Episode 95: transcendent // Thursday, July 9

Chicava: Let's face it. Tensions are high and simple conversations on social media dwindle into power struggles with a few short taps of thumbs. We're moving through a very, very unstable time. So much is changing. 

They say change is the only constant--and really all you ever know your whole life is change. You can say a lot of things about 2020, but you can't say it's not going fast. It does have speed on its side. At least it's not a long slow March.  

Laura: This week on Shelter in Place, I’m sharing conversations with the women who wrote FIERCE: Essays by and About Dauntless Women. You’ll hear from all thirteen of those women tomorrow, but these conversations have been too good to keep to myself, so I’m sharing a few of them with you in more depth this week. 

Chicava: Hi, I'm Chicava Honeychild, one of the writers in FIERCE: Essays by and About Dauntless Women.  I'm an African American woman. I am from Boulder, Colorado. My family moved there a few years before I was born after traveling around in the military. 

Being a part of fierce has been so amazing. It’s stories of little known women in history that inspired us personally. And that 13 of us came together and introduced each other and the world to these little spoken names. It's just very, very magical. I think fierce is deeply connecting across time and space for women around the world 

Laura: What makes FIERCE so special is that each story has a personal connection to the woman who wrote it. For Chicava, that connection goes deep, and reaches back to when she was first figuring out the kind of woman she wanted to be.

I wrote about Chicaba the first, mystical healer, from the 1700s. She was abducted into slavery in the late 1600s and lived her days in Spain. And I've always felt a very deep connection to her since the first day I learned about her. 

So it is a story that begins in college. When I was reading Ivan Van Sertima’s African history in ancient Europe. And there's this one little paragraph that mentioned this nun, Chicava or Chicaba--you can do it with a B or V--in Santo Domingo, Spain, and the miracle work that she did, and . . . dot, dot, dot, . . . she was abducted into slavery in 1672ish, and first taken to Portugal. And then she appeared to be of royal lineage. So she was a slave that would be given to someone in higher society. In the whole idiosyncratic, perverse nature of it all, if you were royal, then you deserved to have the royal kidnapped people for your slaves, as opposed to just common kidnapped people. It's sick. It's really sick. 

So that little paragraph made me want to know about her. And the name, you know, it's so unique. It just stuck with me. I thought I'd maybe named my kid that, or a cat that, it just was floating in my head. Chicava. 

And I decided to become a burlesque performer, and we create names for ourselves. We Shero-name ourselves, alter ego secret agent. I don't know. We make up a burlesque name for ourselves. And I knew I wanted mine to be meaningful to me, and still fun and sexy. I knew I wanted it to be unique. And so I remembered Chicava. 

And right at that time, a scholar named Sue Houchins up at Bates University was working on Chicava, and working on a translation, which I think, is just finally done of her hagiography, which is the biography of a Saint that was written somewhat with her, and right after her passing. This hagiography is a marketing document for the sainting of Chicaba. And so for me at first I took it like, wow. Okay. Is it okay for me to be a strip teaser that names herself after a nun? 

And then I kind of learned that because she was an African woman, when her mistress died, she granted Chicaba her freedom. And since it was a rich house, Chicaba chose to enter the nunnery, and had quite a big dowry to share. But even though she would be a good endowment for any nunnery, she faced a lot of racism. And the only place that would take her was in Santo Domingo. And it was a convent for fallen lost women--you know, strippers, hookers. This is the lowest rung that a convent can be. And they admitted her at the lowest rung that they possibly could. 

But as legend has it, she was what we would call today an energy healer. She helped a lot of people.  That story has been years in coming to me because at first, I understood that she was in the lowest rung of convents. But it wasn't even until 2010, 2012, that I had enough information to really understand that, yeah, you named yourself after a sister who's there vying for her sainthood and she tended to you're kind--if you want to label burlesque performers and striptease as somewhat of a fallen woman, which under the Inquisition, we definitely would be.

Laura: I think it’s worth pausing to give Chicava’s experience as a burlesque performer and teacher a moment of consideration. Chicava is a lifelong dancer. After college, when she first learned about the Chicaba she wrote about, she received an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College and has degrees in fashion design and fashion marketing. She was also trained as a Universal Dao teacher. As an actress, she’s worked with Spike Lee and Robert Altman. She’s been awarded an artist residency with the Public Theater in NYC, and been invited to teach, perform, and lecture internationally and on the university circuit. 

Chicava: I've always loved glamour and I've always loved big musicals and costumes, and I loved dancing. And watching those, there was always an element, the lead dancer would always take a little something off. It is a connecting thread, burlesque is the primary template of pop feminine American performance. 

