The Witches Dance
by Susan Egan
“It’s like The Crucible, but it’s on pointe.”
I flipped through the libretto that Mark Ellis, our ballet master, had presented to me. I knew the story of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. What child growing up in New England didn’t? But choreographing a ballet to this dark period of American history was ambitious, if not foolhardy.
“Rose and I want you to dance the role of Abigail Williams. You’ve made such strides as a dramatic ballerina over the last year. This ballet will give you the chance to hone your skills further.”
Abigail Williams was one of the girls who caused the hysteria that resulted in the deaths of nineteen innocent people.
“I’m not sure I want to add this role to my résumé.” I adored dancing in plotless works, our company’s specialty, with an occasional Odette or Aurora thrown in to keep me honest. The classics put fannies in the seats.
“The directors of the festival specifically asked for you,” Mark said. “The ballet is to be performed on the final night, right before Halloween. Do you really want to disappoint everyone?”
“I don’t know that I can do the role justice. You seem to have taken several liberties with history.” I frowned. I hated when Mark put me on a guilt trip. I wasn’t stupid and knew how important the festival was to the economy of Salem.
“A ballet with you as one of the leads will sell a lot of tickets,” he said. “Who cares about history anyway? A little rewriting isn’t going to hurt the ballet.” From the corner of my eye, I could see Rose nodding in agreement. “You’re too much the purist.”
“We’ve invited Sally Wilson,” Rose said. “Are you going to disappoint her?”
The thought of seeing Sally, my first ballet teacher, in the audience thrilled me. When I was thirteen, she had pushed me to leave the cocoon of her school and take classes at the Boston Ballet. I had resisted, fearful that I would fail, but she was insistent. I had her to thank for my success.
“I realize this is a huge honor,” I said. “But I’ve already accepted an offer to dance in London that week.” It was actually the following week, but I had booked my flight a week early to sightsee. I longed to take the Harry Potter tour.
“It’s been cancelled.”
“Cancelled?” I said. “No one notified me.” I dug into my knapsack for my iPhone and scrolled through my messages. Nothing, as I expected.
“I told their ballet master that you’re unavailable. He was disappointed but very understanding.” He smirked as he relayed the message. I kept thinking that he resembled the Cheshire cat and yearned to slap that grin from his face.
“You had no right. I should hand in my resignation now.”
“But I did. And you won’t. The company always comes first.”
Whether Mark did or did not was open to interpretation. Because I wasn’t going to win the argument, I walked away. The decision was made. Case closed.
* * *
“Okay, everyone,” Mark, clapping his hands, said. “We’re going to rehearse the courtroom scene this morning.” Mark took up his position, front and center of the studio, where he was able to see everyone clearly.
“Why can’t we start from the beginning?” Emma, who was cast as Rebecca Nurse, whispered into my ear. “It’s like eating a burger for breakfast.”
“Not quite,” I said, “but I get your point.” I slipped on my ballet slippers followed by a pair of ratty legwarmers my mother had knitted for me when I was ten. “It’s Mark’s way of exercising control.”
“Do you care to join us, Ash?”
I twisted my hair in a bun and pinned it to the top of my head. “Sure.”
“Here.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me to the center of the room. He began to demonstrate the steps he expected me to perform. “This is the pivotal scene. You’re the reason that the accused are sent to their deaths. Got it?”
“Sort of.” I marked the steps while trying to pretend to be mad. “It doesn’t feel right.”
“Rose, show her what I mean.”
Rose demonstrated how they wanted me to play Abigail. “It’s the first rehearsal, but it’ll get better. The steps are a bit awkward. It’s more acting than you’re used to dancing,” she said, patting me on my arm. Her gesture was meant to be reassuring but wasn’t.
“Why I prefer plotless,” I muttered. “Why I want control over my career.”
“Sorry?” Rose asked. “What did you say? You don’t seem to be yourself.”
“Nothing.”
But it wasn’t nothing. Somehow choreographing a ballet where innocents died didn’t seem right.
* * *
“Costume fitting this afternoon,” Rose said. “Oh, by the way, Mark and I are impressed with your dancing. We were afraid we had made a mistake casting you, but you’ve made such strides just in the last week.”
I looked up from sewing the ribbons on my pointe shoes. “Acting doesn’t come easy to me.”
“Sometimes being out of your comfort zone causes you to grow as an artist. You keep proving that theory at every rehearsal.”
“Glad to help,” I said. “It’s an accident.”
“Well, keep it up. If all goes well, Mark intends to give you permission to guest in Europe next summer.”
“Sure, thanks.” I gulped. It was already in my contract that when the company was on hiatus, meaning the summer, I was free to dance anywhere. Mark was being his usual disingenuous, controlling self.
“Your costume?”
“Going right now,” I said.
