What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [61]
The first morning I arrived to watch Thomas in rehearsal at the Dance Exchange studio—a converted post office—he had per usual arrived hours ahead of everyone else. Wearing baggy gray sweats and old, worn blue dance slippers (“They are like a badge of defiance; they mark that I came from poor beginnings”), he was already engaged in his demanding daily regime. He was holding himself in a rigid plank position a few inches off the ground. I was so entranced by the length of time he held his position that I forgot to check my watch to see how long he endured it. After that, he did an exercise in which, on his knees, he alternately stretched opposite arms and legs and held the position. Then, he stretched, balanced, did jumping jacks, and ran in place.
To strengthen his feet and ankles, he dragged a foot back as if pulling sand with his toes, slowly pushed his toes forward as if returning the sand in front of him, and then alternated feet. He gripped and squeezed rubber balls, juggled them high in the air, and then threw them against a wall and caught them to quicken his reaction time. He also did lung-strengthening exercises, breathing in deeply through his nostrils and expelling air by exerting pressure from the bottom of his diaphragm. “I go from the top of my head to my toes. I want everything to be exercised. So if I ever injure myself in rehearsal or performance, it won’t be because I’m not prepared,” he said.
He makes no concessions to the scoliosis, a curvature of the spine, he has suffered from since childhood. He is a stickler for doing his routine every day, a routine that often leaves his younger dancers awe-struck. When the Dance Exchange does workshops at universities, college students watch Thomas warming up as if he were performing a circus act. “Which is part of what makes it so wonderful,” Lerman said. “It changes what they think of old people, and it changes what we think of warming up, and it changes what we think of dance.”
For Thomas it is pure practicality. “If I didn’t maintain my regimen, I could really be hurt and not get out of bed,” he said, adding, “No one here would ever challenge me in push-ups.” Of that, there is little doubt. Every day, Thomas does at least 125, and that does not include the knuckle push-ups he throws in. In one of Lerman’s most provocative works, Ferocious Beauty: Genome, a multimedia investigation into the history and ethical issues, such as endless aging, of genetic science, the choreographer uses Thomas’s push-up prowess to great effect. He portrays an old man, genetically reengineered to live to an extensive old age, who tries to end his life by exhausting himself to death with push-ups. Thomas, wearing only his underwear, does sixty, with his feet elevated on a chair. The audience is usually gasping by the time he is done.
But conditioning was the least of Thomas’s challenges when he began dancing. Never having taken music or dance classes in his youth, his spatial awareness, ability to memorize sequences of movements, and his rhythm were weak. He still works tirelessly to get the movements and timing right, and to duplicate important nuances such as when to shift his weight to begin a movement. He often seeks the help of younger male dancers, like Joffrey Ballet-trained Ben Wegman or Matt Mahaney. “I know if I can get near what they do, Liz will employ me in a dance. When I’m doing a movement, I want to make it as perfect as I can,” Thomas said.
He has occasionally had difficulty finding his spots onstage during a performance or has lost track of the choreographed spacing between himself and other dancers. A strong sense of space and direction—always knowing where front, back, boths sides, and the diagonals are—is usually almost second nature to