I'd never seen anything like it. I had heard about raked stages. I knew about the upstage/downstage thing. (The upstage, rear, goes uphill. And on they way down it becomes downstage.) But this was crazy. Of course, my memory could be exaggerating, but it was 20-25 percent. Crazy.
Then they told me that Anna Pavlova danced there. What? Doing pirouettes? On toe shoes?
Suddenly I was imagining the scene. A hundred people watching the most famous ballerina of their time, in this little theater with gas lamps along the apron. There's room for her and maybe three other people. The whole concept of dance performance is upended in a space like this. There you are dancing your wildest jumps and turns on a stage that literally wants to deposit you in the lap of your audience.
Why does this memory come so vividly to my mind? Because I feel like a dancer wearing toe shoes doing tricky steps on a steep incline, trying to please a small audience.
