#sparks burn when you can literally SEE the whatever-intangible-emotion that is going on between them

[rhaelynn]

am going feral over this woman's philosophy on dance

Rebecca Ferguson: Wildly subtle

Find out why actress Rebecca Ferguson makes us lose our minds. We show and tell you here. You will surely agree with us.

There are no half measures with Rebecca Ferguson. Her gaze is as intense as her voice and from there comes a sensuality that makes her footsteps feel. If the movie screen were made of rock, surely the footsteps of this Swedish actress have pierced the surface with the steps of her characters, which can never be described as lukewarm.

Rebecca Ferguson: the actress who dazzles with her subtly wild style

On the day of our session with her, the freckles on her chest and face shine like the red spice of the sands of the planet Arrakis from her two Duna films in 2021 and 2024, the result of the reflectors of our great photographer JuankR, who captured each one of their movements during the photoshoot that accompanies these pages, held in the English capital. Pointing. Approaching. Throwing himself to the floor. Feeling the spell of Rebecca, a movie star who has not stopped shaking us with that intense look that begins in sensuality and ends in melancholy. A sort of modern Ingrid Bergman from Casablanca (1942).

This is a dance One that we invite you to hold in your hands in these pages, where Rebecca's photographic plates are added to the words that we captured in this interview by telephone from London. The woman who has been queen in The White Queen, a spy alongside Tom Cruise in the Mission Impossible series, a psychic in the sequel to The Shinning, even the mother of a messiah in the Duna series with sorceress powers, was also the muse and impossible love about to drive Hugh Jackman crazy in not one, but two films: The Greatest Showman and Reminiscence.

“As a photographer, JuanKr allowed me a lot of freedom. He let me play and reveal what I wanted to do. Show only what I decided at my own pace. And together with Caterina, the session's stylist, dress the way I wanted. We had an incredible day and that was because there was freedom, in a dance very similar to the Argentine tango.”

And she continues: “You know?… Tango has a lot to do with paying attention to your partner. May you always be willing to lead others, that's why I love it. Think about any relationship, company, any form of collaboration… tango teaches you that in order to move your partner forward you must lean back. You have to provide him with tiny amounts of movement, to make him notice that you are about to move. You can't push your body on the other person, otherwise you will run over them. You must communicate with your body, your foot, the center of your body and then you lean back, activating the movement for your partner to move forward. That represents for me the world I want to inhabit,” Rebecca's melodious voice tells us from the other side of the line, finishing off like a “shoe strike”: “In this case Juan Carlos was the leader as a photographer, but he was inclined backwards to allow me to enter and thus both of us move forward together.”

Listening to her talk about tango makes me realize that she has taken away the first question from me, after reviewing that in her beginnings as an artist she managed to set up an academy of this Latin American musical genre that tells stories of complicity as a couple with double bass hits, violin undulations. and the daring notes of the piano in a rhythmic rhythm.

How would a girl born in Stockholm, Sweden, end up surrendered to tango and then one day to the cinema? She is totally the stuff of a fairy tale. Daughter of Swedish businessman Olov Sundström and Englishwoman Rosemary Ferguson, Rebecca Louisa Ferguson Sundström took her stage name from her maternal ancestry, whose grandmother is Irish and her grandfather is from Scotland. Of the Libra sign, the actress has the year 1983 on her birth certificate.

“I studied at Adolf Fredrik's Music School, very famous in Stockholm, where we even went to sing at the Nobel Prize ceremonies. The arts are the fault of my mother, who encouraged me to be a dancer as much as to learn jazz and funk. She wanted to expose me to everything, I even learned to play ‘forehead poker’ and canasta with ladies her age.”

And Rebecca's mother knew what it meant to soak up the art in your own city. In 1973, Rosemary Ferguson helped the local band ABBA translate the lyrics of their song “Waterloo” from Swedish into English to compete in Eurovision (a contest where the quartet's fame exploded).

