| a world created by the dance of my hands, and me. With grace and humility, I'll perform my dance for thee. Egotism, beauty, goodness? I have all three. |
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DANCER’S BIO As a child, Melanie Monterey Eyth trained and competed in all styles of dance at Kelly Richards School of Dance in Warminster, PA. Through high school and college she danced. In 2002, she earned her BA in dance from Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA. Junior year, she had studied abroad in London at the Laban Centre of Movement and Dance, and senior year, danced with Michele Yuras at the American College Dance Festival, and also with the Krakatoa Improvization Ensemble founded by Susan Creitz. Today, five years after finishing school, Melanie is a writer and photographer as well as dancer. She lives in both New York City and Bucks County, PA, because the city offers things which the country cannot. Melanie's poetic work appears in books published by her own Dance of My Hands Publishing. Those, and other endeavors are presented here, at www.danceofmyhands.com. Dance performance experiences include: Budzynski’s Studio of Ballet; DUMBO Dance Festival; ACDF; Fielday at Dance Theatre Workshop, Pier 63, and HERE Arts Center; Underexposed Series at Dixon Place; Works in Progress at Dance Space Center; Performance Series at Peridance; Scapism Exhibit at Warren Gallery; WAXworks at University Settlement; The Symmetry of Grace at the FAR Space; Belly Dancing at Studio AIR; with Alexandra Bayeva at Dance New Amsterdam; AWE by Open Floor Dance at the Merce Cunningham Studio; Vada Dance Collective at the International House in Philadelphia, PA; and From the Ground with The Movement Collective at Teatro la Tea, NYC. 
ACTOR’S BIO TV/FILM Day is Done, Singing Extra, Mike Kelley, Director Joan of Arcadia, Extra, Canterbury Productions The O.C., Extra, Warner Bros Television Las Vegas, Extra, NBC Studios Judging Amy, Extra, Judging Amy Productions Clubhouse, Extra, Granite Productions The Drew Carey Show, Featured Extra, Warner Bros Television Friends, Featured Extra, Warner Bros Television THEATRE Thursday Evening, Laura, Spirit on Stage Improvisation Ensemble, Founding Member, Muhlenberg Dance Company Les Sylphides, Dancer, Muhlenberg Dance Company The Nutcracker, Lead, Longstreth Theatre TRAINING Basic Stagecraft; Muhlenberg College, PA Ballet, Jazz, Modern; Laban Centre for Movement and Dance, London Acting; DGA Director and Drama Coach, Studio City, CA Competitive Dance; Kelly Richards School of Dance, PA SPECIAL SKILLS Fluent French Speaker, Swimmer, Photographer Soccer Player, Poet and Writer, Licensed Driver Pianist, Painter, Tennis Player Gardener, Bicyclist, Dancer: Jazz, Modern, Ballet, Tap Angelic Persona, Vulnerable, Flirtatious NOURISHING QUOTES Trust yourself, then you will know how to live. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Pay attention and work on perfecting yourself, so that the perfection of others may not grieve you. Rumi Do you want long life and happiness? Strive for peace with all your heart. Psalms 34:12 You cannot perceive beauty but with a serene mind. Henry David Thoreau Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art. Leonardo da Vinci Your own soul is nourished when you are kind, it is destroyed when you are cruel. King Solomon I pray thee, O God, that I may be beautiful within. Socrates Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. Ralph Waldo Emerson What lovest well remains, the rest is dross What lovest well shall not bereft from thee What lovest well is thy true history Ezra Pound from Rumi O tongue, you are an endless treasure. O tongue, you are an endless disease. Your thinking is like a camel driver, and you are the camel: it drives you in every direction under its bitter control. Hungry, you’re a dog, angry and bad-natured. Having eaten your fill, you become a carcass; you lie down like a wall, senseless. At one time a dog, at another time a carcass, how will you run with lions or follow the saints? The cure for the pain is in the pain. Your depression is connected to your insolence and refusal to praise. The sun goes out whenever the cloud of not praising comes. The awakened and knowing say: body I am entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body. Neitzsche This I believe: I am not my body. I am my words, my ideas and my actions. I am filled with love, humor, ambition and intelligence. I am a creative spirit, a fellow human walking the planet, who, just like you, is so much more than my body. Lisa Sandin Enemies such as craving and hatred are without arms or legs. they are neither courageous nor wise. How is it that they have enslaved me? Shantideva The gentlest thing overcomes the hardest, like drops of water wearing away the stone. The Tao Being the man of concrete experimentation that he was, Ecclesiastes