Good News... We Got Creative Capital!

Hello querides,

In the midst of what has been a challenging time for all of us, I am happy to share a bit of good news... I was awarded a Creative Capital 2022 grant!

I am deeply excited to bring to life "Body as a Crossroads", a new performance work and budding methodology for radical embodiment I have been spearheading since 2018. (and by the way… we are currently looking for a part-time Production Assistant to support our process from now until May 2022. If you're interested in joining the team or know someone who might be, check out this link!)

For those of you who might not know, Creative Capital is a $50,000 grant awarded annually to a select group of artists for the creation of groundbreaking new work. I have dreamed of applying for some years now, having watched many artists I deeply admire receive this honor-- mentors like Amara Tabor-Smith, my collaborator Carolina Caycedo, and greats like Ronald K. Brown, Rennie Harris, Ralph Lemon, and Bebe Miller to name a few.

Like most things these past two years, the road to arrive at this good news was bittersweet. While I was working on the grant application at the start of 2021, I became pregnant for the second time and once again lost the pregnancy. I was miscarrying for most of the time I was writing my proposal, strangely comforted by the ability to bring a creative vision to life, if not the small being inside me.

When I found out I would be a recipient of this incredible opportunity, joy and grief swept over me in alternating waves. And somewhere in there was an undeniable sense of gratitude-- for this remarkable honor, and for my spirit-baby whose presence echoed in every word I wrote.

In this moment of ongoing pandemic and infinite hardships, I am present to the resilience I feel deep in my bones and the kind I see in so many loved ones around me. Our bodies miscarry, get sick, injured, depressed, distressed, and yet... we remain.

We heal.
We create.

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I feel lucky to be surrounded and supported by community, without which none of my work would be possible. Special thanks goes to Bianca Medina for being a co-conspirator in this vision from its inception, to Emily Goulding for helping me craft language and making the grant possible, to Tatiana Zamir for adding so much depth to the work just this past year, and to DiverseWorks for partnering with us in the first activation of this project.
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This is just the beginning… stay tuned for more!
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Reposted from @Creative_Capital:
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Creative Capital just announced the recipients of the 2022 Creative Capital Awards! The grants will fund the creation of 50 new and innovative projects by 59 individual artists working in the performing arts, visual arts, film, technology, literature, and socially engaged and multidisciplinary practices. Each project will receive varying amounts up to $50,000 in direct funding, supplemented by career development and networking services to foster thriving artistic careers totaling up to $2.5 million in artist support. Learn more at creative-capital.org
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Congratulations to the 2022 Creative Capital Awardees! Creative Capital just announced 50 projects—the work of 59 individual artists spanning the visual arts, performing arts, film, literature, socially engaged and multidisciplinary practices—to receive the prestigious award. Each project will receive varying amounts up to $50,000 in direct funding, supplemented by career development and networking services to foster thriving artistic careers. Learn more: creative-capital.org.

What if failure is just another word for play?

The other day, I went to the beach and improvised along the ocean. ⠀

It wasn’t my “best” dancing. ⠀

But there was something alluring about that imperfection.

The uneven ground inviting me off balance, sand derailing my pathways, the salty ocean wind a dance partner all of its own… ⠀

This return to my body feels important to me. ⠀

A vulnerable, tender thing that often feels like failure…⠀

But what is failure if not play in disguise?⠀

And what is liberation if not play? ⠀

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Please know, as we return to our dancing, moving bodies, after 1 yr+ of highly stagnated lives, that you have the right to feel the FULLNESS of that return.⠀

The stumbling, the falling, the awkwardness, the weak muscles, the shortness of breath, the pandemic panza, the vulnerable reawakening of muscles you haven’t used in months, the beauty of being a living breathing body that gets to learn and fail and play…

ALL OF IT.⠀

I just started going back to dance class a few weeks ago, and it’s been a real humbling experience. Simultaneously loving the return of rhythms and movements that had lied dormant in my bones all these months, and spiraling with anxiety in all the moments my body simply could not keep up.  ⠀

The more I talk to folks though, the more I’m realizing I’m not alone in this feeling. I’ve lost track of the amount of times I’ve heard someone self-consciously talk about needing to get rid of their “covid belly”, or talk about how terrified they are of dancing again…⠀

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Here’s an invitation: what if you met that fear with curiosity & play?

