Becoming a Creature
Mary Esther Carter’s Metamorphosis
By Hannah Moore
In the cover photo for her new EP, “Doula,” Mary Esther Carter holds a plate of pumpkin pancakes in her left hand. Her right hand is flung over her eyes, as if she were camera shy, although she is smiling. She sits, legs outstretched in fishnet stockings, her white feet painted black. The brown terry-cloth robe she wears is open at her breasts, which are coated in putty.
Recently, she’s been delivering babies in her sleep, having, “these wild dreams, very vivid, almost like visions,” and the image she has chosen for “Doula” reflects them — it is at once comforting and uncanny. In the song “Fibers,” Carter cries out for the pancakes her mother used to make, “hot off the skillet,” even though she burned them every time. “Momma are you there? Who’s gonna take care of me?” she asks, her voice haunting the track’s sparse blues guitar riff.
Carter says the EP, due out in March, reflects “a life-changing experience,” like bringing a baby into the world. Still, she hesitates to call herself a musician, having spent many of her 29 years as a professional dancer. There is something almost apologetic in the way she talks about “plunking about” on the piano, rather than playing it; how she says she taught herself to sing by listening to Ella Fitzgerald’s jazz standards. But there is nothing naive about the way she makes art.
Carter was born into a musical family in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father, Robert, was principle saxophonist and bassoon player with the St. Louis Philharmonic Orchestra throughout her childhood. “It was a big responsibility,” he says. “I did a concert every month. I’d make my own reeds,” while her mother, Chris, comes from a line of self-taught female musicians, who would “boogie out” to her grandmother’s organ playing. Mary Carter took on her mother’s free spirit and her father’s intense dedication to music.
As he practiced every day, Carter felt the floorboards of their old house vibrating until the melodies seemed to become part of her: Stravinsky’s “Firebird”, scales, tonguing exercises — repeating, repeating. The practice room was a sacred space, forbidden to her and her two elder brothers, Steven and David. They did get to see their father perform in public, though, at a grand concert hall in St. Louis. Carter would sit in the red velvet seats, her legs too short to reach the floor, and draw pictures of the orchestra, imagining herself moving to their music.
Carter says she never really fit in at mainstream schools, and from fourth grade onwards, she did a lot of homeschooling, taking her textbooks along to the local library where her mother works. She began ballet training twice a week, then more. “[My parents] saw my drive, that I was drawn to dance. I didn’t feel I had to have a conventional career,” she says. Still, she was remarkably disciplined. “Mary understood there was so much to absorb, and she wanted to absorb every single drop of it,” says her childhood dance teacher, Robyn Hartley.
It was Hartley who pushed Carter to go professional. “She sat me down with my parents, and she said, ‘The sky’s the limit. What dance company do you want to dance for?’” By 17, Carter had earned a coveted apprenticeship with the St. Louis Ballet Company. But the technique “did not sit easily with Mary,” Hartley says. She soon began to feel restricted. “Even though I was rail thin, too thin,” Carter says, “my butt is a butt, and not many of those ballet dancers had a butt.” She was recording everything she ate, almost “obsessively” counting calories. “We were taught that you had to keep a slim figure for ‘the line’. I wanted to respect that aesthetic, but also respect my body, and it made me miserable. I thought ‘I can’t see a future in this’.”
But Carter wasn’t trained for anything else. “As her long-time dance teacher watching her go through that, I wanted to help. I wanted to rescue her,” says Hartley, herself a former professional ballerina. “Mary had applied herself to ballet so much that to turn away from it likely felt a bit like quitting.”
At around the same time, Robert and Chris Carter started bringing home DVDs of work by the modern American dance greats — Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown — to show their daughter. What she saw in them was a revelation: Here were dancers who played with gesture and costume, contracting into poses that ballet would never allow. “I remember watching Martha Graham doing her “Lamentation,” and realizing, ‘wow, someone’s doing this, and it’s powerful, and captivating, and kind of scary’” Carter says.
***
At the entrance to Brooklyn Museum, visitors sit alone on a bank of vast stone steps that curves around the building like an inverse amphitheater. A woman digs into a steaming shawarma wrap from the nearby Halal truck, chili sauce joyfully trickling down her forearm. Carter stands on the fifth step, warming up as she waits to start filming her new music video, bouncing on her toes, then crouching low in the last slice of sunlight. Her hair is skin-shaven but for a wisp that runs through the center and now glints blonde in the light. She wears her makeup today as always: green eyeshadow, no mascara, dark purple lips.