has done us all the favor of personally plunging head-first off one deep end after another only to crawl back, battered and sadder, but wiser, to tell that "this too is vanity." Robert L. Short Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. Nelson Mandela Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. Edgar Degas Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Emma Lazarrus Where the mind is without fear and the head held high... where knowledge is free... into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. Rabindranath Tagare Down, down he sank into the plumes and feathers of sleep, sank and was muffled over. Virginia Woolf As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on _____; and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Virginia Woolf Fear no more, says the heart in the body; fear no more. Virginia Woolf "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all/ ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. John Keats Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless. Mother Teresa He that can have patience can have what he will. Benjamin Franklin Just as there are no little people or unimportant lives, there is no insignificant work. Elena Bonner The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers. Arthur Koestler The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all. Pablo Casals Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing. Abraham Lincoln Somehow or other, loveliness is infernally sad...and what can this sorrow be? It is brewed by the earth itself. Virginia Woolf Don't listen to anything I say./ I must enter the center of the fire. Rumi I hear nothing in my ear but your voice./ Heart has plundered mind of its eloquence. Rumi I am one thing, my writings are another. Friedrich Nietzsche My formula for greatness in a human being is: that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity. Not merely to endure that which happens of necessity, still less to dissemble it--all idealism is untruthfulness in the face of necessity--but to Love it... Nietzsche Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you... Nietzsche It is necessary to have a master who by his teaching and precepts stirs and awakens the moral virtues whose seed is enclosed and buried in our souls. Baldesar Castiglione Quicken our intellects with the incense of spirituality and make us so attuned to the celestial harmony that there is no longer room within us for any discard of passion. B. Castiglione With the rays of your light cleanse our eyes of their misty ignorance, so that they may no longer prize mortal beauty but know that the things which they first thought to see are out, and that those they did not see truly are. B. Castiglione Writing was a reputable and harmless occupation. The family peace was not broken by the scratching of a pen. Virginia Woolf The vision becomes too masculine or it becomes too feminine; it loses its perfect integrity and, with that, its most essential quality as a work of art. V. Woolf Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? V. Woolf It cannot be doubted that the long years of seclusion had done her irreperable damage as an artist. She had lived shut off, quessing at what was outside, and inevitably magnifying what was within. V. Woolf Almost without exception, she notes women are shown In Their Relation to Men. V. Woolf A week of walking had torn my boots to shreds. Arthur Rimbaud O seasons, O chateaus!/ Where is the flawless soul? A. Rimbaud Thy will be done, O Lord: I shall put no obstacle before it! A. Rimbaud I spend my life sitting, like an angel in a barber chair. A. Rimbaud Theodore Roethke In a dark time, the eye begins to see. I learned not to fear infinity,/ the far field, the windy cliffs of forever, 'And rejoiced in being what I was.' Beautiful is my desire and the place of my desire. Voice, come out of the silence. Say something: Appear in the form of a spider or a moth beating the curtain. I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words. I practice at walking the void. Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries. The two duties are to lament or praise. I know how flowers think. Behold in me one who transcends the sensual ecstasy. My memory, my prison. I am nothing but what I remember. The intolerable sadness that comes when we are aware at last of our own destiny. I am a poet: I am always hungry. Live in a perpetual great astonishment. To be weary of one's own individuality-- is that to die? The sense of something ripped out of a deep consciousness. Be still, great silence. O my poor words, bear with me. My face washed in the milk of this morning. Heart you have no house. I leap to the wind. The desire to leave many poems in a state of partial completeness; to write nothing but fragments. What dies before me is myself alone: what lives again? Only a man of