The Fall BootyNox

When the seasons change, our bodies respond to the shifting environment. The way we walk and navigate space is strongly shaped by how the air feels on our skin. As your faithful Liberated Booty Coach, I am happy to advocate for your booties as the fall equinox dawns and sets many of us on the path to a crisp and cold winter. Oftentimes the Booty is the last thing on our minds as we focus on acquiring coats, hats, and shoes that can bear the frigid conditions. The Booty grows stiffer each day, not so much from the temperature dropping, but rather from the lack of attention we give the Booty after we lock it down under layers of warmth. So being proactive and sincerely booty conscious, I’ve created a special recipe of seasonally-sensitive liberated booty movements that will keep your booty activated and help you sustain your internal oven no matter what’s happening outside. Here's a brand new recipe for you to taste with your own booty...enjoy!


Recipe #56:
The Fall BootyNox

1. In a space that feels good to you, stand with your feet a little wider apart than usual. Bend the knees softly so that you can bounce gently and comfortably through your dance. Breathe in and out, allowing your body to find a home in a position that feels peaceful for you.

2. Imagine your booty is morphing from the vibrant heat of summer into the mellow coolness of autumn. What variety of shapes can you make to express this shift? What speeds, rhythms, or movement textures (choppy, smooth, tense, loose, etc.) does your booty choose to illustrate the shedding of summer into fall?

3. Try the morphing process over and over until you find your BootyNox. When you feel you’ve found the movements you love, experiment with traveling and changing levels. If you’re in another part of the world experiencing a different season, be aware of how the climate is initiating movement within you.

4. Wherever you are practice your BootyNox or create a new one. Share yours with a partner and try on someone else’s BootyNox. Record yourself dancing your BootyNox on different days and see how your booty continues to activate throughout the autumn season.

5. This is fun to do outside in your backyard or at your favorite park. Dance with the breeze, the crunch of leaves under your feet, or any other things that excite you about your surroundings. If you want to be inside, play your favorite music or just enjoy the song of your breath. As always, there are infinite ways to make this BootyNox your own!

booty portrait by colin danville

Prepping Independence Square :: A space activation lab in the making...

Ever since the first night I rode through Port of Spain's Independence Square, I knew I wanted to host a space activation lab of some magnitude in that space. Nearly 2 months into my Trinidad dance residency, I have been doing small-scale space activations at Independence Square to test out the "laboratory." I have also written a lot about my process as it unfolds.

This poem is the second in a series of pieces about Independence Square in Port of Spain, Trinidad. This space fascinates me for so many reasons. Oftentimes after space activating somewhere close by, I go and sit here, sometimes for an hour or more, just watching the diversity of life experiences in this space, writing about it, sorting through my creative projects, dreaming up more collaborations on all levels. Independence Square is also the site for a large space activation lab that i am doing in the near future. Are you in Trinidad...If you would like to be a part of the magic, contact JOYISM! at joyism@dancejoyism.com. This lab will also be professionally documented via film & photo.



we dazzle our world
jumbled hues bleating horns
flashing halogen eyes
fads scream brightly above
popular chicken houses
the red, white, and night
swirl and bounce
on the windows
cars mingle with pedestrians
drivers steer
passages through circles
space clamors
for more

the masses mash-up
on each other
identity softens and blurs
smeared onto seasoned slabs
the opening
a muster point
for the magic made
the day spent
its dreams dissolving
discarded traces soon dangling
on the past

the noise swells
and heaves its waves
the speed splinters time
transient lime unraveling on stone benches
circuits confess complex communities
the circus spins
yet strands itself in the now
a familiar thing draped as
spectacular

dark spots in the gutter
fat rats race the curb
machetes christen the coconuts
young flesh trails the street
the night falls down
impartially
everyone is welcome
but no one is home

7:56pm
1.13.2011
east side of the cipriani statue
independence square
port of spain, trinidad & tobago


A short film from a spontaneous space activation with a 5 year-old at Independence Square

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Stay tuned to the JOYISM! blog and be a part of my dance journeys in Trinidad. Subscribe to the blog, join JOYISM!'s mailing list, "like" JOYISM! on facebook--stay connected to the dance!

Contribute! Make a donation to JOYISM!'s Trinidad dance residency at any time. Your support is always appreciated and is strengthening my ability to create dance and peaceful exchanges with communities around the world. Find out more about my program in Trinidad at www.dancejoyism.com.

Binahkaye Joy's dance journey is featured for New Years!

