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Picture






Aurelia: A Ballet in Prose (Libretto)

By Sakina B. Fakhri

Teaser/Excerpts:

The monastery attracts, and has always attracted, a strange confluence of birds--the native species are the true inhabitants of the land and are treated as such. Most common among them are the black-tipped swallow and the Swainson’s thrush, which is the exact color of the gray-brown stone; when groups of these thrushes sweep from the parapets, it appears sometimes as though the edges of the roof are disintegrating into the blue sky.

***

The birds near the monastery spread throughout the grounds as starlings, sweeping upwards in a unified gale and then scattering like dark dust upon the fortress turrets. They mirror the scattering of the pigeons at Trafalgar, which seems a far way off, and suggest the scattering of grains that served as Beauchamp’s inspiration for the choreography of his ballet. These birds travel continents easily (if not quickly) and have been known to be the cause of exotic seeds that have been transported and planted as far as North America. These grains came to be traded at high value in the late 18th century on the trading floor at Wall Street, before it was the machine-driven thoroughfare it is now--when it was in fact a trading post for farmers toting bags of grain…

***

The last extant monastery of the Order of Circassia was designed with an eye towards Pythagorean-Platonic numerical theories and their interaction with the cosmic constellations; oculi in the parapets accorded with the movements of stars in particular seasons; coruscating beams rendered intricate its interior. Later, performers in the court of Catherine de Medici would dance according to the configurations by which this monastery admitted starlight.


Libretto
Aurelia: A Ballet in Prose

Act I
14th century – The Middle Ages

Aurelia is plagued by visions of a dance that does not yet exist. Everywhere, lines and angles re-coordinate and reconstitute the landscape in front of her; she cannot set her eyes upon the sloping roofs of the palace without feeling an uncontrollable ache in her spine, cannot look upon the creases in her lover’s face without calculating the aerial velocity of an extended line and balance. Seeing these lines everywhere she looks, she imagines a beautiful confluence - so much so that she is glutted with it, day by day, and without outlet. Having heard of the healing powers of the Order of Circassia, Aurelia journeys through the hills of Northern England to make her request.

The nuns show Aurelia appropriate ceremony and provided her with a humble room and only the necessary accouterments. A nun sits in a chair across from her bed and records a detailed description of the girl’s condition; sunset approaches. Her words fill three books, and, finally satisfied with her plea of insanity, the nun agrees to grant the girl her wish - with acid, she blots out her eyes.

Aurelia falls asleep to the pulsation of the flame on her bedside candle, imagining a ballet played out within the blue center of the flame. The pointilistic starlight that streams through the window is reflected in the still water of the jug. Aurelia does not wake up.

Long after the events of this evening—at the denouement of the time of the Crusades--the monastery is pillaged by the Roman army. The medical documents detailing Aurelia’s condition, penned in candlelight by the patient nun, are taken to Italy. There, they remain--for the most part--unnoticed.

 
Act II
15th century – The Florentine Renaissance & The Rise of the Court Ballet

A crenellated brick & stone wall, 6 feet thick and 40 feet high, encircles Florence. The city is protected by a moat and 73 machicolated waters. There are two tall towers with bells--one is the call to prayer, and the other is a summons to assemble in times of crisis. Far off in Rome, horses graze on the overgrown weeds of the Coliseum, which has lain fallow of artistic activity since the religious fervor of the Middle Ages.

We find ourselves at the height of Lorenzo de Medici’s reign in Florence, where Aurelia, a young orphan, is tasked with delivering a violin to the fringes of the royal household. There, she is privy to a heated argument between the King and his son, Giovanni, over how best to showcase their militaristic profundity to their would-be aggressors; as she waits, Aurelia avails herself of the privilege of the violin and her notes attract a horse who grazes nearby; it seems to respond to the music as though it is something with which it is familiar.

Therein the first equestrian ballet is conceived: a display of military force, unity, and elegance. Aurelia is granted momentary reprieves from her beggardly status and is allowed regular visits to the court, where she leads a double life (choreographing dance for the courtiers by day, dancing the empty halls at night--casting terpsichorean shadows that are to become pugilistic engravings). Giovanni at last achieves his father's approval as the family's prominence in the ballet restores a modicum of their fortune and prestige. To showcase the pinnacle of this power, the King announces an aquatic ballet to be performed within the moat. 

The sunlight glitters upon the surface. As Aurelia and Giovanni drown to their deaths beneath the waters, it looks to them like stars.


Paintings by Botticelli depicting these movements are among those artifacts taken, many decades later, by Catherine de Medici when she is married off to the king of France


Act III
16th century – The Paris Opera

This act, envisioned in darkness, encompasses the events of a single night.

