I just got back from seeing Margie Gillis dance. It was… transformative. When my mother was pregnant with me, she saw her dance to Tom Waits’ “Waltzing Matilda” and she cried and cried. Margie performed it tonight and I cried and cried.
Margie says that she dances “from the inside, out” and you can tell. I feel turned inside-out.
She did two new dances tonight, too, one called “The Complex Simplicity of Love”. She began the dance with no music, the lights came up on her spinning and leaping and laughing and doing arabesques. Then the music rose up and she danced and danced, just going on and on across the floor, flying like a ribbon. She went on dancing and laughing after the music had faded. It reminded me of what Martha Graham said about how life never begins and ends, it just continues. Like that. Like love, too. How it just goes on and on. If I could have one wish from a Fairy Godmother, it would be to do that one dance from beginning to end. It looked like something that I feel like doing (that I do?) every day.
The second one was called “Breathing in Bird Bones” and it was beautiful and funny and sad. Margie wore white against a backdrop of blue sky with little cirrus clouds and fluttered her hands, her heart, her breath. Sometimes when I watch dance I “space out”, but this time I stayed with her from beginning to end.
The most rewarding part were her curtain calls. She was so lovely and gracious, all in red, with her long, soft hair all hanging down. At the beginning she just bowed, but at the third curtain call she smiled and put her hand over her heart. At the fourth, she knelt down low oh, so gracefully. At the sixth she clenched her fists and jumped up and down, grinning wildly like a child. At the seventh she laughed out loud and spread her arms wide. She was beautiful and spontaneous.
I couldn’t believe that she is 50. She’s like Martha Graham, she will keep dancing until she’s crippled.
In “L.A. Story”, when Steve Martin is talking about walking with his crush he says all he can think is “Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful”. That is how Margie makes me feel.
The man sitting next to me asked me if I was a dancer and I said yes. Also, Margie’s piece for Laurence Lemieux and Bill Coleman, “Metis Sur Mer”, was mentioned in the program, so I pointed to it and told him I’d danced with both Laurence and Bill, AND seen “Metis” performed, which I have. He asked me what they were like and I told him that Laurence took herself very seriously (he said; “Naturally, she’s French!”, the man who said it was French too, so it was funny) and that Bill was a cut-up. It was a lovely evening.
I never wanted to leave the theatre. I wanted to hang around and look for an opportunity to meet with her. Instead, I called my mother and told her that I cried at “Waltzing Matilda”.