* * *
I waited patiently while Holly Haines, our costume director, finished altering the dancers’ costumes. I watched as she pinned and hemmed the black dresses we would be wearing. The dresses were shorter than I had imagined, and instead of looking like Puritans, we were going to look like the staff of a Paris hotel.
“Ashley?”
I stood on a box while Holly slipped the dress over my head. I preferred dancing in a black unitard or one of those flimsy dresses I wore when I was cast in a pas de deux. I didn’t mind an occasional tutu. Odile’s black tutu was a personal favorite.
“You lost weight.”
“I wasn’t trying.” Since being cast in this role, I had spent night and day reading everything I could find on the trials at the expense of everything else, particularly meals. I wasn’t sure if it would give me an edge or an aura of authenticity.
“You’re a little too thin,” she said as she pinned my dress. “It’s not healthy. You could injure yourself, and then where will the company be without its star?”
“I’m not anorexic.” Too many dancers either starved themselves or lived on diuretics, but I wasn’t one of them. “I’m eating.”
“Well, just don’t lose any more weight. I’m not going to have time to redo your costume. I have no more fabric.”
“Ouch!” She had jabbed me in my side. “I’m not a voodoo doll.”
“Sorry, my hand slipped.” She offered me a tissue. “Did I draw blood?”
“Not really, but you may have just ruined my career.” I dabbed at my wound. “Mark isn’t going to be happy if I can’t dance the premiere.”
“It doesn’t matter. Mark’s never happy.”
I smiled, but it was forced. “He will be if his ballet is a success.”
* * *
“No, no, and no.” Mark yanked Dylan, who was tasked with dancing John Proctor, by the arm and dragged him across the floor. “Your dancing is too pedestrian. Your wife has just been accused of being a witch. She’s pregnant. What would you do? Stand by and let her go to the gallows? Have you no sympathy for your own wife?”
“Sympathy?”
“You’re not believable. None of you are. What if I punished you all? Would that get through to you?” He caressed the stubble on his chin as he contemplated the appropriate punishment. “Rose, what if I cancel their day off tomorrow?”
I could hear a collective gasp, and it was not a pretty sound. Dancers relished having a day off. It was a time to rest, take in a movie, do laundry, or act like a normal human being.
“Sure, that’s what I’ll do. We’ll stay tonight till we get it right, and then all day tomorrow.” He nodded at the pianist. “Dylan?”
Dylan walked to the center of the studio and waited for the music to begin. “Like this?” He prepared to do a string of jetés across the floor.
“Oh, no!” I had heard something snap as Dylan landed in a heap on the floor. Without thinking, I ran to him.
“Happy?” I said, glaring at Mark who shrugged his shoulders.
“Maybe a day off will clear their heads,” Rose said as some of the dancers helped Dylan out of the studio.
“Of what?” Mark snarled. “That is precisely the point. There is nothing in their heads to clear.”
“Fine, have it your way, but we’ve just lost John Proctor and not to the hangman,” Rose said. “A simple jump and look what happens?”
“Company class is at nine tomorrow,” Mark said. “You’re dismissed.”
* * *
“You look glum,” Dylan said as we sat in a café drinking coffee. His arm was draped loosely around my shoulder. “You’re dancing the lead, and you’ve been in the company less than two years. It will look great on your résumé when you decide to leave. What’s the problem?”
“Problem?”
“There are plenty of corps girls who would love to be wearing your pointe shoes right now,” he said, tousling my hair. “Think of the exposure you’ll get. Critics from Boston, New York, San Francisco will be sitting in the front row. You can’t buy an opportunity like this. “
“I suppose.” But for every plus in dancing this role, I counted an equal number of minuses.
“I wish I could dance. While the Proctor role wasn’t what I had envisioned, I didn’t think it would sideline me.” Dylan reached down and rubbed his ankle. “Just a sprain, the doctor claims.”
“Sure.” Injuries were a part of a dancer’s life, and they didn’t always happen at the most opportune time. “Maybe it’s a blessing.”
“How?”
“Mark doesn’t care about history. All he cares about is shocking the audience,” I said.
“It’s October in Salem. Anything goes,” Dylan said, readjusting the ace bandage around his ankle.
“The production just seems doomed. The costumes are wrong. You were injured doing a jump you’ve done a million times. What’s next? Everything happens in threes.”
“Nothing’s going to happen. All you need is a good night’s sleep.”
“I wish it were that easy,” I said. “Dancing Abigail Williams as a woman who had an affair with John Proctor is a mistake. She was eleven in 1692.”
“It worked for Arthur Miller,” Dylan said. “Besides how many people in the audience have ever read Miller or history?”
“Which is hardly the point. We should be respectful of the victims, not trivialize them.”
Dylan reached across the table, grabbed my hand, and squeezed. “You’re taking this far too literally. It’s a ballet, not real life.”
