Alex Ko by Alex Ko

Forum had a new director whose husband was a professor of dance named Eloy Barragán. Mom called that very day.
    When Mom explained what I wanted, Eloy asked us in for an interview. He spoke quietly and with a wonderful Spanish accent. He peppered me with questions about dance, my dad, and my goals in life.
    Though I didn’t know it at the time, Eloy was a big deal. He was an amazing ballet dancer who had performed with companies all around the world, from his native Mexico to Beijing, Washington, and now Iowa City. More than that, though, he was a renowned choreographer. Just a few years before we started working together, the National Endowment for the Arts had given him a prestigious choreography fellowship.
    At the end of the conversation, Eloy looked me dead in the eye. His mouth crinkled into a huge smile, his white teeth shining against his brown skin. He twitched his black, bushy eyebrows.
    “I’ll help you,” he agreed. “And you’ll perform it here, at the university, on a real stage. If we’re doing this, we’re going to do it right.”
    Like that, Eloy and I set off on the first step of what would be my new dance life.

Chapter 11
The Dance
    “P erfect!” Eloy said, and he clapped his hands. The sound of his voice echoed loudly around the small studio, which was empty aside from us, a huge wall of mirrors, and the chair I used in the piece we were choreographing. It was September 2007, I was eleven years old, and Dad’s funeral was only a few months behind us.
    I’ll never forget that room: Studio E103 in Halsey Hall. Halsey was where all of the dance studios at the university were located. Even though I’d been coming to campus for years—on my bike with Dad, for gymnastics with Dmitri, and eventually, to the hospital—I’d never rehearsed a solo like this before. Halsey Hall E103 was my introduction to a real ballet dance program.
    From the outside, Halsey was a big brick colonial building, like the ones I imagined whenever I thought about going to Yale or Harvard or any posh institution. But inside they had carved spacious studios out of the original architecture. There were large windows to let in light, and ginormous mirrors so we could see our every movement.
    E103 was a smaller studio on the first floor, and it’s where Eloy and I met every other week for months as we choreographed Dad’s memorial.
    “I don’t think this is right,” I said as I thought about the movement I had just performed. “I don’t think it should go there.”
    The step in question involved me grabbing the silver aluminum chair in the center of the room and lying on it horizontally, so that my head stretched out in one direction and my feet in the other. Once there, I paused, held myself perfectly straight, and pedaled my legs like a bicycle. Eloy and I had choreographed the movement to pay tribute to all of the cycling Dad and I had done. I loved it, but I wasn’t sure it was in the right place in the piece. It didn’t flow the way I wanted.
    Eloy thought for a moment before responding.
    “Where do you think it should go?” he asked.
    “Earlier?” I hesitated. I rubbed my arms, which ached from the workout I’d gotten. “I’m not sure yet. I just know it doesn’t go here .”
    “Why don’t we try it at the beginning, right after the arm movements?” Eloy suggested. I thought about it, and then nodded. Biking was so much of what Dad and I did together, it made sense to put it at the beginning of the piece.
    This was how our process generally went. I came in with moments that I wanted the dance to reference, or things Dad and I had done that I wanted to create movements from. Eloy and I worked together to translate the activity into a step. My movements came from everything: gymnastics, bike riding, fishing, ballet. Even things like church and dinner were part of the piece.
    The best part was that Eloy treated me as an equal. Or maybe even more than an equal. He knew how much the piece mattered to me.