The New Year is off to a great start in Trinidad! I spent the first day of 2011 writing about the intimate backstory of what it has taken to manifest JOYISM!'s Trinidad dance residency, the divine evolution of my career, and much more. I was invited by Imani A. Love of the HEALING BLACK WOMANHOOD BLOG to be a part of an exciting interview series of phenomenal women doing awesome things in their careers and the world. I was honored to be the New Year 2011 featured writer.

Here's an excerpt:

"....My journey over the past few years of getting to this point has been divinely tumultuous. Everyday that I breathe in the abundant island air, I am overwhelmed with thanksgiving and awesome wonder that “I did it!” After a series of traumatic losses, seasons of depression, physical challenges that at times inhibited my ability to dance the way I wanted to, and painful “truth-ache” lessons that inevitably expanded my awareness about life and love—I can honestly say that I am here…and still coming...."

Full story at THE HEALING BLACK WOMANHOOD BLOG

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Stay tuned to the JOYISM! blog and be a part of my dance journeys in Trinidad. Subscribe to the blog, join JOYISM!'s mailing list, "like" JOYISM! on facebook--stay connected to the dance!

Contribute! Make a donation to JOYISM!'s Trinidad dance residency at any time. Your support is always appreciated and is strengthening my ability to create dance and peaceful exchanges with communities around the world. Find out more about my program in Trinidad at www.dancejoyism.com.

Space Unknown | a spontaneous space activation collaboration

a magical space activation thru a sequence of unplanned events...

filmed on the solstice, december 21, 2010 just off de western main road, in trinidad...a tiny, galactic, globally-connected island just a few strokes north of south america

space activation & film by binahkaye joy

spontaneous collaborator & camera direction by emmanuel king

when i set out for "the beach", my maxi-taxi driver assured me that this was the "best place to go, for sure", and so i ventured into this space looking for the familiar beauty and grandeur of lush sands and buena vistas, and instead found myself another character in a scene of wonder, chaos, and community...

this is just an excerpt from a day of awesome art-making in the organic space activation laboratory...




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Stay tuned to the JOYISM! blog and be a part of my dance journeys in Trinidad. Subscribe to the blog, join JOYISM!'s mailing list, "like" JOYISM! on facebook--stay connected to the dance!

Contribute! Make a donation to JOYISM!'s Trinidad dance residency at any time. Your support is always appreciated and is strengthening my ability to create dance and peaceful exchanges with communities around the world. Find out more about my program in Trinidad at www.dancejoyism.com.

The process of "Space Activation"

As a Visionary Space Activator, I interpret the elements of any space through my vibrant, dancing body. Every space offers a unique cocktail of textures, shapes, sounds, smells, colors, air quality, history, meaning, community purpose, and much more. The space in which I dance interacts with my physical/ emotional/ spiritual/ creative body in different ways, and this union of body and space births a new dance each time.

I am interested in experiencing movements that I have created for “Adelaide Ocean Lullaby”, a segment of The Mother Project dance journey, in all types of spaces throughout Trinidad and Tobago. My great-great grandmother Adelaide Fisher Brown was from Jamaica, and immigrated to the United States after falling in love with a fisherman. I weave what little facts I know about Adelaide’s life into an intuitive movement process that continually evolves within each space I encounter.

When I dance, I experiment with many components of the space, incorporating the dip of the hills in Santa Margarita, the crash of the sunset tide at Las Cuevas against my body, the urgent siren pleading its way through Friday afternoon rush hour on Western Main Road. It is within the wondrous laboratory of organic, unscripted (oftentimes public) spaces that I feel most free to delve into the choreographic possibilities of The Mother Project. I tune into the spatial sensitivities of the moment and discover new patterns and sensations of movement along the way. While in this increased state of creative openness, I ponder the unknowns of Adelaide’s story in my body, filling in the gaps with a dance that expresses my intuitive process of ancient memories, emotions, language, and movement.

The dance is still young in my body, eager to bloom amongst the many frequencies of Trinidad and Tobago’s ripe and abundant spaces.



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Stay tuned to the JOYISM! blog and be a part of my dance journeys in Trinidad. Subscribe to the blog, join JOYISM!'s mailing list, "like" JOYISM! on facebook--stay connected to the dance!

Contribute! Make a donation to JOYISM!'s Trinidad dance residency at any time. Your support is always appreciated and is strengthening my ability to create dance and peaceful exchanges with communities around the world. Find out more about my program in Trinidad at www.dancejoyism.com.

