The stage is empty. Natalie sits beside her husband on metal bleachers, flipping through the playbill. The dance has not yet begun. The older woman beside her, draped in linen and sour with sweat, crinkles open a sweet to suck and drops her wrapper to the floor. “Just like her,” Natalie thinks, momentarily mistaking the woman—a stranger—for her mother. The woman’s entitlement is familiar, as is the heavy beaded necklace she worries with long fingers, painted nails. Natalie can feel bitterness pooling, like syrup, at the back of her throat.

Nearly a whole month in Avignon—and the entire festival— has passed, and they haven’t managed to speak to each other once, not really, not even about the baby who is home in Paris with the nanny and whom they allegedly miss. He just keeps talking at her, and Natalie, she just keeps letting him, letting him outline his reviews as he speaks, never asking a real question, never revealing anything about how he feels. The assignment is special; he feels special. It’s a privilege, really, to cover the festival, a sign of his steadily advancing career, an increasingly steady stream of paychecks, not that they need them. They live off her money— her parents’ money, which came from their parents and their parents’ parents. It came to her whole, as a matter of course, and it grows fast and steady without much tending, like a tumor, or a foal.

The house lights go down and, so quickly, the bitter turns sweet. Her limbs loosen as the room contracts, her lungs swell full. She is happy, she could crumble any second. Her husband takes her hand and she squeezes warmth into his palm. Natalie knows this feeling well, the collective inhale, the shared tension before the stage lights come up, before—

Picture two chairs, side by side, on a stage, and already you have a situation: the chairs are separated and two different worlds exist right next to each other without meeting. There’s a separation, but their meeting is imminent, and obviously unavoidable.

In the playbill, the choreographer has described it perfectly. Nothing has happened and yet there is already so much. Onstage are two dancers, a man and a woman. They are siloed in spotlights, seated in metal classroom chairs placed at a slight distance. Her husband sits with his legs spread wide, a notebook resting on his right thigh. She senses the soft hum of his gaze beside hers, directed outward and down, still attentive, not yet evaluative. She can feel his steady pulse in her palm. Music comes on, or something like music, and the dancers begin to move, but the separation forces the audience’s gaze to constantly be moving from the man to the woman and back, like in a game of ping pong. Natalie’s eyes bounce between them. He turns his head/ she taps her foot/ he shrugs his shoulders/ she scratches her neck. She knows from the playbill that the woman—there, that woman, so thin she seems like she might snap, cold nipples protruding from a breastless chest—is the choreographer. But onstage, the pair appear equal. In a way they are perfectly matched.

They’ve been away from their child for too long. She became certain of it that morning, before they left for the theater, as her husband cooed “How are you, my sweet?” into the phone. Natalie stood across the room, struggling into a skirt two sizes larger than she’d like to admit, that remained, somehow, still too small. Her daughter babbled until a word broke through. “Duck,” the small voice repeated, insisted, as if it were many words that meant many things. Natalie could feel the pull of her child, craved the dense weight of her, just from the sound of that small, strident voice. When did her daughter learn the word? She searched for a memory but couldn’t find one. The silk of her skirt wrinkled under the sweat of her hands. The nanny played translator, holding the phone close to their daughter’s round face, as if to prove the child alive: “We had a yummy breakfast and then we went to see the ducks in the park.”

“Did you see your favorite duck, sweetheart?” she shouted across the room, fiddling with the skirt’s button until it popped off the silk and onto the cobblestone floor. Natalie thought of the small duck, the gray one, the one they had once watched waddle far behind the others.

“Oh, yes,” the nanny replied, eager to paint a harmonious portrait, although, of course, the child liked all the ducks the same. “We found our favorite duck and then met the most adorable puppy and soon we will take a nice, long nap.”

“Oh, that sounds good,” her husband replied, tossing pens into a leather bag.

“Very good,” Natalie shouted, from the kitchen, hunting for a needle and thread, anything to fasten the somehow-now-essential skirt.

