When Tonya Lockyer was 9 years old, she left her home in
Newfoundland for the National Ballet School in Toronto where, she says,
she and her friends were “evicted from our childhoods.” By the time
Lockyer left ballet school to study modern dance in New York, she’d
seen a few girls go crazy and one starve herself to death. The
girls couldn’t talk to their parents about their dead friend, Lockyer
says, because they harbored a kind of shameful awe they didn’t
know how to express—awe for the girl who pursued the attenuation
of her body all the way to its end.
The tragic dedication of dancers is the guiding principle of
Consumed, Lockyer’s new solo piece, commissioned by On the
Boards and running through March 30.
A bitter love letter to dance and dancers, Consumed is part lecture on history and
economics and part storytelling from Lockyer’s 20-year career
(including three deaths, one attempted suicide, and one pilgrimage to
Turkey), with some straight-up dance in between.
Declaiming from the stage is a terrible instinct for
dancers, most of whom can’t act and can’t write, but Lockyer, who now
lives in Seattle, weaves her stories and choreography in an easy,
unforced way. (Her cadence and delivery is reminiscent of storyteller
Allen Johnson, which makes sense—Lockyer and her then-husband
Sean Ryan met Johnson in 2003, and encouraged and produced some of the
early performances that would eventually grow into Johnson’s acclaimed
monologue Another You.) And the anecdotes have a moral force and
tragic depth that justify their telling. In Lockyer’s world, dance
is not for dilettantes. It is a desperate, sometimes fatal,
calling.
The first death arrives before the piece even begins, in its
dedication to Jake Robinson, a student of Lockyer’s who moved to New
York and died of
diabetes because, she says, he didn’t have health
care. The third fatality is a New York horror story, about Monica
Bearle—a dance student and friend of Lockyer’s who was murdered
by her neighbors, cooked into a soup, and fed to hobos in Tompkins
Park.
Lockyer also laments the economics of dance in America, sometimes
too literally and petulantly. When she ironically deploys Irish step
dancing and pseudo-sexy MTV moves to show us how debased the world
of dance has become, you want to push her off her high-art horse.
But when she tells the audience that the average pay rate for American
dancers (even factoring in the salaries of Vegas showgirls and
Baryshnikov) is lower than the average salary for unskilled factory
workers; and that budgets for arts administration have boomed since the
1980s, while grants for dance companies have become scarcer and
scarcer; and that her friend died for lack of health care—the
anger in Lockyer’s elegy begins to make sense. 