As if prophetic, the cover of ABBA's third album in 1975 shows Rosemary's face peeking out from outside the car that transports the group's members, with champagne in hand, looking curious under her wavy reddish hair. Less than a decade later, Rebecca herself would be the one born to walk in that world of art and glamour.

“One day I tried what I would call Argentine dance, tango, and I fell in love with it. Even when I was older my teacher, Danielle, took me under his tutelage and we made a great duo. I had many classes but never became a professional; However, I was good enough to be an instructor,” she clarifies.

And she adds: “I liked teaching the elderly in the fishing village where I lived. That joy of dancing never gets old. You have in front of you 80-year-old men or women dancing with 20-year-old men or women. That didn't matter. The romance and the electricity, the communication without people even knowing their names, nothing gets in the way. Just the existence of that moment between the two,” Rebecca shares, enjoying the memories of her.

For Ferguson, his first flirtation with acting was in the soap opera Nya Tider at the turn of the 20th century to the 21st and at 17 years old, there she was given the opportunity to dream big. The story goes that in 2011, one day at the Stockholm market, director Richard Hobert, after observing her, invited her to be part of his film A One-Way Trip to Antibes for which Rebecca received the Promising Star award at the International Festival. Stockholm Film Festival.

At 28 years old, Rebecca's character in A One-Way Trip to Antibes takes the veteran protagonist, Sven-Bertil Taube, on a Vespa-type motorcycle and helps him rediscover the reasons for living, when he knows that his children want him to leave to steal his inheritance.

That same vitality behind his blue gaze, which also conveys the need to react quickly, such as not letting a definitive moment pass or holding one's hands on the edge of a cliff, has been part of the reasons why actors like Tom Cruise have called Rebecca to be their ally in film adventures.

The British spy Ilsa Faust, who also points guns at Ethan Hunt (Cruise) who allows herself to be lowered from the heights with him, was the opportunity for Rebecca to put her control over her body into practice, even though she herself has said that the heights are dizzying, which he had to challenge in his three Mission Impossible films between 2015 and 2022.

Find out all of Rebecca Ferguson's revelations in our exclusive interview, available in the April print issue of Esquire.

translated from spanish for @rebeccalouisaferguson

[lamortexiii]

Shades and Shadows: What Exactly is an Art Witch?

We live in an age now where you’re no longer burned at the stake for identifying as a witch or wanting to burn down your local church. If anything it’s become trendy, and all kinds of different witches are cropping up as a result. In fact, the internet is loaded with posts where you can essentially Web MD whether you have the qualifying “symptoms” of a witch, and all sorts of little BuzzFeed-esque quizzes to further help you identify just what kind of witch you might be. While this is cute and whatnot, witchcraft is ultimately a path; it’s a practice. I myself am still learning every day. If you caught my introduction post, you may be wondering what exactly an art witch is, or what art even has to do with witchcraft or the occult in general. Let me explain…

Creativity is something that requires you to tap into the unseen, and for me, this is where the correlation between art and the occult begins. Art is a means of entering another world, and it’s actually how I got into witchcraft and the occult in the first place. While my interest in such began at a much younger age, actively practicing and delving in didn’t begin until later when I started painting abstracts. I had no idea this was the path painting would lead me down. Like anything new, painting was initially an experiment. It was fun, it was easy, it was something I could do without thinking too hard, and it felt like I was finally tapping into myself. But something strange began to happen as I got more and more into art, I started to feel as though I was stepping out of my current reality and into something more. I would get so engrossed in what I was doing that when I would step away from a painting, I found myself wondering where it had come from and who had painted it. Of course I never told anybody for fear of sounding insane, but I began to wonder about this something more I was stepping into. So I started asking questions and suddenly found myself with a wealth of information that actually resonated with me.

