Community Building - The Dom(free) S(cool) + Exploration Year

i will be discussing this briefly via IG live of May 22 at 6pm est. I hope you will join me. 

coloniality requires you to work from the top down when it comes to the body. 

colonial wild fire exists because we have tipped to far into masculinity.  it says that thoughts or your intellect is the most important, air. Followed by air is passion and action and uplifted next, fire, which precedes the body and its intuition, earth, leaving the emotions last, the wata the depth of healing. 

i’ve used the terms colonial wild fire (the spacing is important) and indigenous wildfire. 

colonial wild fire is a seeking of everything without in order to make yourself hole. it is a believe that the world, others, religion, the state know better than you do yourself. It teaches you to loop, to stay trapped in the same generations cycles that benefit empire. In that linear box that we all leaned how to play snake, it’s a box that is meant to control you, never to set you free. 

indigenous wildfire is a turning in. a seeking of everything within in order to make you w(hole), and a reorganizing of the self to move from a place of embodiment, intention, and care. 

it is the full recognition that you and I are the tech(know)logy, we turn colonial loops in to layered spirals, where with each season, reversing osmo(cis), we are able to move thru generational traumas, actually closing the cycle, moving generational legacy forward while collapsing empire. 

this is the foundation for The Dom(free) S(cool), which along with Litm(us) lives within, The Wata(ring) W(hole) and its under the cloud formation of the Embodiment Dia. The Body Electric is a new fungi coursework specifically for Black and brown bodies that will also live within the wata(ring). 

if you haven’t had the chance to engage the I ritual offerings and writings around my cosmos I encourage you to do so. 

healing within the west is fractured. It is a band-aid because you aren’t meant to heal in completion, because that would mean you no longer need to rely on the state. 

there typically is always one portion of healing that is left off or isn’t achieved and the reasoning behind this is multilayered. it is one part self sabotage and one part the state who benefits from your not healing. 

i cannot bring the full healing of The Dom(free) to community until I have moved through all of my healing, and the last portion of that which I am already in, the restoration and reclamation of a body that I have never known. The shedding of weight and familial fears that have kept me from true relationship and collaboration with equal counterparts. 

this exploration year I will be taking will allow my healing to be  a full 360, that I can then teach and share with others. 

embodiment is a bottom up affair.

indigenous Wildfire.

the watas, your emotions are the first step and they must be released and reset in full so that they can nourish the body, the earth from and placed of rooted sovereignty, only then can I move into a placed of action, fire, that is controlled by a balance of elements, that cannot be carried away by the air, intellectualizing and hollow talk because we understand what it means to let the body lead. we know that discernment and intuition always lead the intellect. 

to be Dom(free) means we need to move away from the verbosity of talking the talk instead leaning how to walk and then read the walk and it’s rhythmic intention; because everyone knows how to talk, everyone has perfected their hollow performance of a language that is not theirs, where interpretation creates smoke and mirrors and disembodiment. 

The Dom(Free) S(cool) is an exploration in non verbal community building, it is an experimental coursework.  a space where embodiment and discernment are built, not by talking, but in learning to understand our own personal rhythms through non verbal engagement.  By letting the body lead, we can learn to heal and also begin the tender makings of how to actually live harmoniously in community with those who are different from you. A reclaiming of our inner child via wild restorative movement, music making, theater, and other indigenous artistic tools of expression that decenter the written and spoken word. 

over this next year I will be diving deep back into my theatre and art bag by taking indigenous coursework’s and other ways of learning that I have used over my life that helped me to be embodied 

for example, yes we have ASL as a tool of non verbal communication, so learning ASL is on the list, but we have other tools that use the hands that are ways of non verbal communication and grounding. Ways that helps us to understand the vibrations and emotions of others without spoken word. Kathakali and the use of mudras in southeast asian culture is another example, while yes music is typically involved, the tech(know)logy of the body is there. Nsibidi via Afrikan culture is another example. 

how can we take these ancient forms of communication and being and update them within the context of healing, indigenous wildfire, and community. 

dance is another form of communication. as someone who has spent a large part of their life working with dancers, there is a clear recognition that western dance is a tool of control, dance is taken and made into spectacle in the west and in global south now. when it was always about expression of emotion, placing that energy in motion, releasing, and healing the body and by extension others. 

and not from simply watching but from participating. it doesn’t matter if you can dance, it is about connecting body to it own rhythm and sending the bad out through our movements inviting ancestors and spirit in place,  grounding. 

we live in a culture that says you can performatively extract the energy of others, cosplay it as your own, all while healing moves further and further away. 

so how can we learn to be in space relationally with one another without the stinking seed of colonial competition and hyperlexic boo boo? 

how do we embody and exude all that we are instead of a performative listing of pretty shiny things we have collected and learned but applied to nada? 

what does it feel like to execute a recipe or learn a cooking technique without talking? 

how does the dance party change when the vibes can only be heard individually and not collectively. can I still vibe with you if the music we are hearing is different or our bodies are timed to it differently? 

how can we use different tools of plant wellness not for escape but actually to help me lean in full to my body and then to connect to others? 

how can simple acts of intimacy like caring for one another's scalps, minus the tea but with a cup of warm tea, and the energy of the people who care for us most pushing us forward? 

how do we do it?

i have been doing it. You have been watching in in action.

i have it all laid out but in order to be the fullness of who I am within this work, I have to complete the journey.  