Catherine de Medici has been engaged in an escalating political battle with the Huguenots, struggling to expunge any Huguenot sympathizers from within her own ranks. On the eve of her daughter Queen Marguerite's wedding to Henry of Navarre, Catherine anonymously summons Marguerite's childhood friend Aurelia--
(Aurelia, having long ago brought disgrace upon the House of Versailles through a marriage of ill-repute, had retreated to the voluntary exile of her country estate)--to enter the palace and protect her daughter on this final maiden night from any burgeoning plots of the encroaching Huguenots.

Aurelia's benevolently haunting presence remains unknown to Marguerite throughout the entirety of the night, as she keeps a loving watch upon her friend. The deeply political events and whisperings occur in the background as we watch Aurelia dances her somnambulist wanderings through the bedrooms and halls of the Palace of Versailles; her terpsichorean journey ends in the abandoned Notre Dame at which the wedding shall take place in the morning. The moonlight illuminates the rosettes that shift to keep time with her steps.


Strange happenings are noted: Marble statues seem to change position of their own accord; family heirlooms are missing; Catherine receives threatening notes of mysterious provenance. 


Aurelia is able to harness another world through her sleepwalking—she sees details in the palace paintings and pugilistic engravings that are not perceptible in the light of day. One night, she enters the studio of the palace sculptor and the solid marble figures begin to dance around her. She, too, dances a perfect ballet. She realizes in this a flash of something she has known in her past life (though she does not recognize it as such). The inevitable dawn takes its scene and the marriage between Queen Marguerite and Henry of Navarre is cemented in this life as it is cemented in the next.

The aftermath of this tale culminates in the tragic St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre--death to a thousand Huguenots--for which Catherine de Medici will be—erroneously--held responsible. Aurelia's secret somnambulist dance, the true beauty of the night, is never known.


Act IV
19th Century – Ballet in Russia

Aurelia has finally risen to eminence as one of the most prized public performers in the world of ballet; she is regarded by the czars and the public alike as a true nonpareil, widely acknowledged to be a woman with a preternatural affinity for the dance. She becomes the darling of the Ballet Russes in St. Petersburg, capturing the attention of a wealthy patron by the name of Giovanni. When the ballet company falls into financial difficulty, Giovanni becomes the savior of the dance and the lover of Aurelia.

Together, they become the quintessential symbols of the pomp, circumstance, and skill of the ballet. Aurelia travels the nation and the world and dances upon every stage. In short, she who in another life cowered beneath the insanity of her artistic urges, who was admitted back to royalty under only the cover of night upon whom even the statues of Notre Dame wept, is now showered in jewels and wealth, in the intoxicating pall of recognition.

But there now appears in the ballet a circumstance: Stripped of its association with royalty, brought out of disopprobrium of any kind, the woman who dances ballet has become a ripe tool of the man who buys her limbs. Her grace is fettered and fame ascribes an unwieldy gravity to her jumps. She is stylized like a prized steed. Fame she shall have, but the dance--it suffers. The connections of these movements with her soul wither; staring into an audience of millions from atop a velvet stage, it is as though she does not dance at all. 



Act V
21st century – Wall Street, New York

George Balanchine, a protege of the Ballet Russe, founds the NYC Ballet; meanwhile, Aurelia works as a “watcher” on Wall Street—a position invented by investment bankers for a young individual of unencumbered mind whose sole occupation it is to watch a line on a graph rise and fall upon a screen.

One evening, Aurelia accepts a ticket from a client for an evening at the ballet. She watches in inexplicable tears a version of a performance which she herself had helped to develop, before the ravages of fame had once worn her creativity thin. Her eye catches that of a fellow theater-goer: it is Giovanni, of the ice-blue eyes, who feels the palpability of her response. They are destined never, in any of their lives, to speak again. 

Our tale ends in a moment of “5 second alpha capture”—a microtrade gone horribly awry, a flash crash—when Aurelia is able to probe the mystery of this line further than the pixilated screen and has a flash of her past lives and the beautiful lines of the ballet, which she uses to devise an algorithm that unravels the financial tangle. After order has been restored, she feels at last that she might dance--that she might at last achieve the culmination of the art of her invention--that she might perform the dance for which her soul was made: she envisions and becomes a shadow of a 14th century ballerina, eyes blotted out with acid, dancing herself to death at the center of the trading floor.




