Chapter Text
“We’ve been competing against each other since – Ow! Ilya!”
The video cuts.
2007: Youth America Grand Prix. 16-year-old Shane Hollander soars across the stage through an assemblé en tournant, a blue-and-red stripe running across the waist of an all-white costume. It’s Flames of Paris, in all its glory – a slap on the floor; an arm drawn through to a flashy allongé. Mid-air, the grainy video snaps to another of 16-year-old Ilya Rozanov, stepping through fourth with a cocky smile to a double tour in his interpretation of Paquita. He turns twice – three times – four – like it’s nothing, to a fouette, and then down to the knee, the smile never leaving his face. Hollander, silver. Rozanov, gold.
2009: Prix de Lausanne. They’re 18, and Ilya, a little less gangly but still at the same ease with his body, slips into a series of perfectly balanced turns à la seconde against the glowing blue background. Shane, in a black suit now, does the same, smiling broadly when he finishes cleanly. Ilya sails through a manège to the Le Corsaire variation’s dramatic end, falling to the floor with a hand outstretched. Shane’s hand cocks back in time with both the music and a newfound confidence fitting of Don Quixote. Both look at the camera triumphantly as they bow. Ilya Rozanov of Russia: apprenticeship finalist. Shane Hollander of Canada: prize winner.
2011: Youth America Grand Prix, again. A podium, again. But this time, they’re not receiving the awards – they’re presenting them. A floating caption proclaims Shane Hollander, left, and Ilya Rozanov, right, the rising stars of the ballet world – soloists at the Royal Ballet and New York City Ballet, respectively. The two of them, 20 years old in ill-fitting suits that still betray their physicality, rib each other: Remember when I won that? Yeah, what about when I won the next year? Shane’s voice, measured, slices through the fray to say: We are here, together, to recognize the next generation of ballet dancers who will someday step in our shoes. Our excellence comes from our best competitors – each other.
2012: A warehouse in Los Angeles. It’s a campaign for Adidas, and both of them know this matters, because so rarely do brands like this want ballet dancers. Brands want tough. Brands want competition. Brands want to cater to the ideas of athletes and masculinity and bravado that everyone knows. Brands don’t want ballet. But Adidas does, today, so maybe the rivalry they’ve shared is what finally gets people to take Shane and Ilya seriously. They move through harsh lights in a semblance of a pas de deux, twisting and turning around each other’s bodies until the photographer yells There! Stop! Yes, boys, that’s what the people want to see. The show must go on, after all.
2013: The Royal Ballet school studios. Barres line the center, because of all people, it’s Ilya Rozanov teaching a master class today, and no student would be caught dead missing that. The Adidas campaign went big, after all. Maybe a little too big – like Calvin Klein deals big. But Ilya, in the ballet world, is famous with or without that. The camera pans past wide-eyed students to an irritated-looking Shane at the front of the room, demonstrating combinations because Ilya apparently takes delight in pretending to need a translator, or perhaps assistant. (Shane teaches a class in New York two months later. He gives as good as he gets.)
Cut – to a politely smiling Shane and an Ilya whose expression is schooled into attentiveness.
“Despite the antics you might see here and the friendly rivalry we’ve stoked for the past few years,” Shane says, a paragon of media training, “I’m very happy to be a guest artist this season with the New York City Ballet. It’s an honor to perform Balanchine’s works with his very own company. I’ll be participating in the company’s production of Agon on the dates listed below.”
“New York City! Come watch,” Ilya says, smiling. “It will be wonderful when I am still so much better than him, just like back then.”
Shane frowns and turns to face the other. “Shut up.”
“No, you shut up, Hollander.”
“I didn’t say anything wrong!”
“No. You said it is an honor. It is not an honor to share a stage with me. It is a blessing, from God, from Balanchine himself.”
Shane, expression mildly infuriated but also amused, turns back to the camera. “Is this the PR video you were hoping to get?”
Cut.