“Be good for nanny, bug” he yelled, as if their daughter were old and deaf. She grabbed a safety pin from a jumbled drawer. Safety pins scared her, for some reason, their irony too evident. But from her husband’s quick steps she could tell the call was over, that they had to rush. She pressed on the thick needle to release it from its clasp, poked a tiny hole in the green silk of her skirt and felt the cool of the metal lay flat against her hip.

The space floods with the sound of many layered, anxious breaths, the little sister effect, the choreographer explained, as if 1,000 people were simultaneously breathing down your neck. Natalie can still feel the pin, pulsing almost, right above the bone. She would like to shift, to move her weight from one thigh to the other, but she worries. What will happen if it slips? The dancers rub their hands along their thighs, stand, then crouch and cower, curl into their chairs and cover their eyes with their hands. The critic has begun to write; she can feel his mind whirring. Her eyes slide back again and again to the choreographer, to the growing pools of sweat in the armpits of her t-shirt. The choreographer is shaking her head, batting at her hair, pulling her fingers back, one by one, as far as they can go. Her gestures are human, mundane, not the language of dance, so much as the language of fear, movements used in Alfred Hitchcock’s horror films, the choreographer said. It’s through repetition and concentration that these movements end up becoming abstract. 

Natalie is absorbed by the rhythmic anxiety, her breaths short and fast as if she is giving birth, and yet, she remains delighted by it, by being made to feel something, by how cleanly she can clock the allusions. She watched all of Hitchcock, with her daughter, while she was nursing. She knew the selection was strange, even then, but the terror kept her awake, helped her to feel alive and useful even in the depths of night. With each dancer’s movements, references flash across the screen at the back of her mind. Tippi Hendren running, batting at her head, the perfect blonde coiffe rustled by birds’ talons; Janet Leigh smiling under the shower’s spray until her mouth stretches open in a scream; an inert Kim Novak plunging from San Juan Bautista. No matter how afraid those women were, we didn’t see their sweat. She wonders if her husband is recording the very same impressions in his notes, or if she might chide him afterward, with her superior knowledge. Even as the dancers devolve into distress, she feels her ego swell.

For a moment—one Natalie hopes no one else registers—the choreographer pauses, searching the crowd. They lock eyes, and Natalie is certain, despite the glare of the lights, that the exchange is mutual. It’s like the tennis match from Strangers on a Train, every head in the crowd turning in rhythm with the thwack of the racket, all except for one unmoving, unbothered face. Natalie wonders, for a moment, if they’ve met. At some event for Troubleyn, maybe? Back before the baby, when she was dancing, when life felt full. She can’t tell if the look is one of recognition or accusation. “I haven’t done anything,” she protests, although of course, that’s not strictly true. She’s done many things, lived a life made possible by myriad, tiny violences. The choreographer returns to the litany of anxious gestures, but Natalie remains unsettled, her delight faded now that it’s been called into question. Her skin begins to itch. She unlatches herself from her husband’s grip, takes her right palm and presses it hard into her now-jostling left knee, eager to stop the friction of the pin against her skin. The dancers move, fast and then faster, like a steam engine or a waterfall, its rhythm beating again and again. This evolution tells us of the world in which we live, a world that requires us to be forever vigilant and wary. 

What does she have to be afraid of? Everything, of course — but other than that? The men in the south are bolder, they say crude things to her, make her doubt the wisdom of wearing jewelry.

Early in the festival, she went on walks at night. She’d meander her way north through the narrow city streets, skirting the small theaters, buildings plastered with vulgar posters meant to entice those eager for a cheap ticket, her reverie repeatedly punctured by the sounds streaming from the Palais des Papes. They’d seen the festival’s flagship performance, described by its director as a celebration of evil, on opening night. The story of a wealthy German family who collaborated with fascists until their sanity crumbled. Matriarch stripped, tarred, feathered, brownshirts swimming in the swill of their beers, buckets of blood, buckets of blood, hurled across the stage, sloshed atop the naked dead, too many ashes crammed into a too-small urn, until that mincing figure, a pedophile, a mother-fucker, tossed them over his shoulder, dousing his bare body until he looked a fallen angel, a living gargoyle, a distortion made of stone.

