Art borne of souls integrates all of our brightness and shadow.

In fact, in order to truly embody the authentic brightness of the self we must equally authenticate our shadows. For brightness is only perceptible because of the shadowed space around it.

The Pussy Magic Program is a 7 month dive into the transformation of ourselves through burlesque. A full embrace of sunshine, shadows, and unveiling our mysteries through performance art. But it is inherently more than that. Much more.

It is an experimental creation of community; a social experience of processing life beyond one’s capacity to solo-journey and into a solo-group dynamic. Our threads weave deeply between each other, intertwined firmly through the rapid growth of change and hard times we bump up against as we expand into our confidence and sensuality, our eroticism and magic.

For we can never go back to the contracted beings we were before - we are forever changed.

images of Saturday’s Showcase Cast, photos by Barb McLean.

I sit here, in my art studio apartment in the Eco Collective loft space in Chicago, and revel. The Pussy Magic Showcases were a revolutionary 2-day celebration of the femme through performance art created by the Pussy Magic Program participants. These 22 humans have been diving into what is *means* to live life as art with confidence, wildness, sensuality, and pleasure and have created unique burlesque inspired art for the world to witness.

We celebrate the erotic femme energies in all types of bodies, and from all sorts of experiences.

Our witnesses were many, with close to 100 physical + online beings at each showcase. Truly collaborators, each human felt the reverberations of pussy magic in its embodied form, outside of any cerebral or logical attempt to describe it. For pussy magic is a thing FELT.

What is pussy magic, anyways?

Well.

Pussy magic is the creationary, wild, energy of the femme. You must feel what it is – it cannot be explained with words, but is more so the visceral embodied experiences of life. It is not attached to gender or sex or in ways we present ourselves to the world. Each of us is a balanced part of femme eros and masculine logos. They must exist in harmony together to thrive.

The femme energy of Pussy Magic has long been denigrated, distrusted, shamed, raped, burned, and shoved down to be secondary. Our amplification of Pussy Magic brings balance to the cycles we experience in our bodies, and bring us to trust our inner wisdom, intuition, creative capacities, sensuality, erotic, and confidently discover and express our authentic selves.

Creating performance art from this place allows us to courageously be witnessed in the truths we choose to embody and proclaim. This is art born of souls, depicting deep transformation of emotion and liberation.

Images of Sunday’s Showcase cast, by Barb McLean

Compost.

Roses grow from compost.

In a Creative Bravery writing session with Coelti, they shared a metaphor about every communal experience being an integration of the Rose - seeing the moments as Blooms, Buds, and Thorns. Blooms are the ‘beautiful’ and fragrant showcase-ey parts, the buds are the future that must be nurtured and tended, and the thorns the essential pokey fearful bits which are inextricable from the rose experience itself. Integrity is seeing the whole plant.

Including the roots.

The roots are embedded in the dirt, the shadow deepness of damp minerality. Nurtured from COMPOST - the recycling of earthly energy and matter back into itself to nourish the future plants that allow for the existence of blooms at all. Compost is not just a noun, it’s a verb. To compost, one must courageously let go of what no longer serves - old paradigms, small skins, moldy outsides, worn out ways - and let it go fully into the earth to be transformed. In a sense, stripping down to the nude of the soul, shedding skins. The transformation process is far from instantaneous, it’s a process after all. One that takes time, energy, and a fair bit of know how to transform the shit into the black gold of nourishing compost that can bring a tiny seed into fruit.

Here is where our community produces a showcase. The 5 months leading up to the sparkly, shiny theater stage were full of tears and misgivings, of doubts and fears. Of contractions and feels of grief, worthlessness, jealousy, shame, and … all the things of rich compost.

This is where true art is borne from.

When we lean on each other, we can combine our collective composts into a pile that ferments faster, for the larger the compost pile the faster the processing due to heat and variety of microbes to digest. We see that we are not alone, not singled out in our experiences of systemic cultural oppression. Often, others have it just as hard, if not harder than us in a myriad of ways. We recognize our own unique blossoms - roses and beyond - grow from the same soil. They yield the pleasure spectrum of sight, scent, touch, taste, and sound tickling our synapses because we recognize the depth of work it takes to get to the bloom. Our unique independence still exists, yet when we link up together in a system of interdependence, we are stronger together, linked in love.

Pussy Magic is the deep energy of the energetic process of transformation and creation. It is the TRUST built upon the masculine/yang repetition and drive so we may learn to listen to our intuition showing us how to grow, and how to let go towards the compost.

This community of pussy magicians amplifies the change we wish to see in the world.

With 2 months left of the program, we enter back into the spiral of creation, of compost, of blooming. It’s never really ending.

From here, cultivating a supportive community takes an even deeper dive as we look at articulating opportunities within the group through producing independent shows and marketing the self as a performer in this new authentic light.

I am so grateful to each and everyone of you for confidently stepping into your power, your pleasure, and your authenticity on this journey.

Here, we embody existence into the place we desire to live in, which resculpts ourselves, our communities, and the systems around us. We are continually moving into and through the shadows that are always on the other side of brightness.

For they exist and grow together, in the delicious ever non-binary natures of existence. A dance, showing us the sacred marriage of existence.

with all my love,

gaea

big love to Meg Feigal for helping me edit this musing, and to Coelti Ticsay for helping me to formulate these words. <3

PS

You can watch the pussy magic showcase replays HERE and contribute to the 2023 scholarship fund for the next program

Compost & Roses : Pussy Magic thus far