now that I have worked the wata to roots, bottom up, grounding, I must now put my energy in motion, my aligned elements and body back in play. 

the last bit of this trauma weight is ready to be shed because I am no longer meant to be in hermit mode. I am meant to be in the world connecting with people directly no longer via the chaotic waves of the internet. I am not interested in hiding but I can’t teach ya’ll how to get Dom(free) if I myself am in captivity.  chosen captivity nonetheless because that is what healing requires. But now ancient ancestral flower blooms. I have spent the entirety of the healing process, helping others when that wasn’t my responsibility, and to my own detriment. 

so this next year is selfishly all mine so that I can selflessly come back into community from a place of intention and care and not fear and hyper vigilance. 

below is a very messy list of the things I will be executing. all of them aren’t here. some you aren’t meant to see. 

i have set a date of the end of leo season to make this goal of 11k.

this coin will be used in tandem with grant funds that will be coming in. 

this is going to require is depth of consistency from those of you all who recognize and are willing to collaborate with me to help make this year a reality. 

the kickoff to this year will be my starting off in South Africa at the end of the year. 

notes on my year of exploration 

the dom(free) s(cool) when launched will be a small traveling wata(ring) bazaar, for intimate groups of persons that will launch them into actual community care via understanding their own rhythms and eventually the rhythms of others non verbally. 

The year

Dance & Movement tings 

ASL

SE Asian Dance

Mudras 

Afrikan Dance 

Afro Cuban Dance 

Yoga Expansion 

Non traditional Avant Garde Movement Classes 

taste, touch, breathe tings

Indigenous Cooking Classes 

Afrikan Drumming Class 

Breathwork Class

Reiki Class 

Slow Art Praxis - art techniques that encourages community and non verbal communication. 

non traditional meditation forms

theatre tings 

Refresh Playwriting Course 

Refresh Directing course 

Retreat with ability to go to since setting and build concepts around guerilla theatre using and reworking old Black plays with a queer lens. example and all trans cast of Fats Wallers Ain’t Misbehavn as an exploration into gender study. 

non verbal forms of theatre movement that help in community building 

the roots 

afrikan herbalism coursework

hoodoo herbalism coursework (empress karen m rose)

advanced fungi course - to connect my depth knowledge to best practices, and to begin study of afrikan fungi 

the cosmos 

Pottery Class

Brooklyn Metal Works Jewelry Coursework

Stained Glass Class 

Glass Blowing Class 

Jewelry Class (porting and molding metals) 

body ting

Scuba Diving Class 

Water Safety Class 

Canoe Class

Stand Up Boarding Class 

Hiking Coursework 

travel ting

South Afrika 

Senegal 

East Afrika 

Cape Verde 

Brazil 

Cuba 

India 

Thailand 

Louisiana 

notes on the the DOM(free) S(cool)

non verbal community building - how do we do it? 

living list to be developed further 

• atonal music - yt people trying to make naturally indigenous processes of music their own. 

• using Black line dance as a tool of healing and not just a tool of partying 

• organic improv movement, weird music, thing movement class in undergrad 

• exploring plant life fungi and connections and creating and healing praxis with them not just an escape praxis. 

• color therapy - event where everyone wears the same colors, writes expressions around the same color, bathed in color,  lighting everywhere that creates different environments for engagement. listening to music and seeing images that evokes specific colors

• Prompts or an event where people are asked to respond nonverbally. Asking a question and responding with a song, etc..

• silent listening party - non-traditional, unique music that evokes the senses and  colors

• painting, coloring, creative crafts ( using video, written direction, etc for persons and seeing how perception changes with end result 

• keeping talking events, but keeping them limited and asking people to work with a boundary framework where they cannot - explode chaos onto the community - explosive emotion and learning not to lead from that place, but instead turning that curiosity inward when the response is extreme. Waiting to engage others until the body of water has calmed.

• Reading rainbow. Book club where the book report is nonverbal and non-written - could be songs items food, etc. that tells us about their experience of the book - reading aloud to one another without inserting personal thoughts - allowing people to keep notes but also the recognition that if it becomes about about note taking, then they’re not engaging intentionally with the communal aspect of energetically engaging a story together. 

• cooking non verbally - pre-templated cooking script that goes out and then people visually cook together

• Nonverbal storytelling where one person writes one section and the next person picks up, but there’s no speaking. One person will read the entire story at the end or maybe each person reads their section at the end out loud.

• sensory play - Finger painting, play dough, musical instruments, sandboxes, pouring stations, sensory tables, homemade musical instruments, footprint painting, silly putty or cornflour slime, scented play-dough. 

• fungi walks/nature walks

• the name game creating hand sigils and your own personal sign language you can share with people. Also ASL. basic Asl, mudras, nsibidi. 

• strictly stimting let’s gets fidgety - sessions, where people are encouraged to do movement engage their body and objects in a way that is expanding and not constricting the undoing of being seen and not heard. The undoing of respectability specifically on the femme body.

• making music - everybody brings an instrument and organic jam session. It’s not meant to be too serious. So serious musicians will have to release control. Or perhaps it would be a cool idea to have some serious musicians with helping set up general loose construct, but then letting it free flow.

• write a 5 -7 minute play that communicates vibe or or idea nonverbally - non verbal charades 

• what do you hear and how does it make you feel? 

• write a choreopoem and then choreograph 

• non verbal tv shows, discovery + immersions etc the practice of being still of notice the need to do things when there  are no words to be distracted by