Her husband had begun his review by raving about the ending, in which that slight figure turned a machine gun on the crowd. The play haunts her, too, but not because times are tragic. It’s the sounds, which repeat with every performance, so loud as to be inescapable within the city walls. The booming bells, the spray of bullets, the rhythmic screaming of a steam whistle so shrill, it pierces something beneath the skin.

One evening, Natalie walked through Place Pie, where teenagers guzzled beer served in towers. They cheered as France scored yet another goal, and as she made her way towards the palace, she heard a group of boys behind her, their sneakers slapping on stone. The boys were joking, laughing, high on shisha and the winning goal. If she had turned around, she would have seen three of them walking backwards, facing their friends, absorbed so fully in their conversation, in their celebrations, that they risked a fall.

But she did not turn around. She felt certain they were talking about her. Her French was good but not quick, the verlan indecipherable from her sheltered perch. She could make out only the twang of their southern accents, each vowel pushed into something round yet flat at its edges.  She felt their closeness like a thousand tiny breaths, as if they were not fifteen feet away, but half an inch, so close their imagined breath became her own.

Nothing happened. Nothing has ever happened. When one of them whistled—she assumed it was directed at her—she ran, flat sandals tripping on stone, merging into a throng of theatergoers, well-dressed, well-behaved people just like herself. She walked with them all the way home, feigning proximity, nodding her head and pretending to chuckle along to conversations she only half-heard. Natalie returned to the heavy door, the walled courtyard, the deadbolt lock. A man in bed beside her. So many layers between danger and herself.

Somehow, still, there is the fear. Was it born whole with the baby? Or had she nurtured it, let it grow inside her daughter and herself? Is it like with beef, how fear is said to ruin the meat? Had she fed her daughter spoilt milk by the mouthful, watching murder through Jimmy Stewart’s window, watching Marnie float limp in the pool? I don’t own a television because I threw it away, so I looked for fear within me. Sometimes, Natalie wonders whether fear is the only thing she owns. “A month is too long to leave her,” her mother had scolded over the phone. Why had she come? Her husband had pitched it as a kindness, a way for her to reconnect with her former art and those who made it, but really, it was an insult. It meant he believed her life as an artist could be replaced by that of a spectator, that she, like him, should be pleased to sit on the sidelines? Still, she had missed this. The dark of the theater, the bright of the lights, the smell of sweat in the air. Yes, her daughter was safer with the nanny. Some days, in the first year, Natalie couldn’t’ hold her child because the thought of her head slipping back, her neck hanging loose, had sent such strong shivers through her body that the danger became real.

The sounds stop, the lights come up. The dancers rise abruptly from their anxious ministrations. They raise their hands above their heads in surrender, their eyes clear, wide, ready to confess. The lights grow stronger and the dancers begin to crouch. They cover their eyes, their faces, the light too bright, the disgrace too great to bear. The couple shrink to the floor; Natalie shrinks in her seat. Yet the critic remains upright. The pace of his scribbling hasn’t slowed, the scratching sound of his pencil magnified by the silence that surrounds it. Does he have no shame? Each performance they’ve attended another opportunity to wound her, to prove himself superior. The coolness with which he speaks to her, the detached evaluations of artistic merit delivered promptly after each performance. When they first met, she thought him a genius. She had read his work in all the right places, had admired the way his mind alighted from one text to the next, how easily he could chart artistic genealogy, the inherited evolution of meaning. How simple he made it all seem. But over this month, she has seen too much of his process to believe the man truly inspired, can clock too easily when he succumbs to a critical blur, his mind already made up, his scribbling hand transcribing details he only half-perceives. Natalie fingers the pin, thumb pressing down firm and slow, to release it from its clasp.

