking was until I found myself choreographing in college, after years of being touched roughly, without asking, without precedent or I guess with too much of one. My directors and choreographers failed me. Touch in the theater, especially among underage actors, should be a laying of hands, not a blind grope. And the laying of hands is orchestrated by the minister, not the congregation. 

In rehearsal for Les Miserables, the girls were told to be sexy, to be pliable, to crawl and saunter, to use our bodies. The boys were told to be sleazy, grabby, persistent. To use our bodies. Eager to please, I wrapped my legs around my partner, ignoring his hands probing into the flesh of my ass for a handhold, and leaned backwards until my hair brushed the stage floor. I felt his erection stab against me and I winced, not sure what kind of look would be on his face when I resurfaced. The choreographer said, very good. I felt guilty for the ache of pride in my trussed-up stomach. Upside down, my eyes began to hurt. 

I’ve always been drawn to those photographs of bronze statues that are partially rubbed bright, bright gold by visitors wanting something. The Porcellini in the Mercato Nuovo, his snout palmed in exchange for a safe passage back to Florence. He gets a coin for his troubles. I suppose I get applause. 

In Edinburgh, David Hume’s toe. In Springfield, Lincoln’s nose. In Verona, Juliet’s right breast. They remind me of my body, the showpiece, slippery in the spotlight and burnished in the places it’s been touched.