What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [64]
As accustomed as we may have become to seeing physical intimacy between older adults portrayed in film, television, or in incessant advertisements for drugs that treat sexual dysfunction, the spectator still experiences an additional frisson watching intimacy enacted between two older adults so beautifully.
In rehearsal, however, the spell of the piece was broken after the first run-through. Something was nagging at Thomas. When he performed it last, ten years earlier, he was partnered with a dancer whose hair was straight and silky. His fingers easily ran through it. But they had snagged in Shula’s lush, slightly kinky auburn mane. He was afraid that the gesture would not convey what it was supposed to. There were discussions and suggestions, and the dancers spent twenty minutes repeating the problematic part until Thomas was satisfied. “Thomas needs to know everything about what he is doing and why. His attention to detail is laser-like,” Shula told me days later. Since joining the company in 2007, she has also come to trust Thomas as a partner. “I’m always confident that he’s going to take care of me physically. He holds his own with the young guys.”
His work ethic is impressive for a dancer of any age. During a daylong rehearsal, he seemed to go full out on every step. He rarely rested. Even when nothing was required of him, he could be seen practicing some small gesture or movement, including pliés, in a corner of the studio. “I always give one hundred and ten percent. I have to. I am working with professional dancers and I don’t want to let them down,” he said.
Since taking up dance, Thomas has evolved in emotional and social ways that can’t be seen in a performance. Before he joined Lerman’s company, he had lived his life embarrassed by his looks and doubtful that he had much to contribute socially. He made sure to stay in the background, unnoticed. “I hid myself within. But once I started dancing, I knew that I had to get over my neurotic stance if I was going to be successful with Liz Lerman. So now I’m not afraid to speak my mind or to ask questions I know are legitimate that no one else will ask. I’m not afraid of someone saying, ‘You can’t say that.’ Now, I’m much more at ease speaking or moving. I take physical chances, too. Now, I’m a big ham.”
Like many people of an earlier generation, Thomas also believed in the stereotypes about male dancers and owned his share of prejudices about homosexuals. He is disarmingly blunt about it. “I was bigoted. But once I started dancing in the company I came to see gay men as real people with real problems. I had to learn that they weren’t going to come on to me just because I was a man, which like so many straight men, I thought would happen.” He not only learned, he became close friends, confidant, and father figure to many of the gay dancers with whom he has worked.
By the time Vincent Thomas, a dance professor at Towson University and a 2006 recipient of a Maryland Individual Artist Award for Choreography, met him in 1996, Thomas had already long since overcome his bias. Vincent Thomas said he was the one who had to overcome prejudices working with Thomas Dwyer—working, that is, with an elderly dancer. When he was paired with the older dancer in his audition for the Dance Exchange, Vincent Thomas prepared himself to encounter a frail body that could not match his physicality and a dancer who would not be ready to take the risks of real improvisation. “When we made contact, his body wasn’t frail and there was inventiveness to his movement. He didn’t have a ballet vocabulary to draw on, so, instead, what he brought to the table was jarring, beautiful, and intriguing. You see Thomas dance, and your vision of what beauty is begins to expand,” he said.
No moment stands in greater