Her own world was recently tested when guest choreographer Helen Pickett, a former Forsythe dancer, asked her to improvise onstage alone for a full minute in her ballet
Etesian. "As dancers we're used to people telling us exactly what to do," Combes says.
Dahlberg's greatest subject was his mother, and his lifelong Waterloo was his own sexual appetite--his seven marriages, various imputations of harassment and physical abuse, and his whole raging ambivalence about sex: "A man may want to study Mark, or Paracelsus, or go on an errand to do a kindness to an aged woman, but this tyrant [the penis] wants to discharge itself either because the
etesian gales are acerb or a wench has just stooped over to gather her laundry....