straw-- yet straw can feed a fire to melt down stone. Dear God, I want it all: the depths and the heights. I trust all joy. Never be ashamed of the strange. The body is the soul. Theodore Roethke I didn't want any flower, I only wanted to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. Sylvia Plath Though I spent every day with her for 6 years,... I never saw her show her real self to anybody--I knew that what I had always felt must happen had now begun to happen, that her real self, being the real poet, would now speak for itself, and would throw off all those lesser and artificial selves that had monopolized the words up to that point. It was as if a dumb person suddenly spoke. Ted Hughes And God said, let there be light. Genesis 1:3 We shall be one person Pueblo Indian The universe resounds with the joyful cry I am. Scriabin And shall not loveliness be loved forever? Euripides Bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh... Genesis 2:23 She is a tree of life to them... Proverbs 3:18 ...deep inside, in that silent place where a child's fears crouch... Lillian Smith With all beings and all things we shall be as relatives Sioux Indian Before me peaceful,/Behind me peaceful,/Under me peaceful,/Over me peaceful,/All around me peaceful... Navajo Indian The land is a mother that never dies Maori If I did not work, these worlds would perish... Bhagavad-Gita Eat Bread and Salt and Speak the Truth. Russian Proverb ...Clasp the hands and know the thoughts of men in other lands... John Masefield Swing, sweetness, to the last palpitation of the evening and the breeze St. John Perse Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul. Plato The hills and the sea and the earth dance. The world of man dances in laughters and tears. Kabir But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing. Thomas Paine ...the wise man looks into space, and does not regard the small as too little, nor the great as too big; for he knows that there is no limit to dimensions. Lao-tze Every man beareth the whole stamp of the human condition. Montaigne As the generation of leaves, so is that of men. Homer Flow, flow, flow, the current of life is ever onward... Kobodaishi ...I am alone with the beating of my heart... Lui Chi For Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face... William Blake What region of the earth is not full of our calamities? Virgil ...Nothing is real to us but hunger. Kakuzo Okakura Behold, this dreamer cometh Genesis 37:19 ...To know that what is impenetratable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty... Albert Einstein ...I still believe that people are really good at heart. Anne Frank ...Humanity is outraged in me and with me. We must not dissimulate nor try to forget this indignation which is one of the most passionate forms of love. George Sand ...the mind is restless, turbulent, strong and unyielding... as difficult to subdue as the wind. Bhagavad-Gita Who is on my side? Who? II. Kings 9:32 Fill the seats of justice with good men, not so absolute in goodness as to forget what human frailty is. Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd Behold this and always love it! It is very sacred, and you must treat it as such... Sioux Indian Who is the slayer, who the victim? Speak. Sophocles We two form a multitude. Ovid O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! and yet again wonderful... William Shakespeare A world to be born under your footsteps... St. John Perse If I make the lashes dark/And the eyes more bright And the lips more scarlet/No vanity's displayed: I'm looking for the face I had before the world was made. W. B. Yeats Faust by Goethe Begin once more, O sweet celestial strain. Tears dim my eyes: earth’s child I am again. And now with holy dread there wakes/The pure awareness of the soul. The lamp burns peacefully and kind,/and light has steady, soft domain/Upon my bosom and my mind. True, human beings may abound/who growl at things beyond their ken,/Mocking the beautiful and good,/and all they haven’t understood:/Let dogs not join these gentlemen. T’is writ, in the beginning was the Word./A new translation I will try./In the beginning was the Thought…/In the beginning was the Deed. Bow with the gleaming/Beauty of dreaming. What is it stirs, already fluttering/In boding anguish for itself and you? Dreadful, dreadful!/If only I could shake it off,/the thought that hovers all the time/Against my will accusing me! The trumpet sounds,/the graves are shaken./Now thy soul/Is shaped anew... The torrent falls in ceaseless silvery flight:/This beauty gives the zest to traveling days. I feel that winter reigns in my inside. Now we wend our way, it seems, into witchery and dreams. Prove your worth. Are we standing or advancing?