The Trisha Brown Dance Company performed four pieces at BAM last night, including two New York premieres. I know very little about dance and lack the vocabulary to describe the movements and style; but I do know when it works, when the energy makes sense. It is like music in how it opens thoughts from the day-to-day into something skulking deep within. The dancers spun, flipped and dashed, and I found myself thinking back to my first book, The Sacred Whore.
As I told agents time and again back in 1988, “It’s the story of a group of prostitutes who kidnap a college basketball team so that they can air their views on what is wrong with America on primetime television.” The first draft was 720 pages and had 15 major characters.
I eventually got that down to 282 pages and five main characters. It’s a chaotic, action-dependent, socio-political piece that stumbles and ultimately fails, but I still am interested in the premise.
It opens on the back roads of Oklahoma, women climbing out the back of an 18-wheeler truck like refugees. They’ve been kidnapped by a pimp who wants to address the hypocritical morality of the nation with a hair-brained kidnapping scheme. I was standing in a Paris apartment when I thought of this, a mannequin sitting in the dark beside the bed. Prostitutes transported across the country by a truck. What about that?
It seemed like something, I didn’t know what, like the moment some months later, halfway through the book, when a character I had expunged from the text, Chantal, decided to return. She did that on her own. I want back in. She was like the woman on stage last night at BAM, dancing with a camera on her back.
She was self-realized, something out of nothing. I thought about that coming back over the bridge.
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