“Mary is a creature,” says her friend Chelsea Bonosky, a contemporary dancer who has worked on “Sleep No More” and with Ballet X. “Her movement quality is so different than everyone I’ve seen.” Bonosky isn’t the only one of Carter’s collaborators to describe her this way.
Today, Carter is becoming the Kafka-esque creature of her song, “Nightroach.” She closes her eyes and tilts her jaw back, spreading her fingers out to frame her face. She mouths the lyrics “I can never be seen,” as her voice plays in staccato jumps from a small portable speaker. On the steps below her, the video director, Michael Robayo, tests angles, moving left to right as she takes on the cockroach’s movements. Her torso is bent forward, hands are twitching, toes and knees turned inward.
The two work almost without words. “Turn to the right side, that’s good. Just hold that,” he says and she pauses, before suddenly sweeping into a balletic freestyle, casting her arms wide and aloft as if holding a giant crystal ball. Robayo moves for a wide shot and she keeps improvising, unbothered by the stop-start of the filming process or the people passing by.
For “Nightroach” she has spent weeks studying how a cockroach moves by watching videos on YouTube, then mimicking it in her apartment. Now, she scuttles down the museum’s concrete steps by bending to a grand-plie then lunging forward, dropping deliberately down each two-foot stair, until her face almost brushes the pavement. Robayo shows her the footage. “Woah, beautiful,” she says, her voice soft and human again.
***
On a cold Friday morning in November, I walk to Carter’s apartment in Washington Heights. When she opens the door, her face looks drained and there are blue-black lines under her eyes. She tells me she has had bad news about a friend, and I wonder why she didn’t cancel our meeting. But Carter does not give up on people. She offers me tea and then we sit down to listen to her EP, she cross-legged on the floor in leggings and wooly socks.
Through the speakers, Carter’s voice begins softly stroking the notes of “Cookin’ In The Sun, Chelsea,” a song for her friend Bonosky. “If you wonder what she’s doing, just look at the sun,” Carter sings, breathing into the lyrics like a sigh, then chewing them until they almost disappear; “where does the sun go?” Her voice is sweet-melancholic, like Lana Del Rey’s when she sings, “we were born to die.”
Carter seems hesitant to promote the EP. When we discuss the forthcoming launch party, she says she hasn’t even considered inviting people from “the industry.” She’s not sure how to get the music onto a paid platform like Spotify or iTunes, so Soundcloud will have to do for now. Perhaps she would be more forthcoming if she’d had a formal musical education, her mother suggests. Even without it, Carter has made a collection of songs that deserves to reach more ears.
Next “Fibers” rattles out, with its steady claps and guitar loops. It was composed by Carter’s boyfriend, Scott Mangan, a rock musician who has spent years on the Northeast’s small gig circuit. The track is much more heavily produced — polished — than anything else on Carter’s EP, and Mangan says he had to convince her that it fits. “She has so much depth to what she can do, from piano ballads to electronica, to folk,” he says. “I think [“Fibers”] brings all that together.”
The couple met after one of her gigs a few years back. That night, he excitedly called friends to tell them about “this amazing woman” he had seen play. “Like Ella Fitzgerald meets Kurt Cobain,” he remembers, laughing. “She has that angst-ridden edge like Cobain. The music is simple, but her voice goes places you wouldn’t expect.” Now they live together and produce songs in their small home studio. It works, Carter says, because they are “not trying to be each other.” She looks to Mangan, older and more traveled, as something of a mentor. And he to her. “Mary never turns off the artist mind frame. She would sacrifice I think anything to create,” he says. “She’s helping me to tap into my feelings more.”
Carter has just come back from a 10-day silent retreat in Delaware. She cried a lot (try staying quiet for that long), but says she’s never had so much energy since her return. And her hair is growing stronger. “I have alopecia, so my hair for the past two or three years has been in states of health-growth and then just…”
Carter doesn’t really talk about the panic attacks that contributed to her losing her hair a few years ago, though her mother remembers them vividly. “She was on fire with anxiety,” says Chris Carter, her voice cracking a little. “I remember being on the phone to her [from St. Louis] and she said, “Oh mom, if you could just come…” I hung up the phone and was like, ‘Right. Looks like I’m going to New York, then.’ As a mom, you have to wait for that moment when you’re invited in.”