Vibing on Nina Simone's "Aunt Sarah" in Trinidad

The dance comes in many forms, at unsuspecting times. Throughout my movement study in Trinidad for The Mother Project, I am also allowing the creative surges to develop other pieces I am working on. As a member of The Saartjie Project who cannot physically be with my sistren while in Trinidad, it is important that I share my dance and ideas with them however I can. I have been collecting film of me dancing in a variety of spaces in and around Port of Spain, Trinidad. I put together a short piece with movements I felt resonated with Aunt Sarah's character in Nina Simone's classic song, "Four Women". The Saartjie Project's upcoming 2011 season is inspired by this masterpiece and the issues it paints about our lives as black women. Enjoy, share, dance!




More info
www.thesaartjieproject.org
Nina Simone singing "Four Women"

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Stay tuned to the JOYISM! blog and be a part of my dance journeys in Trinidad. Subscribe to the blog, join JOYISM!'s mailing list, "like" JOYISM! on facebook--stay connected to the dance!

Contribute! Make a donation to JOYISM!'s Trinidad dance residency at any time. Your support is always appreciated and is strengthening my ability to create dance and peaceful exchanges with communities around the world. Find out more about my program in Trinidad at www.dancejoyism.com.

COCO Dance Festival in Port of Spain, Trinidad

Just hours off the plane and I was swept up into a community dance festival hosted by COCO, the Contemporary Choreographers' Collective. This portion of the program was called "inter-space" as my piece, a remixed version of "Adelaide Ocean Lullaby/The Mother Project", activated the space from Alice Yard on Roberts Street to Bohemia on Murray Street. When the music went out on the radio, Sonja Dumas, the COCO coordinator, kindly looked up to me and said, "You'll have to do it without music." Of course, impromptu, crowd participation is always a part of the JOYISM! process, so I was happy to journey with the dance and the people. Enjoy this short movie I made with highlights from the COCO festival street dance processional.




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Stay tuned to the JOYISM! blog and be a part of my dance journeys in Trinidad. Subscribe to the blog, join JOYISM!'s mailing list, "like" JOYISM! on facebook--stay connected to the dance!

Contribute! Make a donation to JOYISM!'s Trinidad dance residency at any time. Your support is always appreciated and is strengthening my ability to create dance and peaceful exchanges with communities around the world. Find out more about my program in Trinidad at www.dancejoyism.com.

#7 Space & #8 Adelaide Ocean Lullaby {10 things I want from Trinidad}

#7 Space | "My joy is stimulated by vast, wide, open spaces, both literally and figuratively"--excerpt from my 2010 artist statement

As a Visionary Space Activator, access to a diversity of spaces is essential to my creative process. Each space contributes to the stimulation of new ideas, awakens my body to unexplored movement. Every space is coded with its own spatial sensitivities, and these unique elements give texture and context to the origin and experience of the movement within that space. There is an infinite variation of movement in all spaces because each breath that we take shifts the nature of any space in a subtle, almost undetectable way. Every space that I encounter then becomes a laboratory of unconditional possibilities, informing my dance in a way that only that cocktail of space and time could.

Trinidad is a vibrant laboratory for JOYISM! for so many reasons. The fact that is a brand new space to my body speaks volumes alone. Another irresistible element of Trinidad is that it is an island, surrounded by oceans. Trinidad's spatial orientation on the planet stimulates a completely different frequency than what the east coast of the United States offers me, with its tall highways and compact concrete. The dance will birth itself anew in Trinidad, and I am eager to activate new spaces within and around me.

#8 Adelaide Ocean Lullaby | The Mother Project work-in-process...

Adelaide Fisher Brown is my great-great grandmother. She is the mother of William Brown, who is the father of Gloria Jean Brown, who is the mother of my father, Wayne. Adelaide was from Barbados, and immigrated to the United States at a very young age. There are little facts still left about her life, and so her story is largely an in-depth intuitive journey. I feel that being in the space of the Caribbean unlock parts of her dance and story that I could not have come across in Washington, DC.

The Mother Project's process engages the intuitive memory of our psychic selves and also the memory pre-coded in our biological DNA. Some strand of me is purely Adelaide, and so the dance is a physical action that gives me a real time connection to a woman who lived and died long before I ever existed. Adelaide Ocean Lullaby is a choreopoem exploring the intuitive direction that is coming through my dancing body. Her story is one of a woman who never dreams that she will be leaving home, and her mother, forever. And so she has to find a way to create peace and mother herself in the United States.

