What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [63]
Nowhere is that more evident than when Thomas dances a solo set to Willie Nelson’s rendition of “Blue Skies.” In the beginning of the piece, Thomas lopes around in a large circle, taking long, jaunty strides, his arms moving in opposition to his legs as the iconic country-western singer croons Irving Berlin’s familiar verse, “Blue skies/Smiling at me, Nothing but blue skies/Do I see.” The piece is one of a series of vignettes entitled Nocturnes performed by dancers of differing ages to a medley of Nelson’s best songs. The set explores what Washington reviewer Lisa Traiger labeled “ever-green ideas of love, lust, loneliness and heartbreak.” It premiered in 1996 and has remained one of Lerman’s most popular and critically acclaimed works.
When she conceived it, Lerman did not have much confidence that “Blue Skies” would amount to much. She had been thinking a lot about men of Thomas’s generation who served their country in the military, returned home, took jobs, and started families with a sense of vintage American optimism, expecting that everything would work out. “Then along comes the women’s movement and the changes that occurred in the economy, and for many it all just fell away,” Lerman explained before I watched Thomas rehearse the piece for an upcoming performance. Near the end of the song, Thomas falls hard to the ground and struggles to lift himself. In a gesture mixing frustration and determination, he smashes his fist into the floor and his wrist appears to break. Then he rises to his feet, the palms of his hands and his face lifted to the sky, as if resurrected by his last ounce of will and hope. Audiences are often shocked by the violence with which he pounds his fist into the floor. Even in rehearsal, other dancers—though they had seen Thomas perform the dance before—winced at the impact and the raw emotion he evoked.
“I’m breaking loose from tradition and laws of the tribe that have stymied me but are still very much a part of me,” Thomas explained. If there is a more concrete personal history behind the dance piece, he is not revealing it. Half the meaning of a dance has to be hidden, even from the dancer, for it to come alive on the stage, he told me he had learned from Lerman. When I pressed him, he allowed only: “There was a lot I had to give up to be a dancer. I may look pretty simple, but I am a complicated man.”
By striking out for dance in later life, Thomas broke with expectations of at least one person in the tribe of his family and stirred some mixed feelings. While she says she is proud of her father, daughter Diane Wimsatt has had misgivings about the amount of time that Thomas has devoted to dance at the expense of spending time with her aging mother. “I know what I would have liked,” she said, “but my mother says she never asked him to spend more time with her, and I guess that’s their business.” Doris, at seventy-nine, suffers from hearing loss, and declined to be interviewed. She sent word through her daughters that she supported Thomas and was proud of what he has accomplished.
Aging and romance have proved fertile for Thomas and Lerman’s troupe of intergenerational dancers. None of Lerman’s works more richly challenges notions about age’s limitations on romance and sensuality than the deceptively modest Nocturnes, and no part of that dance does so more touchingly or erotically than a duet Thomas performed in 2008 with Shula Strassfeld, a tall, graceful sixty-one-year-old career dancer who has performed with companies in Israel, Europe, and Canada as well as in Boston and New York.
No sooner had Willie Nelson’s soulful singing of the ballad “Always on My Mind” begun during one of their first rehearsals for the piece than the other dancers in the Dance Exchange studio stopped what they were working on and focused on Thomas and Shula. At one point