Rather than wearing wigs, Carter has created a distinctive hairstyle that stands proudly atop her skull like a cockerel’s comb. “While I was on the retreat I wasn’t thinking about it, so I wasn’t touching it, I wasn’t scrubbing it like a wound.” She smiles. “Motherfucker started growing like a racehorse.”
***
Watch the video for Carter’s single “Joanna” and you’ll see how she engages every fiber of her body as she dances. As she lunges through the forest setting, her pelvis twists open, her core is active and strong, and even her fingertips seem charged with energy, all marks of her training at the Ailey School. After turning away from ballet at 18, Carter won a fellowship to the school that covered most of her fees. She moved from St. Louis to New York, and under the guidance of Ailey’s then artistic director, Denise Jefferson, she started to develop her individual style of moving.
Alvin Ailey had learned from his mentor, Lester Horton, who died in 1953, that dancers should show their personalities. “Don’t try to dance like him or her. Dance like yourself,” Horton told one of his principals, James Truitte. Carter’s friends say she displayed that confidence early on. “She has this maturity about her that’s very strange,” says Willy Laury, who has danced with Michael Clark Company and Paris Opera. “She’s very fresh physically, yet behind her eyes she’s saying so much.”
Carter was hired by The Francesca Harper Project dance company straight out of school — a rare achievement in a city with a high supply of contemporary dancers. “It’s unusual in New York because there is such little opportunity for concert dance,” explains Laury, who met Carter at the company 10 years ago. “In Europe, concert dance is what people come to see, and the dancers are able to make a good living, whether it’s with Michael Clarke, Wayne McGregor, Ballet Boyz, whatever. But in America, the Broadway community is where the money is.” He argues that cuts to arts funding have made it increasingly difficult to survive in New York.
Even when dancers do find gigs — not to mention spots in companies — they still have to scramble. “We all have to do other jobs to make ends meet, even people in prestigious companies,” says Caroline Fermin, adjunct professor of dance at Barnard College. “I still babysit sometimes to make money.”
With music, Carter faces the same financial challenges. She works long hours in a restaurant in Harlem — often four nights a week — just to be able to do underpaid music and dance projects. She probably spends more time waiting tables than she does making art, a reality Fermin says dance schools do not prepare students for. “I think it’s such a scary thing. For an educational institution to say ‘you’re going to be a dancer and that looks like this’ can be scary and dangerous, because then the kid graduates and is like ‘was I lied to? What happened? Am I failing?’”
***
On a Saturday evening in October, Carter plays one of these good-spirited but underpaid gigs at her neighbors’ apartment. Andy Wanning and Brenna Cohen have placed a battered cardboard donation box (suggestion: $15) at the entrance to their living room, which tonight becomes a stage. Carter finished a shift at the restaurant just a few hours ago, and is fighting to keep her eyes fully open as she sinks into one of the well-worn sofas. Around the room it’s mainly friends — about 25 in total — some in natty scarves and blazers, many in jeans, framed by a floor-to-ceiling window that shows the vast expanse of the Hudson as night falls. “We’ve got beers in the chiller there, soft drinks,” Wanning says to the room, as he potters about.
Carter’s up to perform first. She lifts her black Ibanez guitar (nicknamed Moses, after the first boy she crushed on in kindergarten) into the middle of the living room, locks eyes with the woman in front of her and sings in a doleful tone, “long before my hands were formed…” It doesn’t matter how tired Carter might be nor how small her audience, she performs with intensity. She doesn’t want to make people uncomfortable, or “touch their bubble” as she puts it, but she does reach out for their souls. Bonosky calls her “a witch,” recalling how at Carter’s last music video launch, held on the night of a full moon, she handmade blue shell necklaces for everyone who came, looking them straight in the eyes and saying, “I believe this one is yours,” as she placed them into their palms.
None of Carter’s collaborators doubts that she has the talent or charisma to be successful — to play fewer gigs for favors. But her modesty may hold her back. “I told her ‘you need to push the production. You need to get into a booth, get a band, and elevate yourself more,’” says Laury, his voice slightly clipped with frustration. “It’s nice that she’s humble with her guitar. I love it, it’s beautiful, but people like that can afford to aim higher.”
People like that. With the launch of her EP, Carter will be testing how she defines herself as an artist and where she will allow her ambition to take her. The name “Doula” may suggest she is hoping only for a safe delivery. She needs to let the baby cry loudly.