(What if curious is just another word for love? What if failure is just another word for play?)

What might you find?⠀

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Video credits…⠀

musica: Iemanjá⠀

movement improvisation: Marina Magalhães, ocean water, sand & maresia ⠀

*I don’t have the rights to this song 

A Call for Darkness: Postpartum Lessons for Emerging Out of Pandemic

We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction… We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.

— Sonya Renee Taylor

In the last week I have hugged dear friends and family members I have not seen in the flesh in over a year. I have traveled by airplane for the first time in 18 months. I have enjoyed a meal while sitting inside a restaurant for the first time in 15 months. I have found myself in public settings anxiously trying to remember how to do the most innocuous things— hold eye contact, negotiate personal space with strangers, and respond when asked a question.

The anxiety that blossomed in my chest as I sat at the airport terminal two days ago, getting ready to travel outside of Los Angeles for the first time since pandemic, was visceral and undeniable. While I watched a troubling sea of normalcy unfold around me— people bustling to get in line, buying snacks from the kiosk, scrolling on their phones— all I could manage was slow and deliberate breathing.

I was reminded in that moment that—sure, the world around us may be “going back to normal”, but our bodies know better.

Our bodies hold the memory of quarantining in our homes for most of the last 15 months. Of watching as COVID death tolls skyrocketed around the world— over 500,000 deaths in the US alone, with numbers in Brazil (400,000+) and India (300,000+) still climbing. Of witnessing (and partaking in) an explosion of social uprisings—in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, state-sanctioned killings in Colombia, and the devastating 11-day bombing of Gaza by Israeli military.

In this moment, we are reckoning with death and grief in unprecedented ways. And I can’t help but notice the similarities between this collective reckoning and my own from this past year.

Last summer, I had a 14-week miscarriage, following a 10-week pregnancy. And earlier this year, I had a 5-week miscarriage, following a 6-week pregnancy. My journey with pregnancy loss has deeply defined me— something I have tried to be open about through social media and blog posts, in an attempt to normalize this devastating and painfully taboo subject that an estimated 1 in 3 pregnant people experience.

I can’t help but notice the painful poetry of this past year, having experienced the deepest grief of my life as I watched the world around me do the same.

I do not know what postpartum is like when it follows the birth of a living child. I only know it as an act of mourning. An impossible period of time, where one must contend with life in the wake of devastating loss. With what is being born out of what is dying.

I can’t help but notice that this is the same space we are collectively finding ourselves in now, as we emerge from global pandemic.

As someone who has been reckoning with this space in a very personal way for a year now, I want to share that there is profound wisdom and power here. In this darkness. A darkness that is, “as much of the womb as of the grave,” as Rebecca Solnit so artfully says in her book, Hope In the Dark. One that resembles, “the silence of nightfall, where we can hear the silenced voices amplified by the echo of stillness,” as my compañera and teacher Thea Monyeé recently wrote in her IG platform.

But perhaps Audre Lorde captured it best when she wrote…

“There is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, beautiful and tough as chestnut, stanchions against (y)our nightmare of weakness and of impotence. These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.” ”

— Audre Lorde, "Poetry Is Not a Luxury"

I pray that we have the courage to stay in this darkness, long enough to learn from it.

That, as we transition out of our quarantines, we recognize our grief and make space for it. That we wear it, however uncomfortably, as we make our tender way back to each other.

That we allow our bodies to be slow and heavy in the transition. To be awkward and rusty and real when we finally see our beloveds in the flesh.

That, when we are unsure of how to grieve, we turn to the death doulas for guidance. And the grieving mothers, who have held death in their wombs and chosen to live nonetheless.

That we put money, time, energy, and resources towards the ancestral traditions that teach us how to be in harmony with the natural world. That we listen to Black and Indigenous voices who have been preserving and cultivating this knowledge for centuries.

That we prioritize funding the artists, healers, and educators who can help us make sense of this past year. Whose offerings will help us hold the complexities of pain, grief, joy, guilt, gratitude, and transformation we are collectively contending with.

I know I am not the only one praying for this.

Manifesting this.

Enacting this into the world.

Are you?