Purple Prose (28 page)

Wearing that stuff is like donning a uniform, but without any real meaning or purpose.

… it made me think of teenage girls all being unconventional in exactly the same way.
¹⁶

Like, say, goths?

I asked my friend who had received the cheese plate bedecked with red and purple ladies whether she had ever been tempted to become a red-hatter. She was polite but firm:
I have nothing against it. It's just not for me.

Within the dominant colour system of the modern west, older women's dress is associated with muted, dull, soft colours like beige, grey, lilac and navy-blue … [This] relates to the more general practice of ‘toning down' … Purple is an ambivalent colour, associated with royalty and gorgeousness, but also vulgarity and coarseness. In emphasising this colour, Joseph's poem encapsulated the resistance to demands to tone down behaviour and dress, and to become grey and invisible.
¹⁷

I have always been that person who admires bright, beautiful colours in a shop window and then asks the assistant,
Does it come in black?
(See? Closet goth.) But last year my friend Wendy gave
me a gorgeous purple silk scarf to celebrate the publication of
Elemental
(which features such a scarf), and on a whim I bought a dress in the same colour. This out-of-character purchase was not a grab for attention in the style of the red-hatters – but …

You know, in retrospect, I
should
have asked whether it came in black.

Let me tell you a story about a failure to metamorphose.

The 2014 Perth International Arts Festival (PIAF) featured Israeli-based Batsheva Dance Company's
Deca Dance
– ten pieces drawn from choreographer Ohad Naharin's twenty-year repertoire.

I wish I'd been able to watch all ten pieces. But I missed one, and I saw one of the others in the most superficial way because by then I was in a state of shock – physical, adrenaline-fuelled shock.

Attending
Deca Dance
had been a last-minute decision, and I went alone, thrilled to have scored a single seat about ten rows from the stage and just off centre. From the beginning, it was spectacular, the choreography startling, the energy and artistry of the eighteen dancers electrifying.

And then … and then …

Here is an extract from a review of
Deca Dance
– not of the performance I went to but of the same show performed at the New Zealand Festival a few weeks later:

One excerpt was understandably the audience's favourite and mine too. Dressed in slick black suits and fedoras, the dancers slowly left the stage and coolly selected members of the audience … Back on stage, however, the coolness disappeared and the party began.

Not once were the participants put down or ridiculed by the dancers, as so often is the norm in this kind of interaction. At the close of the piece, everyone dropped to the floor, leaving one couple dancing in close embrace.

Then suddenly the male dancer hit the floor as well, leaving the lone woman happy to take her well-deserved ovation.
¹⁸

Now, this review requires a little insider deconstruction because, as you have probably guessed, I am intimately acquainted with the experience of that
lone woman
.

You've seen those wildlife documentaries where a lion surveys a herd of gazelle from the sidelines and you know, you just
know
, it's going to be that poor scraggly thing at the back that it chooses. I'm here to tell you that it doesn't do for the scraggly one in the middle to be complacent, either.

I was the last, that night, to be
coolly selected
.

Like everyone else, I had turned in my seat to watch as the dancers left the stage and roamed the aisles, searching, selecting. I wasn't on the end of a row; I felt safe.

And then I became aware of a frisson of movement to my right. I heard gasps. I glanced around. There was a dark, lithe figure inching along my row from the side. At that point, I began to mutter:
Not me, not me, please not me
.

Alas …

On stage my stern, cool partner morphed into a riotous headbanger, like the other dancers and the women from the audience they had led up on stage, and so in the spirit of okay-there's-clearly-no-getting-out-of-this and what-the-hey-it-will-be-over-before-you-know-it, I flung myself around a bit. For a whole song. And then, thank the universe, the music stopped, people cheered, and it was done, right?

No.

A Broadway song began, but the professional dancers were into their routine now and nothing seemed to be required of the amateurs other than to stand there and watch (and marvel – those dancers were
amazing
). I also looked around surreptitiously for the nearest exit off the stage. But there was to be no quick exit for me.

The Broadway song segued into a cha-cha, and what little participation was demanded of me I managed (except for the bit when the poor man tried to lift me; I whispered,
You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding.
).

Note, please, that by now I had been up there for
three songs
.

What relief when the track finished and the dancers led us to the front of the stage to bow. Even when another song began, I remained elated because it really did seem to be over. The amateurs were being led off the stage to the left, to the right.

Unfortunately, I was not going anywhere.

Despite my politely desperate gesturing that we follow the others, my partner and I were still centrestage, dancing to that execrable song ‘Sway', and he, undaunted by the previous futile effort, was still occasionally trying to lift me.

