Alice in Wonderland

A permission of silences. A gathering of emptinesses. An experiment in chaos. That’s what the rehearsals with Hannah were like. They called it the Alice Project. But really, it was an open field of endless play. They met every Monday evening at her dance studio on Divisidero near McAllister — it was named simply after the address, 848 — the cast consisting of anywhere from four to a dozen of them, constantly rotating and changing, some dropping out, others joining, smashing into each other like atoms and causing wild chain reactions. Horner had spoken with Hannah about the project while he’d still been in Austin, planning his return; it was one of the reasons he’d been so eager to make it back to San Francisco.

In retrospect, the connection had been somewhat miraculous. Horner had been working as a volunteer for the San Francisco Jazz Festival. One evening, he’d been assigned to usher with a young, beautiful red-headed woman named Heike, who turned out to be a dance student from Germany. Unlike most Germans, her English was spotty at best — she was from Leipzig, in the old East Germany, so hadn’t learned much English — nevertheless, the two of them hit it off. They’d shared one glorious night together. Then he’d traveled back to Austin, to untangle himself from his relationship there and plan a permanent move to San Francisco.

In the meantime, he’d written Heike a series of fairly sappy, lovesick letters. Among the letters was a poem, in which he tried to capture what he imagined it would be like to dance as she danced, based on the rudimentary descriptions she’d offered in her own letters. Unbeknownst to Horner, she had used that poem, strained and flowery though it was, in a performance, projecting it on screen and having it read aloud as she danced. Thanks to this, when he returned to the City, even though Heike had flown home to attend to her own entanglements, Horner encountered an entire community of dancers, artists, and musicians who knew who he was and were eager to meet him. Among those were Hannah, and later Milo. Horner was always worried that he was little more than a dilettante, spreading himself too thin instead of focusing on his writing. Now, Hannah had invited both him and Milo to get involved in the Alice Project. The basic premise was the story of Alice in Wonderland, but enacted in improvisational dance with music and words, a theater of make-it-up-as-you-go. There was no budget other than what they could scrounge up by hook or by crook, on top of pure energy and commitment. But the project was ambitious in scope, with rehearsals stretching into months, and a series of shows planned at the end.

To walk into the rehearsal space was to enter a different world. Tired, bored, stressed out, angry, in love — it didn’t matter. The rules changed. Old meanings were stripped away and replaced with new ones, or not replaced with anything. Each idea was either the most brilliant thing anyone had ever seen, or the most awkward and absurd. Even to merely walk across the floor was not accomplished in the “usual” way, without some kind of force or intention. Sometimes Horner got the strong feeling, while hopping around on one foot, making baby noises, holding his arms behind his back and breathing out of alternating nostrils, that he was participating in the most pathetic, childish, pretentious nonsense he’d ever encountered. On such evenings, he left rehearsal full of shame and anger, determined to quit without a word and never return.

Other times, while watching the dancers singing and moving in perfect telepathic harmony, rolling and catching each other’s bodies in a pure flash of truth, emerging somehow more real and essentially changed on the other side, he was convinced that they were all geniuses, himself included, and what they were doing was the most important work anyone had ever done. The truth, Horner concluded, was not somewhere in between. It was one or the other, and sometimes both at once.

None of it would have lasted beyond the first month if it hadn’t been for Hannah. She had that most basic requirement of the artistic temperament: the capacity for infinite play. She was restless, hyper, hungry to keep things moving at all times. She was a steamroller, a cyclone, a force of nature. She gathered the troupe in a tight circle and then tossed them onto the floor like double fistfuls of spinning tops; yet with a carefully prepared script of exercises, new movements to try, characters to explore, dialogue to hash out.

“What’s this?” someone would say, finding a piece of paper with crazy ribboning swirls drawn on it in different colors.

“Oh, that’s the sketch of tonight’s plans… doesn’t matter,” she would say, having worked it all out in her head. “We’re going to run through this,” half talking to them, half muttering to herself. But then stopping to nod encouragingly at something someone was trying, exploring that person’s idea for half an hour, letting it bloom into an entirely different set of movements, assimilating it into her original idea, gathering every stray gesture and thought that anyone might bring and incorporating it into the living flesh of the piece. A kind of Frankenstein’s monster, then, but one that slowly began to blink and open its eyes on the floor as they worked and played, played and worked.

“It’s so weird,” Hannah said to Horner one evening. “I came across this passage in Derrida, it makes perfect sense for Kyle’s character, and I found these shoes today that fit in just right… everything’s coming together in a weird way.”

Not realizing, Horner thought, that she’d made everything she saw or touched or tasted fit in with the Alice Project by the sheer force of obsession. As they got further along, she scheduled special rehearsals at odd times of day to work with subgroups and individuals, and spoke of a “retreat” for the entire cast to get away for the weekend and focus on work, perhaps up north.

But it hardly ever felt like work. She had them all spinning at once, separate tops moving at their own speeds yet somehow in concert, as she sat in the corner watching everyone turn and wobble and turn again. It was perhaps this feeling of infinite play that made it hard for Horner to take the project seriously at times. They often spent hours doing nothing but practicing yoga. Bodies flew together, arms splashed from collisions, alliances were formed and broken, they sang and swam with eyes closed, feeling along the surfaces of each other’s voices in the darkness, discovering boundaries and breaking them. They assailed each other with nonsense words, tried on moods and discarded them like cheap outfits, they were cajoled and pleaded with by Hannah to touch the floor with their hands and be quiet for a moment. Inevitably, they burst out laughing.

When rehearsals first began, Horner was the only male among the six or seven others Hannah had recruited. The women seemed to roll themselves into one vast ball of feminine energy until they were one enormous woman, throbbing with cattiness and sexuality. Several of them had slept together over the course of various collaborations; there were strange attractions and jealousies playing out from one moment to the next. Jamie, at 21 the youngest of the troupe, was an avowed lesbian, and indeed seemed to regard most men with deep suspicion. Hannah and Kayla were bisexual, and had been involved with one another in the past. Yet, over the course of the project, Hannah eventually started dating Alan, a musician, while Kayla began seeing another dancer named John; both were pulled into the Alice Project. A young dancer named Kyle joined as well. Everyone assumed he was involved with another cast member, Marni, though nothing was ever announced.

The way seemed clear for Horner to ask out one or several of the women dancers, each of whom he found extremely attractive in her own way. But some instinct held him back, and he waited and watched, waited and watched.

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