October 2 “You make me feel like dancing . . .”

 

From YouTube description:

This project has been in my heart for a long time and Finally I’ve completed it. Danse Macabre or Dance Macabre is a brilliant piece of music in my opinion. I first fell in love with it when it was played during my music class in the third grade to introduce the instrument families. This music amazes me at how spooky and scary it can be yet it has a joyfulness about it. According to legend, “Death” appears at midnight every year on Halloween. Death calls forth the dead from their graves to dance their dance of death for him while he plays his fiddle. His skeletons dance for him until the rooster crows at dawn, when they must return to their graves until the next year. This is my treat to you all for the Halloween season. You might like it or you may hate it but it is dear to me. Happy Halloween. See Me Fly Productions

 

Written for a mlmm Tale Weaver prompt, dance, Nov. 1, 2018

Edwin would choose the music and she would dance. Wild, free, interpretive, alive.

He always picked the music; she always chose how she moved her body to it.

She could feel its vibrations from her toes to her soul.

Echoes, traces of the composer/performer passed through her corporal body into that ethereal, dancing transcendent spirit.

Sometimes she wove tales with the sway of her long raven’s hair, unbound. Tickling her navel; sweeping the floor.

The delicious sensations of carpet (rough and warm) and hard floor (cool and smooth) against her heated, naked, undulating torso.

Digging her feet into the firmament of the earth, while her head reached the wheeling, whirling starscape.

Wrapping herself in the blanket of the beat; toe-pirouettes or rapper grinding.

Whatever the genre, music brought out the dance in her soul.

Naked, or with skirts that twirled out like opening flower petals, dresses frothy as sea foam, diaphanous like angel or dragon wings or tight, like a second skin.

Decorations in her hair; baubles hanging from her ear lobes; funky bracelets layered on; necklace; scarf to wrap neck and slither through fingers.

Her mood, the music influenced her appearance; playing dress up; costumed sweeps across the hardwood floor.

Barefooted; stiletto-heeled; toe-slippers laced on with ribbons; Chinese flats with embroidered lotus or dragon. Her feet responding to body sensations. Moving her; posing her; twisted-pretzel or long, lean stretch.

When music inevitably stopped; ceremonial stage bows; deferential curtseys. Spent, sinking to the floor. Or being pure energy; kinetic, frenetic movement to invisible echoes still vibrant and vibrating.

Edwin chose randomly, sometimes sentimentally and maybe seasonally.

Celebrating Halloween, he played Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre and Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain. In appropriate costume, flowers braided into her hair, she danced the stories – each breath a part of the tale. Music soared, screamed, crescendoed, giving wings to her feet, until each piece came to an electrifying conclusion. Dance-fire; flames still flared. Echoes, retreating, clearing the marbled floor.

Then, Edwin caressingly took her ear buds out, gently kissing her forehead. The music filling the room was the hum and blip of machinery and monitors. Her body still, with tubes and drips as costume, slowly rising chest, the dance.

Someday, Edwin was sure, she would dance again with her body, not just within her mind.

 

Bonfires dot the rolling hills

Figures dance around and around

To drums that pulse out echoes of darkness

Moving to the pagan sound.

 

Somewhere in a hidden memory

Images float before my eyes

Of fragrant nights of straw and of bonfires

And dancing till the next sunrise.

 

I can see lights in the distance

Trembling in the dark cloak of night

Candles and lanterns are dancing, dancing

A waltz on All Souls Night.

 

Figures of cornstalks bend in the shadows

Held up tall as the flames leap high

The green knight holds the holly bush

To mark where the old year passes by.

 

I can see the lights in the distance

Trembling in the dark cloak of night

Candles and lanterns are dancing, dancing

A waltz on All Souls Night.

 

Bonfires dot the rolling hillsides

Figures dance around and around

To drums that pulse out echoes of darkness

And moving to the pagan sound.

 

Standing on the bridge that crosses

The river that goes out to the sea

The wind is full of a thousand voices

They pass by the bridge and me.

 

I can see the lights in the distance

Trembling in the dark cloak of night

Candles and lanterns are dancing, dancing

A waltz on All Souls Night.

 

I can see the lights in the distance

Trembling in the dark cloak of night

Candles and lanterns are dancing