The young girls are like linen hanging out to dry,
breeze-buffeted and slightly see-through. They pose,
wait with awkwardly clasped hands, rehearse their steps.
Upstage, just off-center, a ginger-haired ballerina pulls
her hair away from the nape of her neck, perhaps
caught mid-yawn or breathless from practice. The light
lifts her towards the viewer: the soft skin of her upper arms,
her mouth ecstatic and open. Pearls shimmer
at her ears and her corseted dress plunges low.
Just offstage, two men in tuxedos watch rehearsal.
One man reclines in his chair, hands in pockets, legs
stretched out. He is a man who always gets what he wants,
takes what he wants. He watches the ginger-haired ballerina
bathed in light. His hunting is casual.
Her movements choreographed for him.
The other man wears a shiny top hat. He has spun
the chair around and straddled it, leaning aggressively
forward from the shadows. His gaze holds another
red-tressed ballerina, this one downstage in the limelight;
her hands are also clasped to her neck, perhaps retying a necklace,
and she is angled towards him, sunk into a deep curtsy: shoulders
hunched forward, bosom cleaved. A glint of gold from the gifted
bracelet on her right wrist, long-lashed eyes like a songbird’s wing.
He has already claimed her, already imagined the capture:
arrogant, looming, hungry.
This rehearsal is also a performance.
Deidre Cavazzi holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Dominican University of California and a Master of Fine Arts in Dance from the University of California, Irvine. She has been an artist-in-residence with The Arctic Circle in Svalbard and the Fish Factory Creative Centre in Iceland, as well as a guest artist at the University of Galway in Ireland.
