LD16: The Sorcerer's Apprentice

LD16 shows Apa dancing with Lucy's makeshift version of the Yup'ik dance stick. I use the spine to bisect the image into a left page showing the present Curukaq festival in a gymnasium, and the right showing a past Curukaq occuring in a qasgiq hut in Apa's memory. The temporal comingling seemed appropriate in light of the Yup'ik cyclical conception of time, which would fold together past and present springtime festivals.

I have drawn Apa's face slightly to the side of the spine to avoid interruption by the spine. You may notice that I have also shifted the dance stick to a lower position to prevent visual entanglement with the background.

I encountered one problem: Apa faces away from the people behind him, partly so that he occupies the foreground (I'm hoping that readers assume that people surround him). Unfortunately, no matter how I drew him with his eyes open, he seemed to retain a look in his eyes that could be described as "faraway," and is thus contrary to the text's message. When I drew my layout sketch, I rendered Apa with his eyes closed. I'm not exactly sure why. Partly in order to avoid the "faraway" look, I have decided to leave him this way. With his eyes closed, Apa looks fully immersed in the dance. Although the split image shows him recalling past dance festivals, he is drawing them into his present activity, and is not therefore "faraway" any longer. I have always interpreted the phrase "faraway," as used here, to indicate boredom.

Here Apa wears a red glove on the hand holding the dance stick, though his hand was bare in the last illustration. Just to refresh: the dance stick is considered sacred, so it is held with a gloved hand. It could be that Apa has chosen to don the glove since he unwrapped . . . or perhaps I will simply include the glove in the previous page. The glove is a blatant red, and he wears a glove only on the hand holding the stick. I'm hoping that children will ask why he does this, and in the process, learn a bit more about the custom. We might add an explanation in the back matter pertaining to this point, where a few other artifacts bear concise description.

When it comes down to it, a sacred dance stick is a sacred dance stick, and with the glove drawn in its proper place, I'll sleep a little better. The sticks were supposed to have spirits of their own, often pestersome spirits. Partly to avoid poor relations with said spirits, the sticks were often destroyed after dance ceremonies (Stebbins Dance Festival, xxii). I have a feeling that Apa will not destroy Lucy's gift after he uses it, which means that its spirit may remain at large. Even if we assume that he destroys it, thousands of representations of the stick will emerge from the printing press, sorcerer's-apprentice-style. I'm not sure how to do the math for pictorial representations of spiritual artifacts, but I figure I had better play it safe and draw the glove to prevent the upbraiding of any spirits. Yup'ik mythology may not be my mythology, but I can't speak for the good people in the shipping department of the UAF press.