My movements are a celebration and a testament to the abundance inherent in each breath
Spin
Inside the Creation Stories of Dancing Mother
My movements are a celebration and a testament to the abundance inherent in each breath
by Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy
This week I applied to my first performance opportunity in 3 years. It was a spontaneous decision when I got an email that the application was due by midnight. I hadn’t seen any other notifications about it. And it felt like divine timing because I had just decided to apply for an artist fellowship that’s due in a few weeks, and I was reading up about how to write an artist statement for that application. And then I saw this new opportunity and it needed an artist statement too. So I thought, “What’s there to lose? I’ll just see what emerges in the next few hours and submit it, and then I won’t be starting from scratch with the fellowship application.” So I did it! I submitted a very well-thought out proposal in a very short time! And with 9 minutes to go, too!
So that’s the origin story of my newest artist statement. It’s short because the application had a word limit, but I love it, and I’ve been reading and rereading. Now I can keep expanding on it and have multiple versions ready to go whenever I need them.
My Artist Statement
Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy dances a life inside pockets of possibility and creates expansive, movement laboratories out of everyday spaces that are soft, vast, and fluid enough for multitudinous mothering entities. Her work explores the movements, stories and futures born from a mother’s body that is (nearly) always attached to or in close proximity to her children. As a descendant of Africans who were once enslaved on the same soil where she miraculously came into existence, Mother Mother dances the dreams and freedom songs of her foremothers, her movements reimagining the elasticity and capacity of mothering labors, and mending the aching hearts and generational fractures of the mothers in her bloodline who were forcibly separated from their children. Mother Mother dances at home and out in the world, surrounded by her children who are freely moving in their own joys and rhythms. Her movements are a celebration and a testament to the abundance inherent in each breath, and a radical commitment to making something beautiful with her dancing body however tiny, chaotic or impractical the moment might seem to be.
