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direct link: dance/ …indigo folio leaves (with poem)
A dance that is creative movement, a moving meditation. Brenda Clews: prose poetry, dance, video. Music: José Travieso’s track, ‘Monster,’ on his album, “No More Faith.”
Music
…enters your backbone, joints, plucks the
cartilage holding you together. Music is the
moon of the red tides of your bloodstream.
Drift to and fro, a willow tree, or sway, bend,
a flamenco, stretch, purple morning glories
on the vine, jump. Sway your hips, delta of
fiery flow. Express yourself, woman. No-one
is watching. Say it all. The lyric travels tenderly
through your wrist, a memory of the wind on the
hill. You are an instrument of the musician who
is absent, gone. Whose music plays on; who
does not know you exist. Orphean muse. Twirl
on the floor, the beat in your ankles, room
spinning, see the canvas walls, luminous see
the sun, moon, stars that are always there.
Spin on the clock turning. Give everything.
Wanton woman. Harlot of the night. Mother of
angels. Insufferable radiance. Black hole of
emptiness. Sweet moan nectar.
Mystery dangles like your silver bracelets,
the ghosts are present. Approach yourself by
disappearing. Undulate your liquid bones.
Beautiful sensuality. Seek invisible illumination
in your writhing steps. Leave time, transform in
your multiplicity, a seer searching the spheres.
Manifest your dreams. Shake them out of the air
to materialize before you like light forms. Shimmy,
wet sweat, a flag in a wind storm. Thunder the
floor. Witch, werewolf, Goth beauty, fragile
starchild, cyberpunk, pull the sky down. Sway
those hips, woman. Sway them until you ignite.
Dance with your ineffable muse. Just, dance.
I pull purple veils over my vision, indigo
blue silk lights and shadows.
Listen: dance on the stage of your
imagination.
© by Brenda Clews, 2011
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Folio: a sheet of paper folded once to make two leaves of a book or manuscript.
Late afternoon, when the spring sun was pouring in, I videotaped some dancing to José Travieso’s track, ‘Monster,’ on his album, “No More Faith“: Besides being technically beautiful, quite goth baroque in its composition, there is an undercurrent of feeling in this music. Music like this can awaken the inner self in its dance, or this is how it calls to me.
And I layered two different dances to the same music: first I separated the figures, but it didn’t look quite right, so I superimposed them, allowing the dance of the two to occur in the same space, an intertexuality of subjectivities, like folio leaves.
I see the woman of the dance transformed into figures that are, but are not me.
I wrote to the Spanish musician, José, on his track, ‘Monster’: ‘This piece is so beautiful, like the passion of angels, pain and transcendance in the music that you play, what is the monster? Is beauty the monster?
How can beauty be a monster?’
He teaches all day, and at night, the music. Stressful, hard. He rarely has time to read, walk, visit friends, relax. “Everyday I work on it with passion… or maybe just obsession. So, everyday, when I’m recording an album, I feel more and more tired, it consumes me… Music is my own monster, my search for the perfection and the beautiful thing is my own monster. This is my explanation.”
‘I understand. A consuming passion. A beauty that devours its creator in consummation.
I, too, prefer art that is vulnerable, without pretence.’
Contemplating the Muse