So I had always wanted to do it. And at a given point, I just took the leap. I went to a show, the neo-burlesque movement was coming along and I was living in Los Angeles at that time, a very not-working actor, needing something creative to do. ‘Cause it was more challenging living out there to be in plays and to have a day job and move all around town. I needed something that was a creative practice that I could just do on my own.

So that's how I started doing it. And then I moved back to New York shortly after. And Brown Girls Burlesque was starting, and I joined in with them and went on to become the creative producer of that.  And after 12 or so years, I'm passing it on to a new generation to craft a new vision and keep that work going while I focus my energy on my new company, Sacred Chrysalis, which focuses on Tao energetic work and sacred sexuality, and then we use burlesque from there. 

I would love for people to learn more about what I'm up to at SacredChrysalis.com. It's really terrific women's work. And I think it goes hand in hand with the energy of FIERCE. So I invite anybody to come hang out. I do a free weekly that anyone can try, and I'll be growing it from here.

It's the experience of being at home in your body and in tune with your body.  

Because so much is changing. You know, they say change is the only constant--and really all you ever know your whole life is change.  

Let's face it. Tensions are high and simple conversations on social media dwindle into power struggles with a few short taps of thumbs. We're moving through a very, very unstable time. 

The hardest part for me is the hardest part for everybody: whatever mirrors came up for self examination or questioning or rethinking and sitting alone in, solitude with it. It's a time of emergence.  

Some of the issues that we're tackling with Black Lives Matter and our rights and the safety and sovereignty of our body . . . there's some hard lines for me on, if someone in my life was diametrically opposed to this, we could go no further. 

But there's a lot of things that I consciously have stopped power-struggling with. We need to not mind if people see things a different way and if they aren't up to speed with whatever you're up to speed with. Cause everybody is feeling and doing and living just as intensely as the next person, you know, and we need to have an equal level of compassion for each other and what we're grappling with. 

And you have, they'll be really in tune with yourself because everything around you, it's going to change, so you're going to be the constant. That's what I wish for people to have a greater understanding about right now is that you have to become your own center of stability.

And this gentleness of being connected, deeper and deeper inside ourselves, is fundamental to our health and wellbeing, and I think will help us with people we care about, people we encounter, the news we read. Just giving people grace, and getting real centered and peaceful with yourself.

I've found a lot of abundance and blessing in feeling very connected to my neighbors. Being a neighbor has been the best part, spending more time with my neighbors, talking to them, helping each other, sharing food. One of my neighbors gets an extra CSA box for me on Thursdays from their church. And it's this gorgeous box of abundant greenness that comes, and that I really have liked.

Laura: As a mother of two young girls, I’m deeply aware of our hyper-sexual culture. I don’t want their self worth to be tied up in how many likes they get on social media, or how much attention they get from boys. 

She says that there's something in burlesque for every woman. I have to admit that when I first heard about Chicava’s work, it seemed like a stretch to connect burlesque to an 18th-century nun who healed people. The little burlesque I’d been exposed to seemed like just another way to seek the attention of men.

But then I watched a video of one of Chicava’s classes. She developed what she calls Sacred Burlesque, which combines body awareness, burlesque techniques, and spiritual disciplines. And I have to admit, it feels really different. 

One woman said that Chicava’s work “is a vaccination against the societal diseases that would see me diet and exercise myself into hysteria, or hide myself and forsake all manner of happiness if I will not obsess over my appearance. Chicava fed my impulse to resist pressures to conform to impossible standards.”

On their website, Brown Girls Burlesque says that their shows “challenge the ways in which the mass media represents race, class, gender, and sexuality, reclaiming our bodies, our stories, and our cultures.” Metro NY says BGB is “shaking not only their bodies, but more importantly, the common understanding of beauty ideals.”

It’s taken me most of my life to accept my own body, because I didn’t look like the women I saw in movies or magazines. When I watch the women in Chicava’s classes dancing for the sheer joy of it, it does seem like Chicava is offering a kind of healing that many of us could use. And also, it looks like a lot of fun.

Chicava is helping us to break free of what society says we should look like, and helping us celebrate what our world all too often forgets--that we are sexual beings, and this is a gift. I appreciate the work Chicava is doing, because it reminds me of the daily I need both for myself and my girls: that when we see our bodies as marvelous creations, something magical happens. We feel freer to move, freer to be ourselves, freer to dance not because someone is watching, but just for the joy of it. It doesn’t just make us beautiful. It makes us transcendent.

Before I go, I want to thank a couple of our early supporters. 

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