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  • ABOUT
    • Our Literary Aesthetic
    • Staff >
      • Writings by Sakina B. Fakhri
    • Contact Us
    • SUBSCRIBE
  • CONTESTS
  • AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought
    • AZURE Volume 6, Issue 4 >
      • TO THOSE FOUND DEAD IN CHIMNEYS by R.W. Plym
      • WHAT TO EXPECT OF LIFE by Steven G. Kellman
      • IF IT WERE DRAWN by Jessica Reed
      • BLOOD IN THE ORCHIDS by Amanda Kotch
      • CORNELIUS RADHOPPER by Peter Arscott
    • AZURE Volume 6, Issue 3 >
      • ANIMAL INHERITANCE by akhir ali
      • THAT DUDE DERRIDA by Daniel Klawitter
      • FLAT-EARTH FRED by Phil Gallos
      • THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING SEMICOLON by Orana Loren
      • MY BALDERDASHERY by Eric Paul Shaffer
    • AZURE Volume 6, Issue 2 >
      • MIRROR by Joshua Kepfer
      • CUE FALLING PIANO by D.C. Weaver
      • ANTON AND THE ECHO by Cristina Otero
      • THAT WHICH WE TRULY DON'T KNOW by JOACHIM GLAGE
      • CONGRATULATIONS by Alan Sincic
    • AZURE Volume 6, Issue 1 >
      • NEVER, NEVER LAND, MY SHIP by Mark Pearce
      • THE SMILE OF MONA LISA by Fatima Ijaz
      • OUROBOROS by Esme Sammons
      • THE DEPTHS OF THE SEA by Margaret D. Stetz
      • SNICKER-SNACK by Bruce Meyer
    • AZURE Volume 5, Issue 4 >
      • THE OWLET AND THE TURTLE by Greg Sendi
      • BRACTS and other poems by Nathaniel Calhoun
      • ANSWERS TO NON-EXISTENT QUESTIONS and other poems by Kevin Griffith
      • NEVERENDING KNOT by Jodie Dalgleish
      • LEARNING TO WALK by Jodie Dalgleish
      • OVERSOUL by P.S. Lutz
    • AZURE Volume 5, Issue 3 >
      • MAP OF MEMORY by Jesse Schotter
      • BISMILLAH by Abby Minor
      • MICROMORTS by Veronica Tang
      • LOVE LETTER TO LANGUAGE: AN ABECEDARIAN by Saramanda Swigart
      • IF YOU WERE ALL WATER by M. Ann Reed
    • AZURE Volume 5, Issue 2 >
      • CONTRA FORMALISME by Leland Seese
      • DRUNKEN MAN ON A BICYCLE by Dan Butterworth
      • WOLF TICKETS THROUGH THE FERAL WINTER by Kirk Marshall
      • SYLVANUS, BARD by Marc Lerner
      • THE LOOKING GLASS OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM by Frank Meola
    • AZURE Volume 5, Issue 1 >
      • INTIMATE THINGS by Laylage Courie
      • A SERIES OF PUNCTUATION by Hajar Hussaini
      • ROT AND GLORIANA by Laurel Miram
      • BLUES ON RED by Elie Doubleday
      • MY FICTION: REMEMBERING 50 YEARS OF WORK by Richard Kostelanetz
    • AZURE Volume 4, Issue 4 >
      • ENDNOTES FOR AN ALLOCUTION by Peter Freund
      • UKEMI (and other poems) by Nicole Vento
      • MEMORANDUM ON DESIRE by Laylage Courie
      • THE HOLYWOOD DEUTERONOMY by Jim Shankman
      • AT THE MAD HATTER-MARCH HARE ART GALLERY (and other poems) by M. Ann Reed
    • AZURE Volume 4, Issue 3 >
      • THE MACHINE, STOLEN FIRE, and PERFORMANCE by Vivek Narayan
      • FIRST FRUITS by Stephen Massimilla
      • ONCE UPON A TOMORROW-TIME by Christopher Routheut
      • YIELD LIGHT OF WAY by Ken Goodman
      • SEVEN TALES by Sara Streett
    • AZURE Volume 4, Issue 2 >
      • THE PUNCH-CARD CIPHERS by DF Short
      • SHE WAS THE FIRST TO GIVE A TOAST by Kelli Russell Agodon
      • HABLU L-WARIDI by Jesse Hilson
      • THE KEY TO DREAMS by Sean S. Bentley
      • SOFA, SO GOOD, SORT OF by Remy Ngamije
    • AZURE Volume 4, Issue 1 >
      • STAMPING THE DEAD by Habib Mohana
      • LEGS by A. Joachim Glage
      • I THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX by Heikki Huotari
      • LUŽÁNKY by V.B. Borjen
    • ARCHIVES: VOLUME 3 >
      • AZURE Volume 3, Issue 4 >
        • TALES UNSUITABLE FOR CHILDREN by Devon Ortega
        • WAKE UP by JayJay Conrad
        • AMONG THE MEN IS APRIL by Logo Wei
        • SWEET by Melinda Giordano
        • BLACK ROSES by Osamase Ekhator
        • MEET ME TONIGHT ON METAPHOR STREET by Vivek Narayan