Eventually, as the reviewer reports, all the professional dancers dramatically hit the floor as though shot. But was this lone woman
happy to take her well-deserved ovation
? I took mine swiftly and fled.

Finding yourself on the stage of the State Theatre is a surreal experience. All you can see is lights. But you can hear, by the laughter, that there are more than a thousand people out there, witnessing your gazelle-in-the-headlights, get-me-out-of-here, I'll-do-anything-you-want-just-make-this-end-
now
anti-performance.

You might be wondering whether I can dance. Well, actually I could, once. As a child. The twelve-year-old me even represented Western Australia in national ballroom dancing championships. (I disclose this only to gratify my mother, who is inordinately proud of it.) But I retired soon after. It was long ago. People write historical fiction about that decade.

Now I have middle-aged feet. I have had spinal surgery. I am impossibly uncoordinated. Other than a couple of forays into bellydancing and Bollywood – for fitness, and in the privacy of my own home – I have left dancing to dancers.

So, in effect: no, I can't dance. Whatever atavistic dance memory remains in my cells, it wasn't enough.

Here's a list of things I wish I hadn't worn on my night out to see
Deca Dance
:

1. orthopaedic sandals
   
2. leggings, which tend (I
   now
   know) to creep uncomfortably south in situations of vigorous movement
   
3. a pedometer, attached to said leggings (I was on the 2/5 diet and counting steps – and the fact that the pedometer was shocked into arrest speaks volumes, I feel).
   

But most of all, I wish I hadn't worn that purple dress and the beautiful purple scarf Wendy gave me. Why? Well.

When I got home from the theatre that night, I told my husband what had befallen me. (He tried admirably not to snort.) Then I held my breath for an hour or so. If anyone I knew had been in the audience, they would have been on the phone to have their guffaw. Nothing.

But a few weeks later, at the opening party of the Perth Writers Festival, I was introduced to the Director of PIAF, Jonathon Holloway, who frowned a moment before exclaiming,
I know! Yes! I saw you at the State Theatre …
etc. etc.
Hahahaha
… etc. etc. And he said he'd seen
Deca Dance
performed several times in different cities –
and they always choose someone colourful as the lone woman
. Apparently, there was even a purple spotlight pooling on me in my dying moments.

It would have made a good story, wouldn't it, if I had suddenly reconnected with my twelve-year-old dancing self on the stage of the State Theatre and (as they say) torn up the floor. If my orthopaedic sandals had miraculously turned into stilettos and
my feet been refashioned to suit. If I had metamorphosed into some gorgeous creature able to make the stage her own and to hell with it, to dance like no one was watching, to become, at fifty-six, the centre of attention
and loving it!
That's what Jenny Joseph's wicked narrator would have done. And probably the redhatting women, too.

I failed on all counts. And so I have to wonder: if I am in the process of becoming, then
what is it
that I am becoming?

Sometimes the only way to answer
what is it?
is to eliminate all the
what-it-is-not
s.

I'm not seeking the kind of visibility that makes me the centre of attention – unless I'm meant to be because I'm reading or teaching or speaking publicly as part of my work as a writer. (Really, I would have made a hopeless goth.)

I'm not harbouring an outrageously flamboyant self who longs to break free and fling herself into the purple spotlight; I've always been a quiet observer and am happy to remain that way.

I don't feel bereft at no longer being an object of the male gaze. But nor do I wish to be rendered socially colourless – unseen, obsolete, dismissed.

It's unlikely I will ever attain the heights of being savagely unimpressed with what the world does to me, although I remain resolutely admiring of those who are.

I don't yearn to spit or be silly, or to wear a uniform of red and purple. In the words of my friend: it's just not for me.

But I am way past forty-four now, and in order to own the age I am and accept all those other numbers yet to come, I need to believe that, in growing older, the focus might be on the
growing
. That change need not be only about degeneration and loss. That I might have more to offer than the statistics to be gained from scans and sample jars bearing my name. What ordinary, human needs they are.

These words from William Yeoman in
The West Australian
resonate with me:

The sense of possibility in the midst of our always-becoming selves is the ultimate source of all hope, and of all creativity. The first step is recognising our real, imperfect selves and not our imagined selves, whether good or bad, and move from there.
¹⁹

What is it I am becoming? I think it's okay not to know. Perhaps the
point
is that we don't.

Ironically, the tattoo I chose for my mark of resistance is remarkable among tattoos only for its utter conventionality. But I love the butterfly on my ankle.

Just as ironically, in spite of my wanting goth-black, it turned out a little bit purple.