Dance To Poetry with Stardust Veils

By Natica Angilly

The art of poetry and the art of dance working together can reveal and establish inventive technique and meaningful interchange. Fusing these arts in the past has proven to serve as an expansion of cultural understanding. Poetic dance has been termed a "mother tongue" for the ages. And it can also be very valuable when used as a healing technique.

A helpful process for poetic dance that I recognize as "poetic referencing"- pictures as references to words - may be a key in connecting poetry with dance. Dance meeting the poem at specific points of tonality, essence, directive, and inherent rhythm coming together at critical points, help to bond a strong relationship. Inclusion into events and occasions, previously overlooked for the possibility and appropriateness of poetic dance performance, make this and other "poetic dance" practices more accessible.

A lyrical approach to recognizable, understandable and visual poetic relationships between the word and motion transforms poetry into "something to dance about." My latest dance "inventions" to aid in this pursuit have been named "Natica's Stardust Veils." They are one of my poetic innovations created to help demonstrate sometimes very esoteric concepts and ideas, especially those found in epic, heroic, nature, lyrical, sacred, humorous, flourishing, and universal poetry.

Core essentials of a poem are sometimes easily visualized with my "Stardust Veil" extensions. With just a short time of dance coaching their use can be created and become well managed. The words inspire visual pictures that are immediately translated into form and feeling (emotion and intensities) for the mind and the eye. If the poem speaks to concepts such as victorious ideals, angelic blessings, triumph, winning, freedom, flight, or subtly suggests floating and gliding in harmony with the universe, the veils create the illusion of wingedness - an uplifted gesture carried over the forward body in motion, with winged arms held upwards and outwards.

Your poem may speak of the swirling, whirling planets as in Dante's Paradiso; life as a great maelstrom, or feeling at one with the dynamic universe. The "Stardust Veils" are easily made into a moving visual solution. The full extension of both arms pointing straight out from the sides of the body with a well centered, open extended, continuous turning motion, sometimes called an "airplane turn" or "India Gypsy Swirl," fulfills this illusion. The essence of the idea becomes dance, quite apparent when the poem is read, and the dance is seen and heard in a compatible time frame.