Artist and scholar L. Martina Young makes words dance as she explores the history and symbology of the arabesque. The seed of a project that is envisioned as an ongoing and expanding series of readings and live music collaborations, Arabesque had a public premier in late 2025 prior to this iteration. At the Reno Little Theater, Young commenced her engaging staged reading with a tribute to her friend and artistic collaborator, Ulysses Jenkins, the distinguished video and performance artist who recently passed away.

The presentation of this poetic essay, “Arabesque—an art of connections, a poetics of the swerve,” was accompanied by a live, original musical composition by bassist Julie Machado, who was joined by violinist David Haskins. The front of the performance space was illuminated with a simple band of light flowing from overhead, leaving the artist glowing in a bright red gown, seated at a small, colorful table. The two musicians sitting stage right provided intermittent melodic interludes among the artist’s spoken words.

A quote from the Persian poet Rumi opens Young’s text and illustrates that the driving spirit of her project is the quintessence of creativity itself: “The ground’s generosity takes in our compost and grows beauty. Try to be more like the ground.” The essay blends poetic observations and reflections with deeply relevant autobiographical references that elucidate the artist’s own growth as a practitioner and keen observer. The unifying elements of all the arts are viewed through the lens of what Young refers to as the “arabesque aesthetic.” She states, “It is arbitrary to separate the intellectual aspects of movement from its emotional and aesthetic aspects.” Her central premise is that the true and basic building blocks of all art are mergers of what is understood through the intellect and what is felt emotionally. This, she points out, is a unity that embodies that which “is sacred beyond measure: the unity of all life.”

Young uses a reproduction of an ancient Persian illustration and another of a so-called Celtic knot to demonstrate the universal presence of the arabesque’s intertwined and seemingly endless path in human art. This exploration of the arabesque aesthetic finds examples not only in human creations, but also in nature. She describes forms such as the fiddlehead fern (“earthbound, its feathery neck unfurls into arabesque splendor”) and the nautilus shell (“a symbol of renewal, its stature found in spirals and swirls”) as ubiquitous exemplars.

The Persian and Celtic images stand on easels alongside the artist’s table. A third visual is an enlarged performance photograph of Young herself in an arabesque position. In this iconic form from the ballet vocabulary the dancer stands on one leg with the other leg elevated behind—generally at a 90-degree angle. The dancer’s arms then float forward in a soft circle. Without leaving her table, Young demonstrated the five port de bras arm positions of ballet, from rounded arms in front of the body to both arms held forward above the head. Young was not instructing her audience to emulate that moves, but rather generously sharing from her experience.

The focus in the theater stays fixed on the artist at her table. She sits and sends her words out to a transfixed crowd. Her gestures are simple but precise. Her face joins her voice in expressing the tale of dance history, world history, and the history of a young child seeing and sensing the flow of art that would turn her into a significant performance artist.

“The spinning world seemed untouchable,” she says. “I made of myself a roundabout amidst the whips and wails of its excesses. Few words came, though something in me stirred. A knowing. A felt knowing,” she says. Young emphasizes that “felt knowing” as an instinctive awareness of the balance that creates art. That balance in which a firm base provides a platform from which the body and the spirit can connect to the heavens.

While the essay and research upon which this performance is based wanders into a world of aesthetic history and theory, the artist never loses contact with the real-world origins of the Islamic arabesque in tenth-century Persia. From those early flowing symmetrical shapes, she traces the history of the arabesque’s inclusion in the art of ballet.

For Young, the arabesque is an icon. With it she can take her listeners on a swirling, lyrical voyage that aims to uncover the unifying elements of the arts as well as all life. As the essay declares, “Endings and beginnings are indecipherable.”