Frances Alenikoff 1960's

dance

Frances Alenikoff in Ed Seemans "freakoba"

painting on wood 2000's

Frances Alenikoff 1930's

Frances Alenikoff 1960's

Frances Alenikoff 1960's

Frances Alenikoff 1960's

Frances Alenikoff 1940's

Frances Alenikoff 1970's

Frances Alenikoff 1950's

TWILIGHT DUST...A Latter Day Fairy Tale Frances Alenikoff

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Who is this God of yours?
Rumours have spread of mysterious explosions.
Examine your own history.
Misting, sifting, silver, satin and silk. Venus in furs flowed in her mother's milk

Connective tissue is not functional when there is no thing to contain.
Dis-integrating, She. Who? Spiraling into madness? Did it matter?
Who cared! Bliss. Blissful. Blissed out. Blessed.
Chaos ? Irrelevant. Entropy? No sweat.

Solid (so called), objects (so called), tricksters in space, waylaid body parts.
"Darling," her mother said, "You'll never be a dancer. You're clumsy".
Barely able to navigate the shifting quicksands, misnomered "Terra Firma",
she skid, DWI, into alchemical no-thingness in which all seemed possible...and probably its opposite..

A speck of dust, haloed on a page, shared eternity with the shadow of a leaf,
sharing eternity with the contours of a hand in repose.
Serpentine ecstasies lurked in the buzzing of a chain saw.
The distant slam of a car door spawned cuneiform nuclei in her ear.
The sea was a naiad, sinuous in sundance... and she no longer yearned to
decipher the arcane codes quivering the flowerbed.

AT LAST, finished with lugging the lodestone, PRIDE,
through Eternal Return, she celebrated each day's pilgrimage through a vortex of comic-cosmic prisms by flapping her vulnerabilities in the wind...
situational stigmata for the witnessing of all concerned ...or otherwise.

Granted - she did have a rather excessive tropism to ecstasy.
I mean, hand her a plain wooden bowl of plain lentil soup,
but season and garnish it with sweet smiles and loving sayings,
and she'd dive in and lap it up as though it were a numinous feast.
More than likely, a sacramental last supper.
Toss her a few dry crumbs buttered with, however ambiguous,
signals of affection, and she'd gobble them greedily, gratefully,
as gifts of manna, milk and honey ...mead from a beneficent heaven.

In every fairy tale something unexpected is bound to happen
Treachery? Betrayal? Slam Bam. Thank you ma'am.
Ecstasy, that macho defector, is off to the races, or, more likely, to greener fields to plow.
Crashing, with no collision insurance from that pie guy in the sky,
synchronicities gyrate into curves tossed from left field.

Synapses zapped,
Anarchy- ever on the alert for a tidy calm to shatter- pre-empts time/space,
confronting her with herself as a mucked up computer gone haywired,
on a macrobiotic diet of jammed signals,
mix-mashed messages, and pressure cooked programming.

A motley, polyphonic crew of lusting beings,
squats in residence in her porous psyche, jostling for position,
quarreling over territorial imperatives,
quibbling about which baggage belongs to whom.

Super Ego, home from sabbatical - reluctant to relinquish status,
loathe to perish - dodges terminal blows to re-cue strident tapes early installed on auto-reverse in her brain.

She Dreamed she destroyed everything she touched.
She Dreamed she poisoned herself with noxious fumes
She Dreamed of her shadow side as a small,
dark child, mute and terrified.
She Dreamed of a clay pedestal with no heroine or goddess to top it.
She Dreamed of Demeter as a trespassed field,
targeted as fair prey for the stalking.

Chinese Sage says,
"Greater vehicles, lesser vehicles, no matter*
All will be towed at owner's expense
Now swinging between river and light,
she focused the lens to clear her sight.
Spying the crystal in the lucent night,
she dreamed she licked fallow fodder into flaming flowers.

Impassioned blooms that blossomed after hours,
transforming snake haunted jungles into bountiful bowers.
She dreamed , she dreamed, and dreaming she dreamed that the thorns,
themselves, sprouted lush flowers.
If she listened quietly she could hear the sonata
of the cerebral cortex ringing harmonies with the medulla oblongata.

That morning New York streets were a garden of earthly delights,
peopled by numinous beings whose disguise
did not obliterate the divinity igniting their eyes.

Here, now, alone in the twilight poised, hovering on the ledge of
an increasingly intangible threshold,
there, poised, flickering, at the center of a tableau,
she thought she spied clues.

Death and resurrection were no Mystery to her.
She was very practiced,
having done the round trip in this life many times.

So she stopped waiting.
I know two and two are five...but it no longer worries me.

* excerpts from text for a solo originally titled "Sometimes".
commissioned by The Tribeca Performing Arts Center for their "Page to Stage" series of Adult Fairy Tales in 2000.
Written, choreographed and performed by Alenikoff.

Also performed at Dixon Place, 2001, as "Darling" her mother said, "You'll Never Be a Dancer..." at Judson Church in 2001 as "Twilight Dust", . and in 2003 at St Mark's Danspace and the Bruno Walter-Theater at Lincoln Center as guest artist with Kenneth King in Writing in Motion