The New Chamber Ballet in rehearsal. Photo by Diego Guallpa.

Three dispatches from the New Chamber Ballet’s poet in residence, Diane Mehta, who has observed their rehearsals nearly every week for the past year and a half.

1: The Lift

In the delicate center of the action, each dancer rests her head on the other woman’s shoulder. Expectation slows, tragedy softens, the center holds. They are barely touching. The lean is superficial; they do not need each other yet. This is the prelude to the enormous tension that comes next.

The lift, when it comes, originates in the deepest part of the hips and resembles the ritualistic crouch of a sumo wrestler. The lifter’s thighs look enormous, but she is slim. She plants her legs below her shoulders and extends her arms. The trick is to hold up the rear without sticking it out so that the dancer being lifted settles onto the lifter’s back without a hitch. The memory of the playful lean in the beginning returns.

Each dancer depends on the other to be precise and reliable in a way that life is not. The arriving dancer leans back across the shelf of her partner’s lower back and is immediately secured by an arm clamped around her waist. Her own arm grazes the floor. Her leg points up like a traffic light. When I flatten the image, I see Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso realizing that the shape of one woman combines pieces of many. The two ballerinas resemble a chair with a straight back for two people, a love seat in wood.

It is the last week of rehearsals, and the musicians are here with the composer for the first time. The three pairs of ballerinas struggle to balance one another, then switch to new partners. It is a lesson in creating an approach and making adjustments with each companion. Every weight-sharing experiment in becoming one body is improvised because no amount of training can anticipate what has unfolded this morning, when these minds and spines crossed the street or exited the subway. No lift—not next take this rehearsal nor one two months later—will ever be the same as the one in progress now.

Watching the women sweat, I realize that an enormous strength is being distributed. Their bodies are talking so loudly that I can hear them: Don’t fall! Put your hip here! Leave me because I’m leaving! When a dancer slides precariously to the off-ramp of her partner’s rear, the partner tilts a hip ceiling-left or ceiling-right or lowers her back to prevent her from falling off and to help her get higher. The tension is explosive because they are really in the middle of the motion of falling down while staying together. What is amplified is need. The work of caring for someone is a duet, and it changes you. Being in the lift is the centerpiece of the performance.

The choreographer seems pleased. No one is defeated, no one has succeeded; they are becoming a shape. This is the slow motion of mechanics with the interference of time, gravity, and music. The journey from lean to lift travels from the beginning to the end of a marriage, from childhood to experience, and I am already thinking that when I leave I’ll notice that the day is mild and crowds mingle at the corner—but all of life is already here, in a sun-boiled studio with sixteen-foot-high ceilings and windows that swim across two walls, repeating themselves in the mirror.

2. The Floor

From a distance, it might have looked like childbirth, when you shoot up on all fours to loosen the pain of the beast you are carrying, but it was only a dance between the floor and her. The two-minute routine she is performing is a kind of Pinocchio story: a wooden surface being brought to life and invited to be a legitimate partner. Her job is to make this solo into a duet.

The relationship between a human partner and the floor is intimate but physically demanding. It is about gravity. It is a ballet dancer’s collaboration with the inanimate and the floor’s experiment in becoming an invisible partner who responds to her body parts as they touch down and lift away.

She flings herself on the sprung vinyl floor like a tossed doll. Prone, she fixes her head in the center and begins the counterclockwise floorwork sequence, moving her body on and off the floor: she spins, rolls, softens, jerks her hips into the air while the floor holds down her shoulders. (“I have waited a century for a partner like you,” the floor yells.)

She has fierce muscles that ripple down her back and hips, and her spine is fixed in space while she turns. With the emotional progress of the music—the tempo quickens, the violin gets louder and drops out for the high notes on the piano—she widens her strides to build momentum and lift into a shoulder stand, cheek to floor, while her skirt falls to her knees and her legs scissor open into a split. We are watching all the ways in which a woman becomes more than her desire, and we, the audience, recede into perversions while she folds her legs and continues on her way.