“Have you read the op-eds? You would think we were about to perform a Black Mass. How about the letters to the editors? One was written by one of the descendants and was scathing.” I was beginning to hyperventilate. “The ballet should be healing, not divisive.”
“It’s historical fiction,” Dylan said. “It’s not supposed to be the truth.”
“And the threats of sabotage on Facebook?” They had run the gamut from hoping the theater burned down with us in it to hoping the company went bankrupt. “If I were Mark, I’d hire a bodyguard.”
“Please, Ashley. It’s called bullying. This is the new normal.”
“It’s normal to curse innocent dancers? What if something does happen?”
“Really, just go out there and dance. Nothing is going to happen.”
The Facebook posts haunted me. The comments to the op-ed chilled me. The descendants of Rebecca Nurse and the Proctors, accusing the company and Mark of blasphemy, frightened me.
“Mark has too many detractors,” I, feeling the need to defend myself, said. “And then there’s the town historian, Joe MacDonald. He’s calling for a boycott.”
“It’ll blow over,” Dylan said. “It always does.”
“I’m not so sure.” In the ballet world, controversy is always welcome, and Joe MacDonald had fanned that flame. Thanks to him and judging by the comments to his article, people were talking, and ticket sales were booming. The company was in a win-win situation, much to Mark’s delight.
* * *
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
“Double, double, toil and trouble...”
“Something wicked this way comes.”
“Oh my God, they’re picketing.” I stood in the window of the dressing room watching the throngs outside the theater. For the moment, it was peaceful, but things could change within minutes.
“It’s just a ballet,” Emma whispered.
“It’s nothing to get your stomach in a knot over,” Dylan said.
“Why can’t we all get along?” a corps girls said.
“Fifteen minutes.” Rose poked her head into the dressing room. “Everyone on stage.”
I peered into the mirror and adjusted the white collar of my dress. I smoothed a little more white foundation on my cheeks. I looked appropriately other-worldly.
“Places.”
The cast assembled on stage and waited.
* * *
“Doing great,” Mark said as he patted me on the back. “Audience loves it.”
I had just exited the stage after the scene where I pretended I was bewitched by Rebecca Nurse.
“It was a little over the top,” Rose said. “Too bad there are no Oscars for ballet.”
I patted my forehead with a towel. The lights seemed hotter than usual, and the sweat seemed to be pouring out of me.
“We’re almost there,” Dylan whispered into my ear. “Then the cast party.”
“I don’t know if I can get through this,” I said, leaning against him. “I couldn’t sleep last night, and I’m dancing on fumes.” I didn’t bother with the gory details of vomiting the contents of my stomach.
“One more act,” Dylan said. “Just think of drinking champagne later.”
“Would that things were so simple,” I said.
“Let’s hope all goes well with the rest of the performance,” Dylan said, as we watched from the wings. The stagehands were busy assembling the scenery for Gallows Hill.
I gulped. Every ballet has mishaps. Injuries happen, costumes malfunction, and scenery collapses. Everyone has witnessed something untoward occurring on stage.
“I don’t like it,” I said. I looked at the gallows from which the dancers would hang. “Miller didn’t have such a scene in his play. Why us?”
“We’re talking about Mark being a showman. This is what bloodthirsty people want to see. It’s bread and circuses, Puritan style.”
“Places.” Rose directed the dancers onto the stage. “Break a leg.”
We had rehearsed this scene for what seemed like a million times. Mark had choreographed it with the assistance of an illusionist so that it appeared the dancers were hanging. In another rewrite, Mark had decided to execute Rebecca Nurse and John Proctor on the same day, although their deaths occurred a month apart. But as Dylan had observed, no one knew the history anyway.
“You’re a choreographic genius,” Rose whispered.
“Maybe I am about to embark on a new career,” he said. “With a major company.”
The music swelled as the two witches, shackled, shuffled onto the stage. Mark had choreographed a variation for me in which I urged the executioners on. Although Emma was supposed to be serious as she waited to be executed, I could see her suppressing a smile at my histrionics.
Two corps girls escorted Emma to the gallows. The audience gasped, but Emma barely flinched as they slipped a hood over her head. It was all an illusion. The trap door would open, and Emma would fall on a mattress beneath the platform.
The music reached a crescendo, while the executioner slipped the noose around Emma’s head. A mist enveloped the stage; the lights dimmed. My variation over, I stood with the rest of Salem waiting for justice.
I heard the trap door open and the snap of the rope. By now, Emma should be lying on the floor, laughing, with the audience applauding wildly.
Except when I opened my eyes, I saw her body swinging.
Had there been a malfunction? Had someone sabotaged our ballet? Whatever, I knew the answer: Karma.
Copyright © 2022 by Susan Egan
