Aepril Schaile

Terrestrial Taking, Flowers: Persephone Mysteria
Performed, written, choreographed by Aepril Schaile
Dance / Poetry / Theatre

pale, inexorable grief / that great deep

This performance moves between wound and will
The mouth of the Plutonion
Desire. Rupture. Hell and bloom.

She descends.
She’s taken. She takes.

The petals keep coming.
I am giddy from his holy eye / invisible / turning in its socket

The choreography and poetry in Persephone Mysteria is pulled from the ancient soil of Eleusis.
It is shaped by a secret:
dromena, deiknumena, legomena–
things done, things shown, things spoken

I spill over / into / up from the earth / a violence of green / bursting forth /
into breath

Aepril Schaile is an American dancer, poet, and performance artist living in the west of Ireland. Her art calls forth the twin mysteries of Eros/Thanatos, their convergence both an undoing and a summoning of power, like opposing fronts in a thunderstorm. With roots in classical expressions of Bellydance, her praxis honors the lineage of the form while pushing into its threshold with dark feminine instinct. Drawing from mythopoetic narrative, Jungian depth psychology, Tantric cosmology, astrological practice and posthumanist theory, she crafts performances that operate as embodied theurgy—rites
of dispossession / re-possession / grief / sovereignty. She has performed, taught, and spoken at events and conferences throughout the US, UK, and Europe. Most recently she appeared at A Tide of Ghosts: Esotericism and Art beyond Fact and Fiction in Copenhagen and Cairde Festival in Sligo, Ireland. Aepril holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College.

www.aeprilschaile.com

@aeprilraven