Dancing Ladies Abstract Afrocentric Dancers Blanket | Velveteen Microfiber

Dancing Ladies

Across the mat, women are dancing. Dancing Ladies celebrates the dance culture of African women — the Maasai and the many tribes beyond them, each with its own dance, each recognizable to anyone who knows the steps. The women gather and dance for celebration, for grief, for the ordinary joy of gathering. The design carries that gathering into the room where you practice.

Provenance:

In African tribal culture, every tribe holds its own dances, and the women dance together. They dance for celebrations, for the turning points of a life, and simply for the pleasure of being in company. At a gathering of tribes you can tell where someone is from by the way she moves — everyone knows their own dance.
Dancing Ladies is a depiction of that culture, and of something larger it points toward: the collaboration of women across the world, holding one another up.

Symbolism:

Beside the dancers sits sacred geometry — the diamonds and pyramids that recur through the design. Certain combinations of number and shape carry meaning in the structure of the universe, and they are laid into this design deliberately.
The geometry is also practical. The layout is arranged so that hands, feet, and body find their place: an alignment guide hidden inside the pattern, so that whether you are moving quickly or holding still, you know where to be.

Materials & Making:

The Dancing Ladies series runs across both mats and blankets. On the blankets, the dancers appear on one face and the sacred geometry on the reverse, in complementary colorways — made for yoga, for meditation, or simply for the bed or the couch.

Founder's Note:

Dance, in a great many cultures, is a language. It means something, it communicates between people, it moves the body, and it is a joy. Wherever we travel, we want to see how people dance. Dancing Ladies celebrates the African dance culture. — Dr. Veronica