A veil is a swath of lightweight silk, 3 ½ yards long, 45” wide that acts as a ‘feeler’
expanding us beyond our body’s skin edge.
Morning Veil Dance
by Dunya Dianne McPherson
I stand looking at my closet. Behind the closed wooden doors are veils; I see them in my mind’s eye. I’ve been working brilliant, complex layers of dye into long panels of fine silk. Nestled on hangers, the fibers of these completed veils breathe through the colors I have brushed into them. They wait. They wait for their dancer. The friction of motion will burnish the threads, working the dye in deeper.
I turn away from these and toward my current veil puddling luxuriantly on the sofa. She is long and beautiful—a sunset I haven’t yet seen—of lavender and pinks with a golden edge. I love her. I love that she can open the inside of me with her shades and tender touch. I take her in my hands. So soft. I breathe and stand. My wan legs don’t want to pace around the rug, which is what they will have to do if I want this veil to float.
I toss her gently up. She slithers down to the ground, exhaling very, very slowly. She finally settles. Wanting to watch all that again, I bend and gather her and toss her and watch her respire. Gorgeous. Again. And this time I want her to unfurl so I toss her but don’t drop her. I let her billow. I wrap a wide arc of space in her skin. Soon she has seduced me into her world. My legs and feet have forgotten their clay and I am in the small sky that inhabits my NYC apartment. Air is always a morsel of sky, yes? Breath is always a morsel of sky.
She hypnotizes me. I forget the restlessness.
We move together in the calm, hanging in timelessness.
We pass through an invisible door, into that movie clip of two lovers at a cafe table holding hands, consumed in one another. Veil and I swirl in a middle world. The middle of the world. The center of the world. We enter a Mystery.
I look up from the Lover’s Eyes and gaze out the window at my mind. I enjoy my mind—lots of architecture, thoughts that divide and separate and sort, chip away and reconstruct. However, once I enter the Moment, there is no room for a mind full of itself and out of its depth. Mysticism is not of the mind. Mysticism uses the mind in order to discard the mind. How hard it must be for the mind to accept this servitude. My lungs fill with sky. The veil fills with sky.
After a while I lie down, the sylph sleeping on my chest. She grows warm as she sleeps. My organs relax under her. My skin melts into the silk.
Alembic Dancers: Nisaa Christie, Kate Russel, Anita Tersa
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