When the young dancer GRACE enters a musty discount ballet shop looking for a new

leotard, she is unprepared for her surreal encounter with the aging, bizarre VICTORIA.

Like a character out of a Grimm’s fairy tale, Victoria forces the ingénue to confront the

dark side of fantasy. She shocks her by revealing that she once was a famous ballerina,

loved and spurned by the very Maestro for whom Grace is desperate to audition.

MONSIEUR SERKIEV, the legendary choreographer, seems untouched by the passage

of time.  He rejects the un-sylph-like Grace until, smelling the scent of the past – Paris, 1920 -- on the costume she wears, a costume once worn by Victoria in a pas de deux they had performed together, he is forced to deal with his own reality. When the two aging dancers meet again, Serkiev is stripped of his illusion, and Victoria is reunited with a part of herself she’d thought she’d lost. 

She, and Grace, and Monsieur Serkiev collide and transform in this picaresque roundelay of longing, loss, and celebration of the discipline and life experience necessary to create art.
 

Personal note: I was younger than Grace when my mother took me to buy leotards at a
makeshift ‘seconds’ shop in an old gym at the corner of Beverly and Fairfax in Los
Angeles (replaced by CBS). There I met the inspiration for Victoria. She fascinated and
frightened me with her focused intensity, not only on finding the right leotard, but also on
repelling the aliens that tracked her every thought. According to my mother, she had
been a wonderful dancer, a legend in Hollywood; when I met her, she had sponges under
her arms and was convinced that wires were coming out of her scalp. She made such a
deep impression on me that, decades later, I began to explore our encounter in Les
Attitudes.

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