The Dancing Tiger

The narrator of this elegant book tells her story in gentle quatrains, describing the nights when she danced with ‘a quiet, gentle tiger/In the woods below the hill’… ‘When the world is dreaming, still’. It is implied in the showing rather than the telling, that the voice is that of a young girl, but at the conclusion it is revealed that it is an old woman talking to her great-grandchild.

The oil on paper images tell the story. They are expertly executed; the tiger’s stripes echo and contrast with the striped effect of the trees in the wood bathed in the light of a full moon, for it is only when ‘the full moon’s shining bright’ that the mysterious feline is visible. There are many nods to more established artists in the images of a young girl cavorting with a tame version of a fierce beast, and both text and image beg for a Freudian reading. But, it must be presumed, that the implied reading is that of liberation. We know nothing of the circumstances of the young girl/old woman but these monthly escapades, real or imaginary, represent freedom, a freedom passed on by an older woman to a younger one. The stripes of the modern girl’s dress also echo those of the tiger, perhaps signalling that if the tiger is an emblem of liberation, hers has become more complete and integrated.