First Collaboration

Blue Nib, First Prize Winner

Published in Blue Ridge Writers, Volume 2, Number 3, 2020

I sneezed when I opened the old album and sent little dust motes swirling through a shaft of sunlight. Then smiled and chuckled, “At least you saved it!”

“How could it get so dusty?” Drew whined dramatically in protest. But his lifted shoulders and goofy grin confirmed that, like me, he had given little recent attention to these pictures of our long-ago dance-theater creations.

I’d come up to the Catskills home he shares with his husband, James, in order to dig through our shared past. The more I wrote memoir stories, the more I was motivated to get confirmation or correction on exactly what happened when. So, after a lovely breakfast, we’d climbed up to the second floor of the ‘art barn’ behind their home to glance through the photos he’d saved. And I’d brought my albums to compare notes.

Even with all the beautiful and well-lit photographs of Drew in my album from the early 80s, we were drawn to one of my favorites, caught in action against the back wall of a Soho loft during a performance. The snapshot’s soft focus and misty gray shadows caress his bare, sweaty chest.

“Was I ever really that well-muscled?” Drew asked, but I can see the pride in his face as he recalled himself in his mid-twenties. “Is that from “Sequenza III?” I nodded. “Yep. It’s you somewhere in the middle of that crazy piece. And you’d been doing weight training back then, I think. Look at those abs!” I turned back to the photo, admiring the lean torso, planted feet, flying hair, face whipped to the side in a wrenched expression. Is it surprise, command, impetuous power? It’s not clear. His hand partially covering his mouth leaves it intentionally ambiguous. Throughout the dance, we’d built in moments of strangeness like this, moments when he’d take a racing dive off the edge of sanity to soar out, far out into free air, his expressive voice leaping and diving through space before landing us, safe but still reeling, back on solid emotional footing a few moments later.

“You know, Drew, it always inspired me how intuitive and spontaneous your performances of this piece seemed. You’d invite us to watch with an almost voyeuristic pleasure, you careening on the edge of… of… of what? A nervous breakdown? A crisis of gender identity? A celebration, perhaps, of a journey through despair, delight, and ecstasy? We never knew, and it was wonderful.” Drew slid into a moment of concentration, with his head tipped to the side. “And to think, that was the first piece we did together. The first in a good long run of pretty innovative work.”

Later that day, while Drew took care of some errands and a doctor’s appointment, I got out of the way by taking myself for a hike in the woods. The steady rhythm of my walking gradually downshifted my mind, and I let myself indulge in all the memories that our conversations had brought to the surface. I drifted back in time, back before this visit and its nostalgic flipping through dusty albums; back before the spirited, self-revelatory conversations over bottles of wine that had anchored our lifelong friendship; back before the opera world wooed him away from my body-voice theater productions, leaving me devastated from the loss of both a musical director and star performer; back before the many pieces we had created together, including the performance where that photograph had been taken. I let the events fall into place in reverse order, till finally it dawned on me that “Sequenza III” was not actually our first collaboration.

Drew and I met early in the spring of 1980 in a rehearsal for a Baroque opera. Drew, freshly back from vocal studies in Vienna, was new to the early music ensemble Concert Royal which was producing the opera. The company cast him in a small singing role. It cast me as part of the dance chorus. After a couple chaotic hours of our initial full company staging rehearsal, we were all tired and hot in that stuffy Soho loft.

On our break, I noticed Drew, all blond brightness and youthful leanness, go over to the window for fresh air. When I leaned on the windowsill next to him, the unguarded smile he turned on me made me stumble over whatever stupid pickup line I was about to attempt.

Instead of impressing him with cool, sexy assessments of our rehearsal process, I started babbling to him about the small group of wacky singer/dancers in my dance/theater company, the fun and willing co-creators I’d gathered to help me build my brand of body/voice theater. I went on and on about this obscure niche in the performing arts world where I felt at home. Without a pause, I expounded about the immersive theatrical experiences I was trying to create out of vocal and movement improvisations. And I probably even mentioned my collaboration with electronic music composer Geoff Wright, who was helping me structure dramatically viable performance tapestries woven from those slim threads. All of that spun out of me before we were called back.

When the rehearsal finally ended, I shouldered the heavy leather dance bag I dragged with me everywhere and followed Drew out the door. His inviting smile assured me of his interest and we ambled all the way across the West Village together, picking up slices of sizzling, gooey pizza on the way. Finally, finding a perch at the end of a pier in the Hudson River, the inexorable slide of the estuary toward the ocean set the pace for our first real sharing. We filled the animated flow of our conversation with personal histories and professional dreams. Our shoulders became saturated with the warmth of our leaning weight. Out there on that safe patch of public space, our tentative touch slid in and out of interlaced fingers, then began a slow but eager surveying of our young toned bodies. Our hands were followed by our mouths, lips leaving trails of wetness that were licked off without a stammer or a blush. The courage of this public display of lusty attraction brought out beaming smiles and further stoked our craving for each other—and for room to romp in private.

