Twenty Movements

A MAJOR PART OF our end-of-year assessment is the famous vingt mouvements. Individually, in front of the entire school, we must perform our own sequence – or enchaînement – of Jacques Lecoq’s twenty mime and acrobatics moves, which we’ve been learning to master since the first day of school. It’s the first time in the year we will choreograph and perform something on our own. It is said that no two enchaînements have ever been the same.

I am extremely proud of mine: it has a flowing logic that moves each gesture gracefully to the next, from the cartwheel to the harlequin, from the handstand to undulation. I have practised and practised in the cellar at the Récollets, the spirits of the monks urging me on.

It’s my turn. I take my place in the centre of the Grande Salle, breathe. I feel nervous but strong; my body has developed new muscles that ignore my nerves and do their own thing. The students and teachers, seated, are dead silent.

I begin with the éclosion, moving from the tightest ball and opening out as far into a star shape as my body will reach, then I ease fluently into the cartwheels, and on goes my fluid enchaînement. My handstand is perfect: I hold it for several seconds before falling down into the warrior pose and undulating. As I move into ‘climbing the wall’ I think I hear a sniff and what sounds like a giggle. I push on. Clean, precise. Another giggle. Am I hearing things? I stay focused and end up back in a ball, just as I began. The metamorphosis is complete.

Raucous clapping. I stand in front of the group, proud and shy.

‘Bravo, Jayne,’ says Claude. He has a strange smile on his face.

Angela is open and warm. ‘This was very good,’ she says. ‘Un bel enchaînement.’

Boris, I now see, has dewy eyes like he’s been laughing, and has his hand over his mouth. ‘There is this thing,’ he says. ‘It’s hard to explain.’

‘It’s her feet,’ says Ju-Yong.

‘Yes,’ says Angela. ‘You have this strange thing with your feet. And perhaps your neck – the way your head sits on your neck. It’s a very small detail, but quite specific.’

‘You don’t mean to be funny,’ says Boris, ‘you are so serious. But something about the way your body is put together, the angle of your feet – it doesn’t match up with your seriousness. So it comes across as funny.’

My classmates agree by smiling. This appraisal is not, of course, what I want to hear. I want to be taken seriously. They liked my enchaînement but my feet are weird? I feel weak at the thought that my weird feet and head may stop me getting through to second year.

The other students’ pieces are fascinating. Each movement is technically the same – the cold, precise executions we have all learnt throughout the year. And while there’s nothing emotional in a handstand, or miming rowing a boat, somehow, in putting together a piece, the actor’s personality comes through so clearly it moves people to tears. It’s as though the soul shines through in the gaps between the movements.

Marie-France’s sequence is sad in its perfection, each movement beautifully executed, but somehow she feels like a lost ballerina, searching for something. Ravi Canada’s is vulnerable in its playfulness. The Spanish Amélie’s is hopeful in its messiness.

Afterwards it doesn’t seem to matter whether we are accepted into second year or not: we have seen each other. We drink ourselves into a stupor at Mauri7 and sing on the tables into the night.

The next day, everyone is pale as we sit in the foyer waiting to be called in and told our destiny. I have no picture of what I’ll do if I don’t get into second year. I just see black. I face my fate with the knowledge that I’ve done all I could. I have bruised and blistered and calloused my body, pummelled my ego, almost broken a finger, been bashed in the head with a broom. I’ve pushed, relented, made a fool of myself over and over and over again and occasionally got a silent nod or a bien and one pas mal. I’ve stayed up all night trying to juggle three balls, got up at four am every day for a week to follow Paris streetcleaners as research for a piece, done two thousand handstands, mastered a solo saut-demains. I’ve tried dominating, yielding, going too far and not doing enough. I’ve worked well with people I don’t like and horribly with those I like. I’ve done my absolute best. If they tell me it’s over, I will go into the abyss knowing I had nothing more to give.

Almost all of us want to do second year, but everyone I talk to has a plan B. Marie-France will go back to being an intermittent du spectacle, a supported government actor doing regular gigs, or perhaps teach, although it’s hard to imagine her not getting in. Umi and Yoshi Japan will go home. Ravi Canada will start his own company.

The faces begin to drift down from the top of the stairs. It’s easy to read the results. Anja Sweden is in. Jamie London is in. So is the Spanish Amélie, but she tells me she’s returning to Madrid: she has a theatre back home waiting for her and never intended to stay. The other four Spaniards are in. Bethany Scotland isn’t, and is in tears in Lara Dublin’s arms. Meg London, Faye Ohio and Marie-France are in. Laurent is not in and is furious. Neither of the Greek girls are in, and are ashen.

I want to be in. I want to stay here where the trees change. Where it snows. Where nobody wears helmets or obeys the road rules. Where killing yourself by smoking is a fact of life, where being an intermittent actor is a normal job. Where being alone isn’t lonely anymore, where I can just walk and walk and look at things and come home feeling full on life, like I’ve gorged myself just from looking. Where the language sounds like velvet and water and caramel and honey, and letter-writing is still a normal form of communication. Where chequebooks will never go out of fashion and nor will inkwells and quills and calligraphy artists. Where bookbinders and button-makers and violin-shapers still work away quietly in their shops, where Sundays are still Sundays and the city is calm. Where some days I dress up for the city and not for anybody else, put lipstick on for her, some eyeshadow, my nicest shoes, and just walk in her. Where the completion of a task as menial as buying a stamp and sending a letter feels like a major accomplishment. Where I feel alive, more alive than ever before.

