The Sacred Dance: Art, music, and literature at The Peekskill Coffee House

Westchester artist Maggie Ploener was joined by author Janet Mason and musicians Lee Kelly (on guitar) and Barbara McPherson (on percussion) at the opening of her show “The Sacred Dance”  on August 5th at The Peekskill Coffee House. The exhibit is running for the month of August.

A resident of Shrub Oak, New York, Maggie has been an artist for 30 years and has received numerous awards. “The Sacred Dance is a series of 23 drawing that I have been working on since 1994,” said Ploener.  “The first series of drawing were large ink drawing of women meditators and warriors. The idea was to make large empowering drawings of women. In 1996 I met a dancer who studied Temple Dance in Pune, India.  She choreographed a sacred dance that included 22 women including herself. In the summer of 1997 I spent five weeks with her at her Maui Hawaii home….

“I took them out in the winter of 2012 and with a fresh eye began to dissect and rearrange the compositions. I made every effort not to make the drawings about Prema the dancer. Then something began to happen. I was finally able to capture the transcendent essence and power of the dance practice.” Ploener’s artwork can also be found online.

Ploener was joined by Long-time artistic colleague Janet Mason, who read from her book Tea Leaves (Bella Books 2012).  Tea Leaves was just described in the Lambda Review as “a memoir that offers the reader an intimate record of three generations of women in a working class Pennsylvania town. Moving back and forth across generations, Mason traces the paths of a grandmother, a mother and a daughter in a moving and poignant account of the lives of women. Education, class distinctions, and occupations are pivotal in this portrait of the evolution of choice as depicted in one family. Tea Leaves tells the story of a daughter coming to jarring, painful grips with her mother’s (Jane) impending death, and the burgeoning conviction that, in spite of their differences, they are not strangers.”   Mason is an accomplished author – with several books of poetry in print, a novel – and a blogger for The Huffington Post.   

Ploener and Mason were joined by Lee Kelly, from Florida, singing Irish folk ballads on guitar and banjo, and Barbara McPherson, from Philadelphia, on percussion.