Aurelia: A Ballet in Prose (Libretto)
By Sakina B. Fakhri
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For the next five months, AZURE will publish serial installments of Aurelia: A Ballet in Prose, a contemporaneously unfolding novel by Sakina B. Fakhri. A libretto establishing the story structure and relevant plot points is provided below. Act I will appear in the July 2015 issue of AZURE. |
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 a courtier the King 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)
Aurelia dies in her early twenties, drowning during an aquatic ballet; paintings by Botticelli depicting her 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
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. As this persistent threat begins to weigh upon her sanity, Catherine—crippled by paranoia—calls upon her old friend Aurelia to return to the palace and seek out the enemies within its confines. (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).
As soon as Aurelia takes her post at Catherine’s side, she is afflicted by an inexplicable insomnia that provokes nightly wanderings through the halls of the palace. 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), and this knowledge propels her resolution of the mystery of Catherine’s “Phantom.”
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.
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. Her position is threatened by the arrival of Charles Didelot from France, and she becomes embroiled in an escalating professional rivalry with this foreign transplant.
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. 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 inexplicably depressed: she envisions a shadow of a 14th century ballerina, eyes blotted out with acid, dancing herself to death at the center of the trading floor.
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 a courtier the King 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)
Aurelia dies in her early twenties, drowning during an aquatic ballet; paintings by Botticelli depicting her 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
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. As this persistent threat begins to weigh upon her sanity, Catherine—crippled by paranoia—calls upon her old friend Aurelia to return to the palace and seek out the enemies within its confines. (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).
As soon as Aurelia takes her post at Catherine’s side, she is afflicted by an inexplicable insomnia that provokes nightly wanderings through the halls of the palace. 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), and this knowledge propels her resolution of the mystery of Catherine’s “Phantom.”
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.
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. Her position is threatened by the arrival of Charles Didelot from France, and she becomes embroiled in an escalating professional rivalry with this foreign transplant.
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. 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 inexplicably depressed: she envisions a shadow of a 14th century ballerina, eyes blotted out with acid, dancing herself to death at the center of the trading floor.