In the mythologies of love we rely on, hearts pound: blood in, blood out. She is the opposite of every reclining woman in a painting. The lines of her body twist like Egon Schiele’s erotic expressionist figures. Her relationship with the floor is not the ceremonial collapse that happens in Pentecostal churches and Yoruba rituals, yet I wonder if she is possessed. I fall into the trance of trying to memorize each movement as it springs away. A sequence is an erasure of moments that came before, yet every move is another beginning.

She is a protractor. The pencil (the dancer), with the aid of a mechanical tool (her body), makes dozens of circles of equal diameter. Watching her recalibrates our own relationship with the floor. We see her spinning on a flat surface that itself seems to be spinning, the two partners tied up in physics and the jagged Newtonian world where everything is at work: momentum, inertia, conservation of energy, torque.

The two minutes have ended. She reverses direction, and in a slow vertical ascent, she corkscrews her body up. By the time she reaches her full height, on pointe, she has raised the tip of her pointer finger, bent it loosely in a rendering of Michelangelo’s muscled God’s gesture to Adam—and in an enormous transfer of power, she hands off her solo to another dancer.

3. The Fight

The action of love is forward motion. Two dancers slide toward each other on the floor and sit on their knees. The music stops. The violin breaks into the scene—fast, high-pitched. The woman in blue strikes, and the dancer in purple blocks. They jab with openhanded strikes. They lean into each other at maximum force with their forearms as they block. If they sever the connection, everything collapses. All four arms are constantly in rotation, like oars. The sequence resembles kung fu—close range but designed to keep an opponent at a distance.

If there is an opponent for these dancers, it is air: they move it between them like a miniature tornado. Then they become the tornado. They are thousand-armed Achilles in a blur on the battlefield, the chaos of swords clashing. The women on the outside pirouette and circle the purple and blue dancers on the floor, as if to egg on the audience for the evening’s entertainment. (“Sailors fighting in the dance hall!” belts David Bowie in “Life on Mars?”) Purple and blue let go at the same time and redirect the momentum of their upper bodies to the left and right of one another, as if dodging strikes.

Choreography is a way of organizing chaos. There is no pattern without chaos, no love without fight. The lean is a kind a lift, but the movement is horizontal. Each body depends on the other, and each dancer’s job is to pay attention to her partner’s gestures and timing. They let go at the same moment. Blue pulls her weight backwards, which brings purple forward, and blue wraps her around her own body. Who is the cobra, and who is the prey? They are still on the floor, tied up in each other. Blue lets go and purple picks her up, then blue wrestles purple to the floor and purple rolls away.

All along, they face one another, not the audience. Dancing is about moving with another human. Performance is theater, while rehearsal is a conversation that the dancers are having for and with each other. They tolerate one another five hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year, sometimes for a decade or more, and that is love. I do not see their legs tremble, but I know they are using every muscle to fight gravity while continuing to jab and block in the process of standing up. Purple strikes an arabesque. Blue moves in quickly to embrace her, and purple folds up her legs. They are Aeneas cradling his father when Troy is burning or the stranglehold in a bronze by Henry Moore or the mothers in Mary Cassatt’s paintings who always love their children so much. They are Virgil wrapping his mother-father arms around Dante in the Inferno and leaping to escape certain death. This is the choreographer cradling all the dancers in his heart to give them comfort and strength. This is my own child in the early years, when it was easy to keep him safe.

Is the purple dancer the father, the mother, the lover? It is so intimate that I don’t notice the three outside dancers sitting cross-legged on the floor with serious expressions. The purple dancer slides down the blue dancer, deflating onto the ground. Suddenly everyone is laying down except the blue dancer who struck first. She grabs a different dancer by the forearm and pulls her off the floor. She falls back without looking, certain she will be caught, before they begin to fling one another around. There is no end to the tension in the choreography of interacting with people we love.

Miro Magloire and Diane Mehta’s first collaborative ballet premieres June 20–21 at the Mark Morris Dance Center. 

Diane Mehta was born in Frankfurt and grew up in Bombay and New Jersey. She is the author of Happier Far: Essays and two poetry books: Tiny Extravaganzas and Forest with Castanets. She has written for The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, VQR, A Public Space, and The Southern Review.