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Shahmaran, Queen of Serpents
The tales of a magical woman-snake with healing powers and knowledge of the medicinal properties of plants still echo today in Anatolia. Kurds remember her too, and her name is linked with the Assyrian Queen Semiramis. Shahmaran also turns up in a story from the Arabian Nights as a snake with the head of a beautiful woman. An ancient symbol of feminine wisdom, Shahmaran is perhaps an intuitive, anthropomorphic embodiment of the double helix -- the intertwined serpent of DNA.
Choreography and Costume Design:
Laurel Victoria Gray
Snakecharmer
As the gods began one world, and man another,
So the snakecharmer begins a snaky sphere
With moon-eye, mouth-pipe, He pipes. Pipes green. Pipes water.
Pipes water green until green waters waver
With reedy lengths and necks and undulatings.
And as his notes twine green, the green river
Shapes its images around his sons.
He pipes a place to stand on, but no rocks,
No floor: a wave of flickering grass tongues
Supports his foot. He pipes a world of snakes,
Of sways and coilings, from the snake-rooted bottom
Of his mind. And now nothing but snakes
Is visible. The snake-scales have become
Leaf, become eyelid; snake-bodies, bough, breast
Of tree and human. And he within this snakedom
Rules the writhings which make manifest
His snakehood and his might with pliant tunes
From his thin pipe. Out of this green nest
As out of Eden's navel twist the lines
Of snaky generations: let there be snakes!
And snakes there were, are, will be--till yawns
Consume this pipe and he tires of music
And pipes the world back to the simple fabric
Of snake-warp, snake-weft. Pipes the cloth of snakes
To a melting of green waters, till no snake
Shows its head, and those green waters back to
Water, to green, to nothing like a snake.
Puts up his pipe, and lids his moony eye.
Sylvia Plath
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