Adelaide's story is still very young in my body, but my dance journey in Trinidad will allow it to mature into its next phases. Read more about the The Mother Project and its early stages at www.dancejoyism.com.


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Stay tuned to the JOYISM! blog for the complete series, "10 things I want from Trinidad." Also, I will be writing about my dance journeys in Trinidad and posting them to the JOYISM! blog. Subscribe to the blog, join JOYISM!'s mailing list, "like" JOYISM! on facebook--stay connected to the dance!

Contribute! Make a donation to JOYISM!'s Trinidad dance residency at any time. Your support is always appreciated and is strengthening my ability to create dance and peaceful exchanges with communities around the world. Find out more about my program in Trinidad at www.dancejoyism.com.

Photos: Ganges River, Rishikesh, India February 2006; Coast of Seminyak, Bali, Indonesia, May 2006

#6 Carnival {10 things I want from Trinidad}

“The soul of the people is in its dance…”

Imagine. A whole country dancing, everyone finding some rhythm in the body, some interpretation of the space, and sharing it with the whole. This is paradise to me. Not just the fancy costumes, and Trinidad’s tropical climate, and the sensual abundance of the féte—but Carnival as the ultimate communal dance jam is ecstasy to me! It is massive, and the whole island stops to commemorate its majesty. This is ancient genius at its best, an annual ritual where everybody belongs! Again, in the expert opinion of a Visionary Space Activator, the human community’s collective dance is how we reach world peace. Carnival is literally how we move in love.

I first heard of Carnival in a GQ magazine when I was about 16. A big feature story opened with a Carnival Queen’s huge gold feathers taking up both pages. I remember thinking, “I belong in her world. There is something here for me.” A few months after coming across the article, my friend Keita’s mother, who was from Trinidad, took a group of us to Washington, DC’s Carnival in June 1998. My life was transformed forever.

HOW I had managed to grow up in DC, just across town from this annual communal soul celebration and never know about it, blew my mind. I was soooooo at home in Carnival's street, being carried by the force of the people down Georgia Avenue. The loud bands blasting music from the trucks, the mud people streaking through us with glee. Keita’s mom bought all of us Trini flags to wave in the air, and we jumped and danced down the mashed up parade—I was in heaven!

After that little taste of dance divine, I started to crave more and more carnival. I wanted to go to New York’s labor day carnival, and then to Toronto’s…I wanted to dance in every carnival there was. I read After the Dance: A walk through Jacmel, by Edwidge Danticat (one of my favorites), and wanted to dance Haiti’s carnival. I decided I was part Bahiain somewhere in my blood and wanted to go to Salvador’s carnival. But more than any other country, I wanted to know Trinidad’s carnival. That instant resonation I felt all those years ago as a teen flipping through pages of a magazine is still strong within my spirit today.

As a Visionary Space Activator who has spent much of her life in places where movement is not fully celebrated, who grew up in a country where the closest thing to national celebration is the Superbowl—Carnival presents the ultimate opportunity to dance in peace with my tribe of indigenous dancing, booty-shaking, soul gyrating humans. Such people are certainly scattered throughout all nations. But the intensity of a million dancing bodies in one place is a spiritual retreat for someone like me who is often the only body dancing up the space. I have been loved and feared alike in the United States for my spontaneous, open space dance process. I am excited to surrender myself to the communal movement, where it's already understood that everyone can dance here.

As much as I have wanted to experience Trinidad’s carnival for myself, I have also always wanted to witness life in the country when it wasn’t carnival time. So, I chose to start my dance residency in November and stay through the winter (we’ll there is no winter in Trinidad!) months and participate in carnival in March. I am sure what little I think I know about Carnival will be exploded into a symphony of wondrous, paradoxical happenings. Whatever it is I do finally experience, the dance will lead me through!

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Stay tuned to the JOYISM! blog for the complete series, "10 things I want from Trinidad." Also, I will be writing about my dance journeys in Trinidad and posting them to the JOYISM! blog. Subscribe to the blog, join JOYISM!'s mailing list, "like" JOYISM! on facebook--stay connected to the dance!

Contribute! Make a donation to JOYISM!'s Trinidad dance residency at any time. Your support is always appreciated and is strengthening my ability to create dance and peaceful exchanges with communities around the world. Find out more about my program in Trinidad at www.dancejoyism.com.