Our days were strictly regulated. The classes were long and arduous. Slowly all the elements of the royal dance became natural. Repeated exercises of increasing complexity transformed our bodies and habits of movement. Even when we walked, we became less and less like normal people. In all this, I felt real pleasure as the capacities of my body developed and I mastered increasingly subtle and complex movements. We all felt we were participating in something both ancient and alive. It was a happy time and went by quickly. The Master attended many of the classes. He rarely said much. He watched us carefully.
I remember once, when I was about eight years old, I asked an older girl why there was a man at the head of a completely female dance company. The girl was about seventeen. She said it seemed that while women could work together to develop a sense of beauty, it needed a man to say whether or not that beauty had the power to entice. Afterwards I watched the Master more carefully, particularly on the rare occasions when he demonstrated a posture or movement himself.
Sometimes princes, ministers, courtiers and high officials came to watch us rehearse. They were kept at a distance since we could not have intimate contact with men if we wished to remain with the troupe. This had always been so. It was part of the original instructions that enabled dancers to fulfil the sacred intent of the dance. As young girls, we never even thought about it, but very occasionally, an older girl would be obliged to leave. This caused resigned sadness in the teachers and attendants and provoked giddy nervous whispers among the older dancers.
At the end of the first eight years, when we were about twelve years old, we began to learn roles in the dances themselves. There were four principal cycles and these were performed according to the season. Each cycle had at least thirty or so episodes. In general, all contained scenes of battles, betrayals, true love, death, parting, clever ruses whereby the treachery of evildoers or demons was revealed, reunions of lost brothers, sisters, lovers, parents and children, all sorts of things like that.
The heroes and heroines were sometimes deities, sometimes humans. Some stories told of their interaction. The summer cycle was mainly devoted to humans, the winter cycle to gods, while the spring emphasised the birth of humankind from the god realm. The autumn cycle dealt with the transgressions of humans and the temporary withdrawal of gods. These themes lay beneath all the twists and turns the stories took, and so the dances were not as difficult to learn as it seemed at first. There was a great deal of repetition in gestures and movement sequences. The real challenge was to devote to all those steps, that by then we knew by heart, feelings of real living beings.
This brought a new level of excitement. Up until then, it was as if we had been learning how to do a kind of human calligraphy, and we were proud of our new and wonderful ability to make all these remarkable shapes with our bodies. Then, all of a sudden, we were learning how to make phrases and sentences. This combined with the greater emotional intensity of puberty. Our involvement with the characters was vivid. It was like discovering a new dimension of life. When I think of it now, I wonder whether it was our raw state of feeling that made the roles seem so alive or whether these elevated and heroic roles sharpened our states of feeling. My life was wonderfully exalted. Now it seems far more a dream than a real memory.
After three years of learning the parts, the time drew close when we would actually perform in public. It was then that the Master became our principal teacher. He spoke quietly and simply about the real meaning of our art. The real function of the dance, he said, was not merely to provide an enchanting and inspiring spectacle, but to purify the four directions of space and the four seasons of time. The earth could provide all that was necessary for life, and the seasons in their specific qualities and transformations made such sustenance possible and showed all the essential aspects of what beings will experience. Each season has its own wisdom and mode of expression. Each contains peace, richness, love and destruction; though, in each, one of these predominates. So our gestures and movements should express not just the passions and desires of men and gods. They should convey a sense of what is timeless in such experience. Dancing in a way that was both vivid and timeless, we conformed to the greatest possible harmony. As we performed, people could restore their own place in the heart of this world.
Finally, he told us that even though we would continue to live as we had, we would be performers moving about in the world. We might have felt nervous or over-excited about dancing in front of strangers and meeting with them. But if we kept in mind the true purpose of our lives as dancers, we would experience no problems.
We were taught in this way for another year, and the effect was subtly to increase the precision we brought to our dance. All that emotional intensity was held within a larger feeling. It sounds odd, but it was profoundly relaxing. Each movement, each gesture, each pose, would dissolve like a drop into a river and flow from sequence to sequence. Our moods and feelings did likewise.
So at last we performed in the dance publicly. I was about sixteen then. To say I enjoyed it is less true than to say that I could imagine no other life. Each season we danced for eight weeks, and while, in the past, the dances had been performed at the four great royal residences, two of those cities had long since been annexed by neighbouring countries and one was an abandoned ruin. We danced for the most part in the capitol, but each season, we travelled to various parts of the country and performed there.
And indeed we did meet all sorts of people. Young men would flirt with me, and less pleasantly, old ones would too. All of us had that experience. Some of the girls, particularly as they got older, were troubled by their desire to have a lover or a husband and a family, or just to have a normal life. Eventually they left. I however, like many others, even though I was almost twenty, did not.
“Do you really want to remain a virgin all the rest of your life?” people would ask. But contained within my own body and my own life, I experienced everything that could be experienced, every passion, fury, regret, good, evil, heroism and death. I felt no need for anything else. Normal life, as people called it, seemed merely a shadow play of what unfolded annually in my being. I could see no purpose in falling into more ambiguous and murky realms.
