Entries in dance (84)
Share Article 
Moroccan Girl Dances
The Moroccan girl with wild brown hair tied back is not on the train leaving a white station.
She sits on her haunches. Her bare feet dig soil gripping small earth pebbles as exposed root structures dance with toes.
Her toes are extended connections where her shadow lies forgotten. It spreads upon vegetables. They prowl toward late winter light.
She is not on the red and brown train zooming past green fields where her sheep in long woolen coats eat their way through pastures after a two-year drought. She is inside green with her wild brown hair pulled tight.
She is not on the train hearing music, eating dates, reading a book, talking with friends or strangers, sleeping along her passage, or dreaming of a lover. She does not scan faces of tired, trapped people in orange seats impatiently waiting for time to deliver them to a desert Red City.
Her history’s desert reveals potentates sharpening swords, inventing icon free art, alphabets, algebra, practicing equality, creating five pillars of Islam, navigation star map tools, breaking wild stallions, building tiled adobe fortresses, selling spices, writing language.
She is not on the train drinking fresh mint tea or consulting a pocket sized edition of the Qur'an. She does not kneel on her Berber carpet five times a day facing Mecca.
She does not wear stereo earphones listening to music imported from another world, a world where people treasure their watches. Where controlling time is their passion for being prompt and responsible citizens giving their lives meaning.
She is not on the train and not in this language the girl with her wild brown hair tied back with straw or leather or stems of wild flowers surrounding her with fragrances.
She is surrounded by orange blossom perfume beyond rolling hills cut by wet canyons and yellow and green fields where her black eyes penetrate white clouds in blue sky.
Her open heart hears her breath explore her long shadow, causing it to ripple with her shift.
Her toes caress soil. She is lighter than air, lighter than eagle feathers in High Atlas Mountains. She smells the Berber tribal fire heating tea for a festival where someone wears a goatskin cape and skull below stars.
It is cold. Flames leap from branches like shooting stars into her eyes.
Someone plays music. It is the music of her ancestors, her nomadic people. She sways inside the hypnotic rhythm of her ancestral memory.
She is not on the train.
She is inside a goat skull moving her hoofs through soil. She dances through fields where she danced as a child seeing red and yellow fire calling all the stars to her dance and she is not on the train.
Burma
Myths, Legends, Stories
Down in the southern province of Suhag in Egypt where King Scorpion lived 5,300 years ago I worked with archeologists discovering clay tablets.
Humans recorded taxes on oil and linen - a material Egyptians considered ritually pure under the protection of the goddess Tayt. The hieroglyphic line drawings of animals, plants and mountains revealed stories of economies and commodities.
In Nevali Cori we found 9,000 year-old shards of ceramics pottery depicting dancers.
“These images,” said a metaphorical digger, “reveal a common ancestor creating to integrate their community.”
A camelhair brush cleaned shards. “Anything else?”
“Well,” one said sifting dust, “we surmise these images established a collective discipline in their community. See how the figures are holding hands? What do you see now?”
“I see a circle of movement. A connected unity, a language in space.”
“It’s more than that. There are five rhythms in dance. You start with a circle. It’s a circular movement from the feminine container. She is earth.”
“Earth?”
“Yes, then you have a line from the hips moving out. This is the masculine action with direction. He is fire.”
“Fire is the driver.”
“Chaos is next, a combination of circle and lines where the male and female energies interact. This is the place of transformation.”
“I see. And then?”
“After chaos is the lyrical, a leap, a release. This is air. The last element of dance is stillness. Out of stillness is born the next movement.”
Language dances in space.
Every fourteen days a living language dies on Earth. The last speaker says good-bye.
6,100 and counting.
Storytellers sing oral traditions. They memorize stories, songs, poems, seasons, celebrations, rites, magic and ceremonies. They create and exchange family, clan, tribal myths and legends. Their children listen, memorize, chant and recite ancestor songs.
An historian’s job is trying to understand what happened through time.
An anthropologist’s job is to understand how people told their creation stories.
Mircea Eliade, a historian of religions, said, “Myths tell only of that which really happened.”
Myths suggest that behind the explanation there is a reality that cannot be seen and examined.
A myth is a story of unknown origins.
Myths are sacred stories of religion based on belief, containing archetypical universal truths.
They are in every place and no particular place. The world is sacred.
Myths, legends, stories.
Magic words grow here.
Intensity propels ten claws across twenty-six keys. Reed-like digits reflect use and neglect.
Psychology handles the branches. Mindfulness swims with roots.
Evolution flashes flickering beams of incandescent auras and pulsating electro-magnetic fields evolving character, attitude, values, behaviors and intention.
Intention is karma.
Perpetual transformation.
Weaving A Life (Volume 4) - Kindle Edition
Burma
Dance
“We climbed up. We descended,” said Zeynep breathing through her shamanic mask.
“Is it carved from tribal memories?” said Lucky.
“Masks are symbolic manifestations in diverse cultures. Mask dance is a ritual, worn in a dance trance. Wearing a mask you become the thing you fear the most, your essential nature. Masks hide a human’s consciousness of fear.
“Dance is about process, becoming from stillness, from nothing. Shiva symbolizes the union of space, time and destruction. Dance is ancient magic. People seeking transformation wear masks representing gods or demons. Dance is the incarnation of energy from the source. We are from the source. Have courage to wear your natural face mask. The entire universe is a vast theatre. Death does not exist.”
“Humans evolved their ability to scheme and deceive behind masks,” said Lucky. “How do they manifest compassion and love without projecting guilt and shame on others while wearing their mask?”
“That's an eternal life quest,” said Z. “It requires daily practice and letting go of ego. Cogito ergo sum. They think their mask is reality. It's not. It’s artificial, an illusion, a myth, a projection of their fear.”
Hanoi Ethnology Museum
Dust. Coffee. Rice.
"I have walked through many lives some of them my own, and I am not who I was."- Stanley Kunitz
Dust coffee rice
Home zone bamboo ice
Voice language culture
Shadows
Old man cleans ears
A professional stranger shows up
Among whisper smiles
Old man balancing on bamboo staff
Shuffles
Voices decipher cognition
Plain clothes officers clean spectacular spectacles
With what they don't know
White paper
A girl loving geography
Lights four incense sticks with gratitude.
Dance now think later.
Hoi An, Vietnam