At a dancing school in a remote place, Fortunata teaches her pupils to become points of light.
They begin with her as early as six or seven and some stay for the rest of their lives.
Most, she releases like butterflies over a flowering world. Bodies that could have bent double and grown numb she maintains as metal in a fiery furnace, tempering, stretching, forcing sinews into impossible shapes and calling her art nature.
She believes that we are fallen creatures who once knew how to fly. She says that light burns in our bodies and threatens to dissolve us at any moment. How else can we account for so many of us who disappear?
It is her job to channel the light lying in the solar plexus, along the arms, along the legs, forcing it into fingertips, and feet, forcing it out so that her dancers sweat tongues of flame.
To her dancers she says, "Through the body, the body is conquered."
She asks them to meditate on a five-pointed star in the belly and to watch the points push outwards, the fifth point into the head. She spins them, impaled with light, arms upraised, one leg at a triangle across the other thigh, one foot, on point, on a penny coin, and spins them, until all features are blurred, until the human being most resembles a freed spirit from a darkened jar. One after the other she spins them, like a juggler keeping plates on sticks; one after the other she runs up and down the line as one slows or another threatens to fall from dizziness. And at a single moment, when all are spinning in harmony down the long hall, she hears music escaping from their heads and backs and livers and spleens. Each has a tone like cut glass. The noise is deafening. And it is then that the spinning seems to stop, that the wild gyration of the dancers passes from movement into infinity.
Who are they that shine in gold like Apostles in a church window at midday?
The polished wooden floor glows with the heat of their bodies, and one by one they crumble over and lie exhausted on the ground.
Fortunata refreshes them and the dance begins again.
-Jeanette Winterson, from Sexing the Cherry
They begin with her as early as six or seven and some stay for the rest of their lives.
Most, she releases like butterflies over a flowering world. Bodies that could have bent double and grown numb she maintains as metal in a fiery furnace, tempering, stretching, forcing sinews into impossible shapes and calling her art nature.
She believes that we are fallen creatures who once knew how to fly. She says that light burns in our bodies and threatens to dissolve us at any moment. How else can we account for so many of us who disappear?
It is her job to channel the light lying in the solar plexus, along the arms, along the legs, forcing it into fingertips, and feet, forcing it out so that her dancers sweat tongues of flame.
To her dancers she says, "Through the body, the body is conquered."
She asks them to meditate on a five-pointed star in the belly and to watch the points push outwards, the fifth point into the head. She spins them, impaled with light, arms upraised, one leg at a triangle across the other thigh, one foot, on point, on a penny coin, and spins them, until all features are blurred, until the human being most resembles a freed spirit from a darkened jar. One after the other she spins them, like a juggler keeping plates on sticks; one after the other she runs up and down the line as one slows or another threatens to fall from dizziness. And at a single moment, when all are spinning in harmony down the long hall, she hears music escaping from their heads and backs and livers and spleens. Each has a tone like cut glass. The noise is deafening. And it is then that the spinning seems to stop, that the wild gyration of the dancers passes from movement into infinity.
Who are they that shine in gold like Apostles in a church window at midday?
The polished wooden floor glows with the heat of their bodies, and one by one they crumble over and lie exhausted on the ground.
Fortunata refreshes them and the dance begins again.
-Jeanette Winterson, from Sexing the Cherry
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