/All is whirling, swimming, dancing…. …In strangest dawn, whose baleful glow/ lies lurid on the black abyss/And lights the chasms far below. then honour be where honour’s due. With freedom such as gods may give,/Discover what it means to live! Omniscient? No, not I; but well-informed. Again make whole/The temple of your soul. Beauty is by a demi-god destroyed:/We, sorrowing, bear/The fragments to the endless void. Go from your solitude/Coursing the world, renewed. Find what you crave. I’ll sound the heights and depths that men can know,/Their very souls shall be mine entwined,/I’ll load my bosom with their weal and woe,/And share with them the shipwreck of mankind. You are, when all is done—just what you are./…Mount learned stilts, to make yourself look big,/You still will be the creature that you are. like other people, I’m afraid... . Then up! Let meditation be,/And stride out in the world with me! Broom can scratch and prong can poke,/The womb may burst and the infant choke. Keep close, lest we be parted. …Solitude is cheered with company. I tell you, let the world’s mad traffic be,/While here we sit in quiet serenity. Indeed it is proverbially true,/From greater worlds we fashion small ones too. …I’ll be the pander, you can be the wooer. Who wants to read…a book that has a modicum of meaning? Time flies, and what is past is done. Try novelty for salesman’s bait,/For novelty wins everyone. I fear lest sense and reason abdicate. Deep nature has her wonders still,/So draw the bungs and drink your fill. Silence, old beer-can! For if a work completely flouts and rules/Its mystery enthralls both wise and fools. New art, my friend, springs from antiquity. The vacant mind/Has truth assigned,/It comes to him unbidden. she cannot put your image from her mind,/and all because she loves you to despair. Tempt not again my aching soul to gaze/On her sweet limbs with all my heart aflame. Nay, I am near her still: at home, abroad,/I lose her not. My love is infinite./I’m jealous of the Body of the Lord/When with her tender lips she touches it. Whatever is to come, let quickly come. The sound of his words/Is honey and bliss,/The touch of his hand,/and oh, his kiss! …And yet you dare to dance like mortal men! Long have I toiled to purge this madness hence,/And still it clings, with sheer impertinence! That bosom Gretchen yielded, lovely, warm/I took my joy of that dear, gentle form. But I situated on my goat/to show my lusty body. And so your pious soul betakes/Himself to devil’s quarters. Ideas can be a tyranny/To give one mental twinges:/If all my thoughts are really me,/My mind is off its hinges. Does fair Nature give you wings,/Wings that the soul discloses?/Follow where you Ariel sings,/On paths and hills of roses. In misery and deep despair! Long, long a piteous wanderer upon the earth, and now to be trapped! Cast into prison, she, that lovely creature, unhappiest of souls… For those I love, death’s pangs I would endure. Is not life teeming/Around the head and heart of you,/Weaving eternal mysteries/Seen and unseen, even at your side?/Oh, let them fill your heart, your generous heart,/And when you lose your being in that bliss,/Give it what name you will—/Your joy, love, heart, your God./For me, I have no name/To give it: feeling’s surely all./Names are but noise and smoke,/Obscuring heavenly light. To make a world, strange fellows there must be. I feel so happy on your arm,/Surrendering, yielding, loving, warm… …When he is near I cannot pray,/That is a fear that eats the heart away. Grant me one hour on love’s most sacred shores/To clasp the bosom that my soul adores,/Lie heart to heart and merge my soul with yours. …Our little blossom has gone to the bad. My tongue had never words enough. So here we are, at the uttermost bounds of understand. Why did you throw in your lot with ours if you cannot stay the course…Was it we who forced our way to you, or you who thrust yourself on us? Think you to wield the thunderbolt? To crush the innocent thing that crosses you, there lies your true tyrant’s way of ending your embarrassments. With long-forgotten woe my spirit groans,/I shudder at the load of mortal ill. Can you not pity? Have you not human eyes? So, be not deaf to what I now implore… Be still, my tears, lest like a coward I shrink. Fasut: I am he! Margareta: You are he! Oh, tell me once again! Goethe The Bhagavadgita There is more happiness in doing one’s own work even without excellence than in doing another’s duty well. Each one must try to understand his psychophysical make-up and function in accordance with it. It may not be given to all of us to lay the foundations of systems of metaphysics or clothe lofty thoughts in enduring words. We have not all the same gifts, but what is vital is not whether we are endowed with five talents or only one but how faithfully we have employed the trust committed to us. We must play our part, manfully, be it great or small. Goodness denotes perfection of quality. However distasteful one’s duty may be, one