Good afternoon,

Perhaps you are going dancing tonight! If so enjoy, and please also enjoy these articles on other women dancers.

If there’s one thing I love it’s the articles you get when people who go undercover in mildly or extremely cultlike environments. As you might expect, this piece in Harper’s about the fourth annual Spirit Weavers Gathering does not disappoint at any turn. Every sentence is a gift, please get a cup of tea and enjoy:

Every night, as I am about to sleep, someone is "called" to start drumming. One night I rose from my tent to go see what the racket was about, and saw women drumming, naked and primal and dancing around the fire, like a Goya painting come to life. I was annoyed because I wanted to sleep, but also because the aesthetic of the wild woman reconnecting with the Earth hadn't changed since the goddess festivals I attended in the early '90s with my mother.

http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a16297/inside-the-worlds-chicest-cult/

This is a story I think about often, because I find it very inspiring. If you’ve met me you’ve probably heard me say “DID YOU KNOW Zelda Fitzgerald took up ballet in her late twenties* and got good enough at it to dance professionally?”. She did:

When Zelda Fitzgerald started ballet lessons she was 27 years old and determined to become a professional dancer. As the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, she had lived in The Great Gatsby author’s shadow for almost a decade. Dancing, for her, was not just a hobby – it was the only way she could have a life of her own. [… Dance teacher] Egorova was impressed by Zelda’s ability. She said that although Zelda started too late to equal stars such as Nemtchinova, she could still dance important roles with great success. On her recommendation, Zelda was asked to join an Italian dance company. But despite the prospect of a monthly salary, Zelda turned the offer down, apparently afraid of the very independence she had so long sought.

https://australianballet.com.au/behind-ballet/save-me-a-dance/

We close with the story of Loie Fuller, pioneer of modern dance. She wasn’t classically trained but she created an art form and inspired the creators of many others:

I wanted to create a new form of art, an art completely irrelevant to the usual theories, an art giving to the soul and the senses at the same time complete delight, where reality and dream, light and sound, movement and rhythm form an exciting unity […] For this ideal I am drawn most particularly to modern music where so much pictorial orchestration opens such an enormous field to magical lighting that imagination directs me to unceasing innovation.

http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Loie_Fuller

Enjoy your weekend, I hope it is sunny and beautiful where you are,

Alex.

*I might have told you early thirties, but I was wrong, please accept this correction.