The Hour Before the Curtain

There is an hour before every performance that the audience never sees. The house lights are still up, the orchestra is still tuning somewhere below, and backstage the dancers sit in a hallway of mirrors, sewing ribbons flat against their ankles.

It is the quietest hour in the theatre, and the most honest. Nothing is being performed yet. The beauty is all preparation — chalk dust, silk thread, the small superstitions of pinning the same pin in the same place.

We think of our pieces the way a dancer thinks of that hour. Jewelry is fastened in private, before the evening begins. A clasp closed at the nape of the neck is a curtain about to rise.

The performance gets the applause. The hour before gets the devotion.