“Black Wizzle” was a live hip hop yoga performance set to the instrumentals for Cardi B’s “Foreva” and “PickUP” by DaBaby, over which I rapped original lyrics in the introductory portion. The piece lasted for six minutes, i.e., the duration of the two songs. The performance took place on the Lion’s Gate (the spiritual portal that opens each year in the season of Leo on August 8) and was associated with the “Corona Cats” pop-up group exhibition curated by Marcus Glitteris. Thus, the crowd gathered was a mix of planned audience members and passersby on the street. I wore a neon fringed dress with matching shorts and box braids. I performed over a matching neon carpet—the fringe caught the wind to call on the spirit realm.

“Black Wizzle” refers to the Black Widow spider, associated in life and myth with danger, female energy, sexual power, and creative life force energy. The spider named for the practice of the female killing and eating the male after mating (which is the main focus of Arachnophobia) no less adds to the Black Widow’s lore as the symbol of femininity, sexual power, and independence, often linked symbolically to untamable women and devouring mother figures. Nancy Blair’s Oracle of Ancient Wisdom explains that the spider embodies sacred creativity, the creatrixxx who sits at the center of her own world and determines her own fate. In Native American myths, “Spider Woman” weaves the World into Being. In Hindu myth, the spider symbolizes the Mother aspect of the Triple Goddess Maya who spins the web of fate. Ultimately, Spider Mother’s web is invisible magic uniting creative vision with action. She reminds us that the sacred dimensions of being are within the bounds of the spells we weave between cosmos, flesh, and blood.

At once hip hop yoga and a contemporary dance fertility ritual, this piece quotes “La Tarantella,” the Southern Italian folk dance for the Black Madonna of Southern Italy, which I learned last summer in Tuscany working with shamaness Alessandra Belloni. The tarantella was quoted in one portion of my hip hop yoga flow, with a pelvic lift easily flowing into the tarantella’s signature pelvic gyrations. The notorious “spider dance” is full of pelvic gyrating and is a folk cure for psychotic symptoms of repressed sexuality and for survivors of abuse. The female dancing fights her way out of the disempowering web of the parent culture.