An alternate montage looks like this:
2007: 16-year-old Ilya Rozanov meets 16-year-old Shane Hollander for the first time behind the New York City Center. He’s an irritation, first: Why won’t this kid let him light up a cigarette in peace, for fuck’s sake? But then, oh, his name is Shane Hollander, and Ilya knows. The cigarette is no longer nearly the most interesting thing in the room. He sneaks into an empty balcony to watch this Shane Hollander, the one they’re saying is the National Ballet School’s star, dance Flames of Paris – and Ilya knows he’s never getting past the boy who dances with such restraint and yet such passion. He’s no Ivan Vasiliev: none of the flourishes that befit the Russian education beat into Ilya’s head with a pointe shoe peek out here. But Ilya sees how much he loves it, how it courses through every pointed foot and extended leg – what would it be like to love something so much, he wonders? – and he knows that even if Shane Hollander comes second place today, he will be first in Ilya’s brain for a long, long time. So Ilya tells him, after the performances and the medals are over, by boldly pressing a kiss to the side of the other’s face before his coach can see.
2009: 18-year-old Shane Hollander waits impatiently in the wings. Inhale, exhale. He can’t come second again – simply just can’t. And then Ilya Rozanov finishes his solo, sweating and stripped bare and so beautiful just as he was at 16, and in the darkness of the wings he finally kisses Shane again before the latter even knows it. Maybe that’s what propels him through Don Q, sends him to heights higher than ever in his leaps and pirouettes faster than ever before. It pays off, for prize winner Shane Hollander, the Royal Ballet’s Shane Hollander! his mother says with tears of joy. But her face isn’t the one he needs to see now. After the spotlights dim and the audience has left and his parents have gone back to the hotel, he walks back to the theatre entrance. Ilya Rozanov is there, standing under a lamp and waiting for a taxi. And this time, Shane beats Ilya to it. Even when Ilya’s eyes are wide open with shock. Even when Shane backs them into the lamp’s shadows where they can no longer see each other’s faces clearly. And even when a cab does pull up, Shane tells him – we’re not done here. We’re not done for a long, long time.
2011: They’re staying in the same hotel, and they’re 20 now, and they know things about their bodies that at 18 they could only begin to conceive. They are Shane-versus-Ilya in front of the press and Ilya-and-Shane when the cameras turn away. Someone pulls the other behind a locked door. Someone takes their shirt off first. Someone walks them toward the bed in the dark. It’s the first time of what could be a long, long time. One of them is always gone by the morning.
2012: In the dressing rooms. Behind the warehouse. In the hotel rooms. Well – they’re not so brave, always, but Ilya tries. It’s hard not to, when the photoshoot seems to be based on the premise that sex, if nothing else about ballet, sells. It’s ironic, because Shane thinks ballet is the least sexy sport there could possibly be. Every dancer he knows is sweating and gasping for air by the end of act III, and they probably have blisters rising up among long-suffering toes, especially for the women whose pointe shoes kick the agony up a notch. Agony, like this, is not sexy. But the cameraman and the Adidas spokesperson who pitched it to them think the agon – the contest – might be, at least. Shane is glad nobody knows the truth. Maybe, he thinks fleetingly, they wouldn’t care. Doesn’t everyone think male ballet dancers are gay, anyways? But something about the idea of people knowing about this, about Shane-and-Ilya, feels like cockroaches are crawling up his spine. This is not that. This is not a performance. This is not a one-time stunt. So it’s better, he ponders, as Ilya drags him beyond the hotel door and kisses him senseless, that ballet is unsexy. In the shadow of that, there is magic in this – in going down.
2013: Fuck you, Shane tells Ilya, for making me do that. You wanted to embarrass me, didn’t you? But the words get lost in bedsheets, as they seem to always do every time the two of them meet. Ilya likes this, being in someone else’s city for the first time. He’s never been to London, but if Hollander can make it his own, then so can Ilya. So he embraces it. He puts so much clotted cream on his scones that it makes Shane cringe, and he sticks his tongue out when there’s ever so much as an attempt at correction. Ilya Rozanov does not believe in rules. Not when it comes to ballet and the neoclassical challenge that Balanchine brings, not when it comes to how one should eat a scone, and certainly not when it comes to how to have sex with Shane Hollander. They’re certainly not lovers, Ilya thinks as he leaves the apartment before dawn, but there is nobody else who could compete. Maybe that’s the singular rule he subscribes to in this godforsaken country with too much rain: Shane equals Ilya. Ilya equals Shane.