The Medicine of Collaboration: Bridging Ancestral Wisdom and Artistic Practice

Beloved One,

I started working on a document to share my collaboration approaches and values over four years ago, a little before the decade mark of my professional career as an artist. There’s google docs and notes on legal pads and many text threads where I gathered language I wanted to share with people about what collaboration means to me.

Most of those words never made it to others. Throughout all that time of writing about collaboration; brainstorming and sharing here and there with trusted sounding boards, I knew that something key was missing. A really core foundational piece felt like it was not present and was still waiting for me to find it.

I kept going. Collaborating, experimenting, saying yes to all kinds of experiences, rooms, and spaces. I was searching, honing, refining and deepening my practice. My journey was challenging, sweet, and inevitable. 

In the last fifteen years of my professional artistic life, I’ve had the chance to be in many different kinds of rooms and spaces all over the globe. I’ve been in the ceremonies and casinos of Ojibwe tribe members, rehearsed and consulted at the Apollo, danced with the Balinese, and made work in every level of theater in New York with (most?) conceivable archetypes of people, and performed with and for several household names. 

All of that has taught me so much about being a collaborator and being in collaboration.

And, it was all incredible ground, but none of it was the missing piece. 

Nothing has taught me more about collaboration than humbling and opening myself to collaborating with my Ancestors. That action has brought the missing piece of shifting culturally, instead of only talking about shifting, and expanded my paradigm beyond what I ever thought was or would be possible.

Collaborating with my Ancestors brought me out of focusing on articulating my approaches and values and even my beliefs about collaboration and into an embodied, ancestral, ero-poetic and Black soma-feminist view.

As you consider collaborating with me, I want to share with you Now what I know experientially –  as a Priestess of a tradition I reclaimed with my Ancestors’ guidance and the dreams they sent me to lead me home.

Sh*t Might Come Up (so that Healing Can Happen)

I know that when we come together to do work, we often think we know exactly what that work is. We have a plan. Our plans, desires, and expectations when we collaborate deeply matter. And also, Spirit often has other plans and medicine for us that we cannot see at the outset of a collaboration, for if we did, we probably wouldn’t say yes.

So I just want to Name that for us. And for you to have in mind and heart, as you consider our work together.

Things may come up that we don’t expect. My approach to that is from the perspective of a healer and my practice as a priest. I try to find the medicine in what is arising and see what needs to be done from there. 

Which is to say, 

Seeing everything as healing work hits different than making something ‘healing.’

In my embodied, ancestral, ero-poetic, Black soma-feminist view, medicine has a much broader definition. Everything is and has medicine and everything can be an opportunity to heal. In this view, it becomes up to us whether or not we want to be well. We often need to surrender to what it means in our lives if we are no longer sick, which can be the biggest obstacle to healing, not whatever system, situation, or circumstance we are in.

At the same Time, afro-indigenous practice shows us that what we believe, trust or mistrust does not necessarily or ultimately matter in the face of Divine Law and natural order.  

We experience this with the force of gravity, for example. We understand that Gravity does not need you to believe in it for it to do its work. The Ancestors and medicine work are like this, too. 

it’s important for you to know that collaborating with me is collaborating with someone who is intentionally open to these forces. I continually surrender (at least so far :0)) to the medicine path. All aspects of my life: my art, my Being, my Way; are oriented toward Ancestral elevation, practice and healing. This is the ancient medicine they move through me. Whether other people, institutions, or colonial systems “believe” in these Truths or not is of no consequence. 

Gravity is gravity. Air is air. And Love is Love. None of these things are seen. But they are all real and have real effects in the sensory world.

Black feminists know this. Indigenous rememberers know this. Medicine keepers know this. Poets have told us for centuries.

I have an agreement with my Spirits to be a primary collaborator with Them. It’s a perspective shift, a culture shift and a shift within my being, and I didn’t know it was missing until I found it.

My prayers often awaken this medicine in others. 

So, this feeling letter is to give you a sense of the experience working with me. 

It comes from my heart and desire to share openly, powerfully and vulnerably about my work in the world at this time. I want you to have this important information about the spaces I conjure, so you can make a more informed decision about stepping in more deeply with me.

Thank you for spending time in heartful consideration of deeper relationship with me. So many blessings for your path.

—QGYT