Please, let me stay in Paris. I will be good.

‘Jayne?’ calls the voice from above. Marie-France squeezes my hand as I head for the stairs and then sit to wait on the same fold-down chair I sat on the day I enrolled. The Grande Salle is empty, the wind outside blows leaves against the skylights.

Angela pokes her head out the door and beckons me in.

‘Sit down,’ she says, and I sit in the big leather chair feeling minuscule.

‘Can I speak in French?’ she asks and I nod, though I instantly regret it as she launches into a discourse I can’t quite follow. She then stops, looks me dead in the eye and says, ‘It’s a oui.’

It’s a oui!

Be calm, I order myself. Be calm and listen.

‘Now you must push … No more time for hesitation … During the year you were like this’ – she draws a chart in the air of ups and downs – ‘next year there is no time for this. We do not take you by the hand. Next year is something else, it is up to you to push your ideas. We can see you know why you’re here. Stop being scholarly. Move more, think less. Don’t look for results in order to grow bigger.’

‘Okay,’ I say.

‘Do you have questions?’

‘No,’ I say, though I have loads, I just can’t phrase them quickly enough.

I leave with her words buzzing around my head. I have been trying too hard to impress them, to be a good student. This, it seems, is not a good thing. But I’m in. I’m in! I breathe for a moment before walking down the stairs in front of the gallery of heads looking up, placing on my face a neutral but open look that reads yes, but not too much.

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Dad is happy for me, and says he knew I’d get in. He has decided to retire from the television station and buy a small man-house by the beach we went to on holidays as kids. He has found a rock there he likes to sit on. I think about Mum’s wardrobe. Her old porcelain Sally doll up there with her painted red nails. Her coats that you fall into. The knits with her smell in them.

Kate tells me I suck and she doesn’t want me to come home anyway. Her new housemate actually does the dishes and doesn’t require that she hide chocolate. When she told the housemate I was in Paris, the housemate said, ‘She’s never coming back.’

‘I’ll be back,’ I say. ‘Just not this year.’

‘Good, we don’t have room for you anyway, country’s full.’

‘Why don’t you come here?’

‘Because I don’t want to.’

She will be okay. The boys are okay. Dad is okay. They are all okay. It’s okay.

Adrien comes straight over and, without a word, tugs off my clothes and we bash around the studio, having a huge little death together on my tiny kitchen-table top, then falling asleep on the floor before he gets dressed in a barman’s outfit and runs out to a one-off catering gig. I lie all night staring at the moth, in its spot near E.T. With the fear of not making it through gone, and with the prospect of a long break from school, I should feel elated. But for some reason I feel strange. Now that I’m in and can see the year ahead, a flood of new questions arrives.

What are you doing? the moth asks. People are calling you madame. And you’re throwing yourself around a room being a camembert cheese, an operatic chicken, a drop of water swept out into a raging ocean …

Dancing around in the city of light, trying to touch it. Paris. The beauty. The grime. The tits-on-end anticipation. The colours and thoughts and songs and sounds and smells and germs and children and dogs. The cardboard beds outside the Gare de l’Est, the taste of strawberries, the sky, last métro, first métro, foamy piles of spit on the pavement, the bells, the dreams, the light in my tree …

Adrien. His handwriting, the new words and expressions, his blank looks after yet another of my faux pas. The grave errors of conjugation. The correctness of things. His hair in the mornings, the taste of his skin, the mon amours and the chérie je t’aimes, the way his mouth moves when he speaks. The misunderstandings, mistranslations, miscommunications, mistrust, mystery. The mist. The missed. The trying and wanting and asking and wondering and spinning around and around and around …

I am the moth. The night butterfly. Turning in circles now on E.T.’s face, saying come on, come on, girl, it’s time to grow up, time to take control.

I’m living. And I’m changing. I’m a child. And a girl. And a woman. And my grandmother. And not born yet. And dead. This biology. The grass-roots, animal baseness of it all. I’m a root machine like everyone else, just wanting to fuck and grow round and shoot out spawn like the rest of the fishes, to hang my eggs over the precipice, to bury my offspring in a warm ditch. I am the cat from the Festi Bazar, with crumbling ears, pumping out litters and litters in cupboards and corners, just shitting them out, spewing forth reams of seething maggots, vomiting up tiny ratty copies of myself and washing their shitty nappies and sending them to school.

I dream of babies, fat ones, tiny ones, of miniature girls in prams and sons dressed in tutus and babies that speak perfect French and give me very serious information, and babies that are dead and floating in the sea.

One is not born a woman. One becomes a woman. My nature is not calibrating with my brain. It is independent. An alien growth.

Help me, Simone de Beauvoir. Help me know what it all means.