The Armless Maiden: two arias by Maria Constanti

A large tree in the middle of green woodland. Large white text reads: The Armless Maiden. Smaller text reads: Discussing disabled characters in fairy tales and folklore.

I
​
My grey sisters never lived their youth
They share one eye and one tooth
Aligned as eggs they sleepwalk through our back yard and nest beneath our apple tree.

Our kind mother is the Lady of Canines
Under the surface of herself she has the distorted body of a swan and a cosmogonic castle of riddles.

I absorbed I merged I forgave
Amalgamated inward
To slay I disdained
Stood in the clearing alive as a forest

II

​My armless body across currents of memory
Do I lose control or clench as the impalpable axe in my floating palm hangs over stretches of white plankton
An eroding seabed bears my pearl face 

​Underneath I am eight years old 

​my unripe hand clasps a pen
 
I toss my small journal book in the depths of my throat

​-An undomesticated land of reversed periphery 

​from the ocean’s floor, out into the forest, up the mountain, out into the river, out into the desert, stars come up, night falls over, my childhood house in flames
Flesh in its boundless amorphous fate

​My crucible heart        
a geomorphic mystery of distance
a melting agony of protruding golden arms

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About the author:
Maria Constanti is a performer from Cyprus, based in Athens, working across the fields of storytelling, music and devised performance. In her work she embraces practices that explore the body as the creative source of poetic and symbolic articulation, as a space for speaking in images from the body’s experience,  informed by the underlying resonance of the mythic. She studied Classics at the University of Cyprus and researched postmodern reinterpretations of fairy tales at the University of Athens, performance practice and embodied dramaturgy at Arthaus Berlin Centre for Devised Theatre and Performance.  ​