After I screwed up my face and mumbled a quick description of the grungy one-bedroom apartment in the sketchy neighborhood in Brooklyn, I shared then with two equally poor roommates, there was no question we would head to the clean efficiency on the Upper West Side he sublet that month.

“Come on.” He said. “Let’s go grab the #1 train.” He led the way, erotic urgency pulling us to the lovely sunset-washed studio. Much to my heart’s delight, our lust-play that evening tumbled into a deep pool of skin-grazing and soulful eye gazing. I couldn’t get enough of rubbing my face and chest and groin all over his smooth rippled belly. He wrapped himself around me in soft muscled embraces that wouldn’t let go.

From that first night, and as often as we could for the next month, I slow-danced all over his body, and he sang soft arias in my ears. In the cauldron of our hot attraction, we extracted long-burning sweetness from persistent pleasuring of flesh. Right from that beginning, we transmuted sex into both love and art. Art in place—beauty emerging moment by moment for an audience of two.

Life interrupted our storybook beginning for two painful months while I commuted every day to White Plains for a lucrative but boring venture into commercial musical theater, and Drew went back to Vienna for more vocal study. Only postcards kept us in touch while he was away, but we picked up where we had left off as soon as he was back in the country. Both of us were still relatively new in New York, eager and fresh with our artistic curiosity. We were tempted out of bed for frequent tastes from the vast smorgasbord of music, art, dance, and theater available every night of the week somewhere in the City. From downtown hole-in-the-wall Soho venues to Broadway and Lincoln Center, we began sampling everything we could afford—standing room cheap seats, or better yet, comps from performer friends. If what we saw or heard was good, a quick glance in his direction or a squeeze from his hand confirmed it for me. A sparkle in his eyes amplified my excitement. We discovered and shared our passion for the most thrilling music, the most extraordinary voices, the most dynamic dancers, the most risk-taking performances. We shared heart-opening and mindexpanding conversations about what we saw, and our excitement for this new relationship soared.

Our nights together grew more and more frequent. When we were in the same room, we were in constant touch. Our mutually adoring gazes and languid caresses were bonding us in ways neither of us understood and in ways we hadn’t found with previous boyfriends. We didn’t care about why. We just wanted to see each other and be together as much as we could. In August, my little company of singer/dancer/performers had been invited to take a suite of dances from our previous year’s production, “Song Weavers,” up to the Tanglewood Music Festival. This plum of an opportunity for my work to be shown in such a prestigious venue was only possible because of Geoff. He was a young composer in residence at Tanglewood for the summer and had been asked to present his work. He was proud of the musical results of what he and I had done together and decided it would be impressive for that audience to see the dances and how the dancers’ voices wove in and out of the electronic score. All I had to do was excerpt sections of that immersive theater piece, re-stage it for proscenium, and ready my troop to go up to the Berkshires for the weekend.

With some anxiety, I asked Drew to come along. Of course, I wanted him in my bed and by my side, but I really wanted Drew to be impressed with my work. I wanted him to see and feel what the company was doing—what I was creating.

The notoriously snobby audience at Tanglewood was accustomed to listening to highbrow classical music while enjoying chilled white wine and elaborate picnics on the grassy slope in front of the stage. But the movement of our colorful costumes broke up an otherwise somber performance of heady, electronic music, woke them from their stupor, and gave our dance (and Geoff’s composition) a standing ovation that afternoon. Drew had paid even closer attention and was more than impressed. His gleaming smile when he came backstage at the end of the performance made my heart soar.

Filled with both joy and immense relief, I got the courage right there in the wings of that open-air stage to spring a question I’d been trying to figure out how to ask throughout the weekend and the weeks leading up to it. “Drew, I was wondering.” I took his hands and looked into his sweet, elated face. “Would you maybe be interested in possibly working with my company this fall on a new body/voice theater piece?” Not sure how to read his lifted eyebrows, I back-pedaled. “It shouldn’t be too involved time-wise. I can only afford studio space a couple afternoons a week. And I’ll do my best to work around the rehearsals and gigs you already have. I do a jigsaw puzzle of scheduling for the others, anyway.”

When he turned on his heel and walked a few steps away as if to give my question some deep consideration, my heart sank. My self-confidence was not yet built on solid experience nor grounded in a successful career, and easily sank into a tailspin of doubt at every potential disappointment. But he didn’t leave me dangling long. True to dramatic tendencies I would learn to admire, he whirled back around, rushed at me, and jumped into my arms for a hug, wrapping his legs around my waist. He pulled his head back just enough for me to see the impish, conspiratorial gleam in his eyes.

“Yes.” He whispered in my ear. “Of course, yes. I was hoping you would ask me.” We sealed the deal, as broad and vague as it was, with an equally broad and lingering kiss. Neither of us knew exactly what we had agreed to. Perhaps we understood even then we needed to be working together, creating together, fulfilling the potential of the passionate connection constantly threatening to overtake us. After dinner that evening, as the group of us meandered out to choose rocking chairs on the porch overlooking the Berkshires, Drew mentioned a vocal piece he was intrigued with but hadn’t heard performed. He thought it might work as a theatrically staged performance piece.

