The Great Conjunction
The Great Conjunction is an expression of a multi-year, ongoing collaboration between dance artists Muffie Delgado Connelly and Tahni Holt.
Muffie and Tahni’s collaborative project speaks to and works with questions of friendship and mutual care across cultural and racial lines-Muffie as a female biracial indigenous person and Tahni as a female white person. We ask: what must die in us individually and collectively to usher in a new age of radical embodiment, what must we lay bare to co-exist with our brutal pasts and how do we forge into a future together? We use our somatic practices, dance, and choreography not just as a frame for the material but as the material itself. This work can only be done through movement and embodiment. Our collaboration is part of our individual and collective activist practices.
The Great Conjunction is a ritual. It is a gathering on the darkest night of the year, solstice 2020, that brought 19 artists together (separate) during the unprecedented times of Covid and social justice Black Lives Matter protests. There is a chalk circle inside a big raw warehouse space, Building 5, where artists come in one at a time to express their ritual inside the circle. Muffie and Tahni’s ritual is the last one.
Artists: Noelle Stiles, Tracy Broyles + Aidan Hutapea + Adrian Hutapea, Julissa DeJesus, Linda K. Johnson + Augden Hayes + Steven Hayes, Ruth Nelson, Jme Antonick + Geovanny Vega, Jess Evans, Lyra Denman-Butler, Taryn Tomassello, and Muffie Delgado Connelly +Tahni Holt + Luke Wyland + Bill Boese + Sophia Emigh.
The Great Conjunction: We have been in deep research with good friend and master astrologer Carl Ferris.
On the darkest night of the year, December 21st, 2020 Saturn and Jupiter will enter into the house of Aquarian (the great conjunction). We leave the “I am” and enter the “We are”. We are rebellious, we are unconventional thinking, we are brighter visions for the collective future, we are liberation and freedom for all peoples. And yet as astrologers, artists and activists have been storytelling for us all along, it is born from the rubble of our wreckage. What must die to champion this new era? What must we grieve individually and collectively?
Where will you be on solstice this year? Dance your death dance with us. Let us together (apart), usher in this era with courage to let go of all that must die.
I body be bright stinging in light. Bones of born labor of twilight, pump my blood this the darkest night.
There are bits of octopus, and whale songs, and deep-sea dives into low vibratory tempos. There are shes and sharp eyes, snake spines, and sharp edges with tendrils of lighting zigzagging across my thighs. Cobra coiled up at her feet drippings of humidity, sweat tracks traced in their skin.
There are pulsating cells of my body of beyond and sounds to anchor this boat. Riding a wave of current that lands into a kaleidoscope of expression. She is of old, of now, just born from the rubble of our wreckage. All things burn. There is a knowing that grows inside/outside It is born from the body, body be bright. Bones and ashes and blood and babies. Sweltering and oozing into focus I see you. Across the waters we are not strangers, With this body, this object these snakes these sirens, these cracks, these hands, this vessel this song, this arc, these vertebrae below this head with my heavy heart.
We ride the horses on the wave of love.
Photos: Eugenie Frerichs
