The Casino Tapes

Genia Blum

1. The ballet company rehearses in the attic of Lucerne’s casino, a majestic Neo-Baroque building flanked by two palatial hotels on the city’s lakeside promenade, in a studio leased by the Civic Theater that’s neither majestic nor palatial, but it has a ceiling lofty enough for the tallest dancer to lift me up in a pas de deux without grazing an exposed beam, and its large mansard window, which frames a postcard view of the Swiss Alps, summons the sun inside to bathe our bodies in golden light.

2. The casino’s nightclub is located three floors below, a dark, windowless lair with minuscule tables and inflated prices, where young women from less affluent countries gyrate and undress for a predominantly male audience, seven nights a week for the duration of one month, until their visas expire and they’re obliged to leave Switzerland.

3. The spheres of ballet rarely intersect with this netherworld of erotic dance but, in a rare convergence, a pretty blonde who says she was a circus contortionist until she injured her back, comes up for an afternoon ballet class I teach, and since I don’t charge her for the lesson, invites me for a drink on the terrace, where I tell her I’ve been inside the nightclub only once, to cap off a dancer’s birthday, when a doorman with a crush on the birthday boy invited our party in for free, and she recounts stories of low pay, bad accommodations, obligatory post-show mingling, and the constant expectations of sexual favors.

4. Unlike the pretty contortionist, I’m not required to mingle with the audience, not even with subscription ticket holders, but I, too, earn less than Swiss people with regular jobs, like the local man who guards the stage door at the Civic Theater from behind a glass window, abetted by an ergonomic swivel chair and a portable radio tuned to folk music, who struggles to read the rehearsal schedule pinned to the bulletin board and fails routinely at conveying correct information over the phone—his salary is higher than mine.

5. I freelance at trade shows and fashion events, bookings even more trivial than the frothy interludes between actual ballet performances in the Civic Theater, where directors shoehorn every female dancer into every act of every operetta in the season’s repertoire; so that one night I’m pirouetting en pointe in Coppélia or The Firebird, but reduced to swishing underskirts as a Hungarian peasant in The Gypsy Baron or scampering in yellowface makeup and a conical hat in The Land of Smiles on the next, obeying stage directions to deflect from the woodenness of the theater’s choristers.

6. A public relations person from Sony Switzerland contacts me about an event in the casino’s restaurant to introduce a new, palm-sized camcorder to the press, for which they seek “professionals, not amateurs” to dance for journalists and photographers who will test the novel Handycam by capturing videos of the show.

7. I recruit two other dancers, start rehearsing in the ballet studio, and invite Sony P.R. Guy for a preview, to which he shows up with two men in their early thirties with a collective demeanor of “Wow! Real dancers!” who assume self-conscious power poses on chairs in front of the mirrors, while we dance a lyrical Chopin waltz followed by an Offenbach can-can that ends with splits on the floor, after which they whisper among themselves until P.R. Guy clears his throat and says, “Hmm … actually, we wanted something more … exclusive,” so I take a deep breath, slide another cassette into the sound system, drop my voice a register and purr, “Like this?” and, taking my cue from the movie soundtrack of Flashdance and its utterly unrealistic, stripper-to-ballerina storyline, I commence to bump and grind.

8. The night before the gig I drink too much wine and wake up with a raging hangover that intensifies when I arrive at the casino, where no one has thought of providing us with a private dressing area, so the other girls and I change in the toilets, observed closely by a cleaner who pushes a wet mop over the floor while we wriggle into neon bras, briefs, diaphanous tights, and sheer black skirts that cling to our half-exposed buttocks.

9. The casino’s restaurant is packed, predominantly with men smoking and enjoying free drinks; chairs and tables have been cleared away, and a platform of connected elements erected at one end, accessible via an unsteady stepladder; a vinyl dance floor that should have been laid on top is missing and the stage’s surface, due to its modular nature, is uneven, and—dancer’s nightmare—so slippery that we decide to go barefoot, ditch our heels, and chop off the feet of our tights with shears commandeered from the kitchen.

10. Before we climb onstage, Mr. P.R. Guy, mining the “sexy dancing” for more marketing gold, imposes another costume modification by providing us with Sony Walkmans to strap to our waists, and though their connected headphones muffle our hearing, we still pick up music booming from two towering speakers that hog floorspace downstage, whose chaotically crisscrossed cables further exacerbate spatial restrictions, making collisions inevitable.

11. We move, crash, entangle; and as we struggle to disentangle from messed-up headphone wires, our bodies rub up against each other—while scores of factory-fresh Handycams point directly at us.

12. Years later, I’m a ballet school director and mother of two; the casino undergoes renovations and reopens as the Grand Casino, its nightclub transformed into a disco where my teenage daughter meets her friends on weekends; the theater secures a larger subsidy, modernizes its front of the house, and raises its stage artists’ salaries; Mr. P.R. Guy leaves Sony, becomes communications guru for the Swiss Federal Government, and by the time he’s elected to the Board of Trustees of the rebranded Lucerne Theater, all those Video8 recordings—of which I never saw a single frame—have completely degraded.