photo by Laela Sequoia
words from alexis pauline gumbs… “there is an older story. if you want to know. about a big enough love for winter. a love deep enough to come back”. to that i say my deep love is fleshy and muscular. familiar. scents of musky sweat against the floor. a memory of flying. a rare moment when gravity is sweet in flight. we are taking off. welcome to a dream space filled with imaginings.
About Me
mawu ama ma’at g. Oyesii (we/they) is a black queer, multidisciplinary artist, educator and choreographer. They received their BFA in Dance from Georgian Court University and their MFA in dance from Temple University. They have had opportunities to work with choreographers and scholars such as, Dr. Kariamu Welsh, Lela Aisha Jones, Earl Moseley, Sidra Bell, S. Ama Wray, Silvana Cardell and more. From 2019-2022 they were adjunct faculty member at Drexel University serving as community based learning director. They built best practices for community arts based learning, choreographed and toured performance lectures for students K-12 and encouraged students to develop and learn their artistic voice. Currently they work at Bryn Mawr College facilitating intermediate modern dance with an Africanist approach. As founder and creator of Ma'at Works Dance Collective they build shared stories, rituals and performances to venerate and honor the multiplicity of blackness. They began Ma’at Works in hopes of putting more black, femme, queer, trans and fat folk on stage. Their work revolves around identity, restoration and humanness. Adamant about building safe spaces, they are the co-founder of The Juba House, a co-creation space for black queer artist living near and around the West Philly community. They have been recognized as a dance artist dedicated to serving the community. In 2020, they received the Leeway Foundation Transformation Award. As a forever emerging artist they hope to sustain their choreographic process through residencies, workshops and connection. They are grateful to have received opportunities to participate in the 2022 New Dance Alliance Black Artist's Space to Create Residency and the 2023 Satellite Residency. Currently, they work closely with Silvana Cardell as a member of Cardell Dance Theater touring and working nationally and internationally.
Movement Artist & Collaborators
Featured movement artist in the photo series above include: Tyra Jones-Blain, Lee Edwards,Graciella Maiolatesi, Sophiann Moore, Amethyst Rose, Edwina Thertulien & Surya Swilley
Works
I’ve had the pleasure of creating a multitude of works which include the following— something soft (2022), To Give: Undone (2021), Project Assata: Conscious States of Rage (2020), In Between (2020), Moko Jumbie(2020), Excerpt One: Project Assata (2018), The Lost Girls are Black (2018), & Affirmation (2019).
some new work.
something soft is a work that captures memories, moments, and happenings that involve softening. inspired by queer community, writers like Alexis Pauline Gumbs and angel edwards are guides through a blue wombscape. something soft is an echo of rest as resistance and a journey through imagination. how do we deal with the complexities of oppression, homophobia and dystopia which plague our bodies? this work encourages us and makes room for all of us to explore and restore ourselves. we enter our challenges boldly. we rest. we move at sloth pace. we put healing first. we become a gateway of sight. something soft is a journey of introspection. a way through the deep blue. a way back to our wombs.
some old work.
Project: Assata, Conscious States of Rage is a six year exploration of time through Assata Shakur. it takes reference from Shakur’s autobiography, which captured, frightened and inspired me. it is a drawn line through the past and present intertwining myself, Shakur and the movement artist I collaborated with. images of their bodies exist from past and present to reimagine a future of existence as resistance, rage as pleasure process and history as a guide to new black futures.
i want freedom in my mouth. inside a crevice of habitual tendencies. to crease my lips and speak with a high pitched pronounced tongue. that would never live in my mouth. yet the words are there before I know what i’m saying. the love of my life has crept into me like a sweet scent on clothes. like weed. frank incense. myyrh. and she reminds me not to take my mouth out. with out me in it. -late nights with purple
UPCOMING EVENTS
"I don't have to be visible to be viable on my path. I don't have to be shy to be sacred about my time. There are only two things I have to do, my mom taught me, and I can do them in the company of my choosing. The company of myself, my living, my dead, my folks, my dreams."-Alexis Pauline Gumbs
“we are the names chosen and put away. or given to others. we are the ones that did not stay. but then we do. we are the nails and edges of you. we are the waiting and wonder of you in the womb.” from DUB by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
did you make it here. if so, i want to ask some questions, keep reading...
what makes you viable, valid, worthy and then some without the sight of others? how do you depend on your good word? where do you begin? new questions? keep reading...
in this time? that being your life, what has inspired you the most? how do you imagine this world? how are you shaping it? sit with it, meditate on it and let it transform your happenings...