“I’m interested.” I said. “But I need to hear it first. I don’t have enough musical training to make sense out of sight-reading a score like you can.” “I’m not sure even I can read this one. It’s Luciano Berio’s “Sequenza III,” he explained. “It was written for a soprano, Berio’s wife, but because it’s scored completely in a completely unique way with no specific notes or time signatures, only relative pitches and special symbols for stops, trills, pops, hisses, and stuff, it can probably be sung by any voice. But it’s one of the hardest and most mind-bending unaccompanied solos I’ve come across. I’ve never heard it sung live, though.”

“I have,” said Geoff lazily, rocking on a chair next to ours, enjoying a welcome evening breeze. “It should really give you some musical chops, if it doesn’t drive you crazy first. And good luck deciphering the score.” When we returned to the City, Drew ferreted out a copy, figured out how to read it, and line by line, taught it to himself. Even at the age of twenty-five, Drew was already a consummate musician, deeply educated in a wide variety of structures, harmonies, melodies, and styles of music—music of all eras, especially what was then and is still often lumped together as “Early Music”. It turned out that his unusual voice, ranging from the bottom notes of a baritone to the upper notes of a contralto, and his fearless, nothing-held-back approach to performing were perfect for this piece.

As soon as he could give me a taste of what it might sound like, we started staging it, snagging hours in the downtown studio I rented. I looked for and eventually found the choreographic devices that would illustrate the flow from one part to the next and reveal the emotional beats hidden throughout the piece. In rehearsals, Drew’s mood vacillated from commanding to insecure, depending on how confidently he could execute that part of the score. He was a perfectionist when it came to his singing. I never doubted that we would render this remarkable vocal tour de force as a fully staged theatrical piece. It was a perfect showcase for his multiple performing talents. And it also gave him the chance to explore outside the early music repertoire into which countertenors like him were often boxed.

The staging process sometimes uncovered his insecurity from a lack of formal dance training. He told me he felt out of his element whenever I asked him to stray too far into technical dance vocabulary. So, more often, I’d ask him to show me the movement the music suggested to him, and then choose from the possibilities he came up with. As I had already discovered with the dancers in my company, and in my college production years before, pulling the best and strongest out of the skills a performer already owned excited me more than insisting they bend to a predetermined vision. There were times, even in rehearsal, when Drew’s simple, clear, but unstudied gestures brought me to tears. His finely tuned body, more beautifully proportioned and muscled than mine, moved with a natural grace that many trained dancers lacked. He took my movement coaching hungrily, digested it, and made it his.

The choreographic result, held solidly on course by his magnetic presence and vocal pyrotechnics, directed the viewer’s attention from the extremes of expression to the tiniest details of each gesture. His performances were so transparent they taught audiences to “see” the beauty, humor and pathos in the music. Back from my walk and sitting on the back patio of Drew and James’ home, I sipped a glass of luscious and heady Cabernet, and again studied the poorly lit photo from the 1980 performance. It was Drew’s transparency that pulled me in. I’d been used to working with more guarded, less musical performers. Working with Drew on this piece had excited me. We’d started working on the next creations even before the reviews came out on this one. My old black leather photo album is full of pictures of Drew in dances ranging in tone from haunting to comic, erotic, rousing or rollicking. Elaborate costumes anchored some works, while other productions capitalized on a stripped-down minimalist aesthetic.

Drew interrupted my thoughts when he brought his own glass out and sat down to join me. “How was your walk this afternoon?”“Well, I spent a lot of my time sorting through our first year together, and realized that, actually, “Sequenza III” wasn’t our first collaboration.”

He raised one eyebrow, and said in an imperious tone only he could master, “Oh, really now?” “Yes, really.” I matched his tone and smiled, then placed my wineglass on the table for emphasis. “It was our relationship dance that came first. And it created the underlying artistic structures for all the rest.”

With that opener, we began deconstructing our lives together as its own performance, just as we had deconstructed our dance-theater performances years ago. From this distance of time, we could joke that we’d not needed a costume designer. We’d found plenty of flamboyant and fitting attire in second-hand stores, retired performance gear, and cast-offs from family and friends.

We’d been our own producers with only a starving artists’ budget, no ticket sales, government grants, or parental safety nets. We’d hired no lighting designer, no set designer and no stage manager but never lacked for a backdrop or spotlight. We’d found plenty of inspiration in nose-bleed seats at Carnegie Hall, on floor cushions in the front row of off-off Broadway theaters, or bundled gamely against the chill in poorly heated Soho rehearsal studios.

And we’d had plenty of dramatic ups and downs as we dashed head forward through gritgusting streets of the City or steadied each other amidst the jostling hoards in overcrowded subways. With a supporting cast of performer friends, who also served as our appreciative audience, we’d performed our lives full-out every day, holding nothing back, and ending each night exhausted, exhilarated and tangled deep in soft sheets.

Love itself was our first collaboration.