must be faithful to it even unto death. But the man whose delight is in the Self alone, who is content with the Self, who is satisfied with the Self, for him there exists no work that needs to be done. Even the emancipated souls do work as the occasion arises. Thou shouldst do works… with a view to the maintenance of the world… Life of God and life of the world are not opposed to each other. In the name of my Lordship, I slave for the whole world. If I should cease to work, these worlds would fall in ruin and I should be the creator of disordered life and destroy these people. …let him not unsettle minds. Do not weaken religious devotion of any kind. The elements of duty, sacrifice and love seem to be the foundation of every religion. In the lower forms, they may be barely discernible and may center round certain symbols which are accessories to the principles which they uphold… Faith is wider than belief. The true self is the divine, eternally free and self-aware. Even the man of knowledge acts in accordance with his own nature. Beings follow their nature. What can repression accomplish? By self-surrender to the Lord who presides over cosmic existence, and activity, we must engage in work. “Thy will be done” is to be our attitude in all work. We must do the work with the sense that we are the servants of the Lord. It does not follow that we should indulge in every impulse. It is a call to find out our true being and give expression to it. We cannot, even if we will, suppress it. Violated nature will take its revenge. So long as we act in certain ways because we like them and abstain from others because we dislike them, we will be bound by our actions. But if we overcome these impulses and act from a sense of duty, we are not victims… The fundamental social crime is appropriation in any form whatever, class privilege, race discrimination or national egotism, for it involves pain to others. Never to blend our pleasure or our pride/With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels. WORDSWORTH The senses, they say, are great, greater than the senses is the mind, greater than the mind is the intelligence but greater than the intelligence is He. Consciousness must be raised step by step. The higher we rise the more free we are. Control the restless ego by the light of the Eternal Spiritual Self. He who knows becomes truly independent and asks guidance from no other power except his inner light. By developing our inner spiritual nature, we gain a new kind of relatedness to the world and grow into the freedom, where the integrity of the self is not compromised. We then become aware of ourselves as active creative individuals, living, not by the discipline of external authority but by the inward rule of free devotion to truth. The individual self is a portion of the lord, a real not an imaginary form of the Supreme, a limited manifestation of God. All forms of existence are found in each being. The matter, life and mind that fill the world are in us as well. Our intellectual nature produces self-consciousness. Any sense of satisfaction and security derived by submission to external authority is bought at the price of the integrity of the self. ________ disentangles himself from the social context, stands alone and faces the perilous and overpowering aspects of the world. As our purpose is, so is our life. Only our desires for truth and virtue are nobler. Man has a haunting sense of the vanity. Those who live on the surface of life may not feel the distress, the laceration of spirit, and may not feel any urge to seek their true good. They are human animals, and like animals they are born, they grow, they mate and leave offspring and pass away. When (the individual) is assailed by doubt, denial, hatred of life and black despair, he can escape from them only if God lays His hand on him. The image of God in us expresses itself in the infinite capacity for self-transcendence. Knowledge pursued for the sake of power or fame does not take us far. It must be sought for attaining truth. At the end, knowledge, love and action mingle together… Even as God combines in himself these features, man aims at the integral life of Spirit. Cognition, will and feeling, though logically distinguishable, are not really separable in the concrete life and unity of mind. They are different aspects of the one movement of the soul… There are different roads by which this end (of spiritual apprehension) may be reached; the love of beauty which exalts the poet (is one road). Unless the individual has complete self-awareness, he cannot become master of his life. By developing purity of intention, passions directed towards mundane objects die, producing tranquility of mind… In stillness which is the rest of the soul from earthly encounter, insight is born and man becomes what he is. 
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