Red Dance

BY KATHERINE LANSING DAVIS; ILLUSTRATION BY TRACEY TURNER

Emmaly, 29, talks to dancers over 50. Her passion — a book with photos. She has an amazing photographer who will follow her anywhere… in the free world.

Emmaly is 5’8” but always wears stilettos. Her favorites are blood red to match her lipstick. She only wears the lipstick when on camera.

She wants to interview Nataliya, 52, a world-famous Russian dancer. But Nataliya is in a Moscow prison, due to her activism wanting to free women who dance from the tightrope stranglehold of old ballet. Ballet, for both, is a jumping off point to freedom, to flight.

Emmaly, innocent and respected, an MA from USC in her pocket, lands an interview. At the prison, she immediately bonds with Nataliya. She wears her red stilettos. And the lipstick.

Suddenly, Nataliya drops her reading glasses under the small wooden table they have been permitted to sit at together. Bending to pick them up, Nataliya quickly rips off Emmaly’s stilettos, kills the two guards with them and grabs their two pistols. She looks back at Emmaly, who is frozen in shock.

“Run,” she hisses, pirouetting and tossing a pistol to Emmaly, her new fellow fugitive, as they spring out of the dark prison cell, dancing to freedom and flight.

Red Dance for web

To learn more about Emmaly and the Dancing over 50 Project, click here!