Andrea Tonty’s novel Some Dance, Some Die is set in the frantic and competitive world of New York ballet. As in Tonty’s earlier To Dance, To Die, actual performance lies outside the frame of the narrative, with the season ending performance of Giselle coming before and a Gala Fund Raiser after the frame of the novel, and the narrative shows what typically goes on twelve to fourteen hours a day as dancers recover from and prepare for performances.
The company, Eastern Ballet, is especially known for its performances of Romantic ballet, a genre denigrated by one of the city’s most influential critics, and the company is constantly threatened with fiscal and logistic disaster. Even their rehearsal space is unsettled, as the company moves from one city neighborhood to another, sharing with other companies. Moreover, Eastern must accommodate middle-aged latecomers to ballet, like Phoebe Manning, wife of the ballet’s Board Chairman, and Jerome Farshak, a lawyer who confesses he is a “balletomane” in his private dreams.
The novel’s characters are also unsettled: Lynne Haskell, just flown in from Europe for the closing night as Giselle, is pushing forty and is rumored to be Eastern Ballet’s next Artistic Director. Although much of her success as Principal Dancer has happened overseas, she has a New York apartment she rarely visits. (A mind-boggling luxury, especially in today’s real estate market!) Lynne, in a flawed parody of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, “thought of the past . . . and there had obtruded the perennially present, because of the perennially past and future, the extended present . . . it was all too confusing.”
Lynne’s estranged sister Mona Parker lives in Lynne’s apartment, along with her husband Don. Mona is a former dancer, whose “hopeless” feet have led her to modern dance, in which the “intellectual, inside” compensates for ballet’s unending “practice.” Mona currently has a cottage business as tax preparer and Don, a Ph.D. in English, has given up a potential career in writing for an adjunct position in ESL at community college.
Tricia Young, a promising ballet talent of eighteen years, is hounded by self-doubt and by her obsession with the inadequacy of her feet, “the second toes both almost half an inch longer than the big ones—an anatomical fact that had led to pain.” Lynne, as veteran Principal Dancer, observes Tricia, as she rehearses for the role of Giselle and wonders “what the connection could be between the story and this eighteen-year-old American girl” and recognizes philosophically that, at eighteen, Tricia’s “sense of time was too short to foresee the inevitable” decline toward middle age.
The nexus that draws these characters together is a secretive European cult: The Enterprise. A New York branch, identifying itself with mystic founder Lurieff (whose exact burial place has long been a secret), has placed flyers around the city advertising that “TO KNOW IS TO BE.” Lynne, who has left this cult her parents introduced to her as a child, still decides, with some inner conflict, to bring young Tricia Young to Lurierff’s shadowy successor, improbably named “Joe,” with the hope that he can magically assuage the young dancer’s doubts about her ability to perform triple pirouettes. Lynne’s sister Mona, who has never left The Enterprise, is torn between psychoanalytic therapy and the teachings of The Enterprise, and Don, her husband, sees this cult as a way of advancing his lagging professional career. Finally, there is Andrea Tonty’s inevitable academic, Jonathan Landau, a history professor at the University of Iowa, who has dedicated his sabbatical to the history of The Enterprise.
The Enterprise, itself, is run by five people: “Joe,” the Master, who was converted by a vision on Manhattan Beach; Odile, a pianist whose name evokes the black swan of Swann Lake; Vera Hartmann, whom Lynne describes as “a dancing four-armed Shiva encircled by a halo of stylized flames,” and to whom Lurieff dictated the cult’s sacred text Everything; Ward Harrington: “one of those financially secure, late-middle aged, WASP gentlemen” who has delivered to The Enterprise a spacious compound outside the city; and Don Parker, who regards himself as Joe’s possible successor. While at least one client appears enlightened by Joe’s therapy, others, as the novel’s title Some Dance, Some Die betrays, “will not get out alive, and it takes a Principal Dancer and a seasoned New York police detective to unravel the myriad clues, placed deftly throughout the text for Tonty’s attentive readers, to draw a picture that leads them to an unqualified resolution.