      • AZURE Volume 3, Issue 3 >
        • MENAGE A TROIS, WITH HORSE by Don Dussault
        • THE BLACK by Ben Colandrea
        • BLUE SKY LANGUAGE by Christien Gholson
        • UN DETECTIVE VIEJO by Franco Strong
      • AZURE Volume 3, Issue 2 >
        • THE CLEANSING by Linda Dennard
        • SHUFFLE by Debbie Fox
        • DID YOU FALL OR RISE FROM THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING? by M. Ann Reed
        • THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE PORNQUEEN by Omar Sabbagh
        • KIGALI MEMORIAL by Carlos Andres Gomez
        • PANTOUM OF THE MEAT by Ouita Rogers
      • AZURE Volume 3, Issue 1 >
        • HOW TO WRITE A BIOGRAPHY by Joanne B. Mulcahy
        • PROTOCOL NINE-NINE-NINE-NINE by Kenneth Hanes
        • LESS' MORE by TWIXT
        • POINTLESS MR. PROBST by Beatriz Seelaender
    • ARCHIVES: VOLUME 2 >
      • AZURE Volume 2, Issue 4 >
        • SYLVAN PASSAGES by Dan Wood
        • SISTER ALONE by Janet M Powers
        • CENTURY 2.1 by Alan Flurry
        • CLAIMED BY THE SEA by Sam Reese
      • AZURE Volume 2, Issue 3 >
        • CROSSHATCHING by M.K. Rainey
        • LULLABY by Barbara Daddino
        • HOUSEMOUTH (and other poems) by Anhvu Buchanan and Brent Piller
        • THE RESIDUE IN PUBLIC TEA AND COFFEE CUPS by V.B. Borjen
        • SYZYGY (and other poems) by Malorie Seeley-Sherwood
      • AZURE Volume 2, Issue 2 >
        • DRAGONFLIES: A DISCOURSE ON ANXIETY by Lara Lillibridge
        • AND RICHARD BURBAGE ALSO HAD A SISTER by Freya Shipley
        • THE WATCHERS by M.K. Rainey
        • JAZZ INTERACTION WITH SYMBOLS by Sarah T.
        • SPIDER (and other poems) by Natalie Crick
      • AZURE Volume 2, Issue 1 >
        • ECHOES by Daniel Freeman
        • MAPS by Susan Brennan
        • EDGAR'S FATHER'S MAGIC WORDS by JWM Morgan
        • LOCKJAW: IN TWO ACTS by James Blevins
        • WHAT THE LIVING DO by Susan Wadds
    • Archives: Volume 1 >
      • AZURE Volume 1, Issue 10 >
        • SUSURROS DE RECURRENCIA by Franco Strong
        • THE OLD MAN by Sarah T.
        • PERMUTATIONS by Laura Cesarco Eglin
        • WORLD PEACE 3 by Gustavo Alberto Garcia Vaca
      • AZURE Volume 1, Issue 9 >
        • LITTLE GHOST by Danny Judge
        • THE LAST ALLUSIONIST by Sakina B. Fakhri
        • CHURCH by Diana McClure
      • AZURE Volume 1, Issue 8 >
        • DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS by Nancy Flynn
        • WHAT I COULDN'T SAY by Erika Ranee & Diana McClure
      • AZURE Volume 1, Issue 7 >
        • BRASS TYRANT AND THE AMERICAN THIRST by Kirk Marshall
        • LADY KILLER by Monika Viola
        • THE RIBBONS by Ferguson Williams
      • AZURE Volume 1, Issue 6 >
        • AURELIA: A BALLET IN PROSE (ACT 2 - Part 1) by Sakina B. Fakhri
        • NEW AGE UNCAGED by Frank Light
      • AZURE Volume 1, Issue 5 >
        • THE TRIALS OF TOBIT by Joseph Lisowski
        • LIKE MANY GIANT FOOTPRINTS (and other poems) by William Doreski
        • AURELIA: A BALLET IN PROSE (ACT I) by Sakina B. Fakhri
      • AZURE Volume 1, Issue 4 >
        • WARDENCLIFF by Barbara Daddino
        • BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY by Reg Darling
        • AURELIA: A BALLET IN PROSE (LIBRETTO) by Sakina B. Fakhri
      • AZURE Volume 1, Issue 3 >
        • LAWTON, OKLAHOMA by Mark Lawley
        • TWEETY BIRD'S GRACE by Diana McClure
        • CONTAGION AND THE DINNER GUEST by Sakina B. Fakhri
        • ON POETRY AND PROSE by Sakina B. Fakhri
      • AZURE Volume 1, Issue 2 >
        • TWO MICE IN A BLACK BOX & THE DECONSTRUCTION OF LANGUAGE by Sakina B. Fakhri
      • AZURE Volume 1, Issue 1 >
        • CHARACTER SKETCHES by Diana McClure
        • SEASONS ON A GRAVESTONE by Sakina B. Fakhri
        • COCKTAIL PARTY by Diana McClure
        • DESUETUDE by Sakina B. Fakhri
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