White Swan, Black Swan

Adrienne Sharp’s “White Swan, Black Swan,” opens with an image capturing the sublimity of the dancer’s body in motion. New York City Ballet (NYCB) dancer Joanna is watching from the wings as her boyfriend Ridley performs a pas de deux from George Balanchine’s “Jewels.”

“He’s so beautiful, truly soulful, when he’s moving; he has an absurd kinetic confidence that lets him skim cream through any role, his body magically and alternately built for speed and gyration, elongated for purposes of carriage and line,” she says.

While Joanna is enraptured by the lyricism of Ridley’s dancing, she expresses her frustration with her inability to be “there with him” as his pas de deux partner can be. This polarizing divide between performer and spectator is one with which any theatergoer is familiar.

Can we know what dance means for the dancer that we ogle? The answer offered by Sharp’s debut collection of 12 interlocking short stories is a resounding yes.

Alternating between first person and third person omniscient narration, Sharp vividly renders the inner lives of both 20th century legends—Balanchine and his muse Suzanne Farrell, Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, among others—and her own fictive characters—primarily figured as members of the real NYCB or American Ballet Theater (ABT). She lends an aura of verisimilitude to her readers’ vicarious participation in the lived experience of dance.

“Swan Lake,” the classical ballet from which Sharp’s text takes its title, figures prominently throughout the individual stories as a metaphor for the resolution of conflicting human desires through the formalized tensions of dance.

As the narrator of the climatic title story asserts, “[Audiences] wanted to see a love story, and this was the big one, ‘Swan Lake,’ four acts of love, regret, death, and absolution.” Indeed, when ABT principals and lovers Lexa and Robbie dance the roles of the Swan Queen Odette and her prince Seigfried, they exhibit a perfect “erotic synergy.” Odette’s desire for her prince ultimately defeats the evil sorcerer von Rothbart, who would keep them apart.

Offstage, the rather less romantic image of Lexa and Robbie’s relationship is one marked by post-performance pill popping, thrown punches, and Robbie’s infidelity with ingénue corps member Sandra. The collection’s expansive cast of dancers all exhibit very human frailties, struggling with eating disorders (“In the Kingdom of the Shades”), flirting with drug use (“Wili”), and succumbing to AIDS (“Departure”).

Sharp’s figuring of professional ballet as a ruthless taskmaster demanding bodily sacrifice in the pursuit of an artistic ideal is not a new insight.

Yet “White Swan, Black Swan” exhibits an evocative vibrancy resulting from Sharp’s privileging of experiential description over critical terminology: “Like balsa bent into a bow, I am rocked into an impossible backward C, Nilas holding my arms and one leg above us, stringing me up. Then I am lashed beneath his body. My leg is extended high and pressed between us like a sword. Our pelvises meet and pulse. The audience takes a collective breath.”

This punchy, almost breathless cadence is seductively accessible to the balletomane and casual observer alike. Sharp adroitly collapses the distance between performer and spectator, suggesting that we can all relate to the pas de deux’s pursuit of perfect synchrony between individuals.

White Swan, Black Swan
By Adrienne Sharp
Ballantine Books
Out Now