Sound courses through the room in broad wide strips, sound like ripping linen, like deep ice cracking wide and open, his scribbling subsumed in the sound. The dancers rise slowly, twisting around themselves against the pressure of imaginary wind. Unthinking, she clutches the unpinned skirt to her hip, only aware of her movement when she feels the gaze of the woman beside her. Natalie turns her head just slightly, up and to the left. The light is low, dim and blue, diffuse, the woman’s gray hair shining silver. The woman’s eyes are soft, her mouth sloped gently downward, her palm upturned on the armrest between them, as if offering communion.

But Natalie does not want it, not from her. She turns away, leans her torso forward, eager to forget the bodies beside her. She clutches the pin, savors its cool weight in the flat of her palm. A photo of her mother as a smiling baby, diaper held together by a glinting pin, just like this one. In the soft glow, the sweat on the dancers shimmers, like under moonlight. The dancers move towards each other as if in a windstorm, impossibly slow, stop motion played frame by frame. Natalie is drawn to the dancers, as if by string. They breathe in steady unison and work carefully across the stage, moving closer to each other inch by inch, closer to all that is good and true. They touch: the choreographer places a hand delicately on her partner’s shoulder, nestles her head firmly into the crook of his neck. Now, their movements are no longer gestures or abstractions, but dance, dance as something human and recognizable, every motion weighted and graceful.

The dancers hold each other tightly. They tear at each other’s clothes, the way they did, early in their courtship, the desperation Natalie felt to be near him, the hunger to get beneath the skin. Maybe, this time, after the performance, things would be different. He wouldn’t rush off to write, pausing only to lecture. This time, he would see that she had been so moved by the piece, he would stop her before they exited the theater, a temporary space for the festival, a converted school gymnasium. He would let the crowd rush out ahead of them until the sound of sneakers squeaking on the parquet had faded, and then, in the cool hush of the doorway, ask Natalie how she felt.

“That was beautiful,” he’d say. “Do you think so?”

And she would nod and look into once-tired eyes and see that they shone with feeling. And then, without speech, an understanding would rush between them, as it once had, or seemed like it had. And Natalie would feel grateful, yes, for all she had, the lovely particulars of her life. And they would be kind to each other, and very happy, yes.

The male dancer holds the choreographer by the neck of her stretching shirt. They pace, slowly, across the stage, the fabric pulled taut and thin, and Natalie sees that he has been holding her up, she has been weighing him down, that she has choreographed it just so. All that she resents in him— that terrible play, how he’d smiled through endless scenes of terror with evident glee—was it her own doing? The void inside her, the one that can never be filled, not with dance or plays or money, a child so plump she would eat her if she could—has it swallowed him as well?

And just as she has come around, just as she has begun to see, her husband coughs. He coughs inexcusably loud and hard, as if to clear the room, and it is only then that Natalie realizes she has been holding her breath, that everyone in the entire theater save him has been holding their breath, and something within her cannot stand this, cannot stand the distance between them, between them and the dancers, the space of the stage and the endless, anxious desert of her mind, and on the inhale, she pops open the pin, pulls the precious silk of her skirt up and away to bare the thigh and stabs the sharp point deep into her flesh. Fat tears well in the corners of her eyes, but she does not let them drop, the sound of the wind accelerating, the dancers moving fast again now, the lights even dimmer, their breathing louder and heavier. They move impossibly fast, the sound churning, the sound of locomotion and she is moving in rhythm with them, their breath her breath, their pain her pain. When you’re in a state of ecstasy, you can’t think. She would not have considered this ecstasy, but now she feels it, a steady thrum through her body, her heart chugging quick, meaning comes from the gaze of the audience, but it is not just the gaze, it is the breath, too, the release, finally, of all that is held inside, the air between her husband and herself, the woman beside her, the people in front and behind, bodies fueled by nothing but charge, lives rushing inexorably forward. That’s why nothing is fixed, the choreographer explained. You no longer think, you do. 

Text in italics can be found in an interview with the choreographer Lisbeth Gruwez in the English-language playbill for her piece, We’re Pretty Fuckin’ Far From Okay, performed at the Gymnase Paul Giéra during the Festival d’Avignon, 2016.