And his body shouted Freedom! with every move. I can think of only a few dancers (Bill T. Jones comes to mind) with that sort of command of a language, an entire vernacular of movement, which seems utterly instinctive. Dimitri is called a circus performer, but he’s really a dancer in the circus of his imagination.
The ending of his show? He somehow slipped out through a hole at the top of his tent (which was small three hundred of us were shoehorned into it, barely able to move) and shimmied up to a tightrope strung outside. Follow me!, he called as he exited. And so we did, like the Pied Piper’s devotees. Craning our necks upward, we gazed at a marvelous sight: a man with a pole in his hands, traveling by foot from one end to the other of a tightrope high above our heads—each swing of leg and-foot, leg-and-foot a miracle of balance.
I watched the rapt expression of Milo as he stared up at David Dimitri, magician on the wire, and thought, ah, che fortuna: you’ll always remember this.