Na, Performance Ritualist

Meet me.

I create.

I dream up worlds in my body and offer them in ritual.

I am powered by a practice of pouring love into myself.

I shape a full body yes.

I wallow in the wild and dance with desire.

I am a performance ritualist, erotic educator, and loquacious lover. I am an herbalist, cacao lover, dancer, singer, yogi, conjurer, gleaming glitterbeam, all that. Blackity Black. Queer, twentyfine, baldie, mama, and forever a student of Audre Lorde. My artistry is the well through which I conjure my power. I plant futures in my palms in service of people who craft an abundantly free world. I no longer fear my deepest cravings. I am sweetening, softening, slowing, and surrendering. One question I keep returning to is, “is this a full body YES?” I am in my “embracing the erotic” era.

the erotic root is my ritual medicine practice. My medicine is movement, cacao, herbs, yoga, writing, singing, wailing, shaking, massaging, surrendering. It is my walks in the morning, it is my womb holding. It is oiling my crown. It is bathing in Playa Negra. It is swinging my hips and rolling my neck and daring to surrender to all of my desires. I am in this practice. I am in this ritual.

I write to you from Puerto Viejo, de Talamanca, in Limon, Costa Rica. I moved here in June of 2021. In the middle of the pandemic, heartbreak, burn out, and exhaustion. I thought I was coming here for three months to heal. Within an hour, I found home.

Thank you for being witness to me.

I’ve been dancing since I was a little girl, making art in living rooms, on Bed-Stuy Stoops, at the Brooklyn Museum with my mama. On the step team, on the color guard, in my high school dance company. During my transition to college I left my love of dance behind.
A couple of years later, I returned to my body. My grandmother, Shirley Palmer, became the first ancestor I really knew. I had survived an abusive relationship, depths of depression and suicidality, and the heartbreak that comes from strife with your mother.
I made my first performance ritual, “she looks at you”, during “Needing It!” A queer performance making workshop at Brooklyn Arts Exchange, facilitated by Heather María Ács. I needed to heal from all the shit my body absorbed that was never meant to settle so deep in my bones.
I read Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: Erotic as Power” a couple years before that performance and it changed my entire life. I entered my “reclaiming the erotic” era.

“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self, and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”

— Audre Lorde

My first solo burlesque performance is titled “Recovering Undercover Overlover”. I dove into that practice to investigate why it was so damn easy to give all of my love (read: power) away.

I performed some more.

I have since spent the past decade reclaiming my erotic power - I got out of that abusive relationship, I broke up with the United States of America and moved to Costa Rica by myself, without knowing anyone, I finally found the right medicine regimen for my bipolar disorder, I survived a heartbreaking abortion, I ended codependent friendships, I found burlesque, I studied herbalism, I discovered Black feminism, I cut of all of my hair, I started my own non-profit organization, I, currently, am transitioning out of my leadership role for that non-profit position, I found a secure love and went on to have a miracle of a baby, and so much more.

Work With Me

“The erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.”