Ever since then, I’ve made art a part of my practice. Not necessarily on a daily basis, but the parts of my practice that don’t involve art still work to strengthen myself as an artist. The two just seem to intertwine so well. Basically, an art witch is someone who not only incorporates art into their practice but finds a solid connection with their practice through their art. It’s more than just being an artist who also happens to practice witchcraft. I think anything creative that you can incorporate into your practice will strengthen both you and your practice, and I think that goes back to what I said earlier about creativity being a way to tap into the unseen. Really what makes you any kind of witch is figuring out where you feel like you step into your power. Where is it that you find that solid connection with yourself? If you want to find your connection to anyone or anything else, especially something intangible like “the other side,” you first have to find that connection with yourself, and that connection then has to be nurtured. There are many ways you can incorporate art into your practice, which I will be discussing further in upcoming posts, but one very basic application is using it to keep your mental health in check. Walking a spiritual path of any sort does not make you immune to life’s challenges, and let’s face it, 2020 has been the year for challenges. I would be lying if I were to say I haven’t been thrown off track a few times. However, looking back on those moments it’s easy to see where I just wasn’t applying any of my practice to keep myself in check.

Art is incredibly powerful in healing rituals, so naturally one of the main things I do to keep my mental health in check is to paint. I understand that not everyone is an artist or even remotely interested in such, but chances are you’re more creative than you think. When you’re engaged in something like artwork, you’re momentarily distracted from what ails you. You’re also allowing whatever state you’re in to just be, meaning you’re not berating yourself for it, which often does more damage than the initial state itself. An art ritual can be as simple as lighting a candle or burning incense and putting what you feel onto canvas. Lighting a candle or burning incense alone can sometimes be enough to help shift your state of mind. Of course no practice is meant to replace working with a professional when necessary, but it can certainly aid in the process. Art doesn’t always have to be a serious practice either though. There are times when I take what I’m doing more seriously, but it can be easy to get too caught up in that, so it’s equally important to let go and have fun.

Something new I’ve incorporated into my art practice is connecting with my paintings through card reading. As Ja Rule once said in a rap skit, “the cards never lie, it’s all in the tarot reading.” In all seriousness though, I find reading cards an excellent way to check in with my own energy, the energy around me, and as I stated, the energy of my paintings. One of the areas I began to feel stuck regarding my artwork was feeling like I never knew what to say about my pieces. It felt as though I wasn’t connecting with my own paintings on the level of the story they have to tell. Pulling cards is a creative way for me to go about that connection and allows for expansion in both my art and my practice. If you’re familiar with reading cards, then you know the kind of guidance and insight they have to offer, but it had never occurred to me to incorporate them in my art practice.

I think a lot of the time when we feel stuck, whether it’s in an area of life, an emotional state, or even a mindset, it’s because we need to look at how we could expand whatever it is. Even I go through periods where my artwork and practice feel stagnant, and it’s usually because I’m lacking growth in that area. All the extra free time we’ve been given this year due to the pandemic is also giving us the opportunity for major growth, and as many of us know, that can be uncomfortable. Maybe it’s time to try new things. I think it’s become glaringly evident (at least in the United States) that the way we’ve been going about things as a society is not working. Maybe that’s what the rising interest in witchcraft and the occult is all about. More and more people are waking up to the fact that a lot of what we’ve been fed, such as traditional religion, isn’t working anymore. Let me make it perfectly clear though, I have nothing against religion, so if it works for you that’s great.

For me witchcraft is about stepping into your own power. Does that mean you need it? No, of course not, it’s simply a tool. That’s why I can’t stress enough the importance of figuring out where you step into your power, or what it is that energizes you. It doesn’t have to be art or even witchcraft for that matter. It could literally be anything. Follow the things that spark your interest. If you are following the path of witchcraft, incorporate these things into your practice, even if they seem completely unrelated. These are all simple tools, and they will give you something to work with when you meet life’s inevitable challenges. It will also help to expand you and your practice as well.

Shades and Shadows Blog by @thecraftyvvitch

www.LaMorteXiii.com

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