With Chicava Honeychild
Donation $0 - 25

In collaboration with Griot Circle Senior Center, Cumbe is presenting a monthly series of lectures on African Diaspora Dance. We’re excited to welcome Chicava Honeychild for an explorative conversation about the journey of the Black burlesque dancer. From Josephine Baker to the modern woman, we’ll discuss the power of expressing feminine sexuality and sensuality as a Black woman in America.

“I chase 80-year-old Black strippers. Perhaps they aren’t all in their 80s – some are in their 60s or 70s; some of them passed away more than 80 years ago.  All of them are my foremothers.

When I picked up my pasties for the first time, I recall wondering if any Black woman had taken up this craft in the decades between Josephine Baker and me. I was hard pressed to find an image reflecting my likeness, my color, and my people. Surely, I hadn’t been the first black burlesque dancer in the modern era?  Then one day I found a picture: Lottie ‘the Body’ Graves looking into the camera with a flirty glance over her shoulder in a fringe skirt and barely there bralet. I immediately made myself a fringe skirt for my first costume. Next, it was a photo of Toni Elling with her hips thrusting away a stool and her effervescent smile shining out at me. It started becoming real, Black women do have a legacy in the feminine art of striptease.

So began what is now a twelve-year journey of late nights of internet sleuthing, digging through the annals of Jet Magazine and African-American newspapers from the late 1800s on and the piecing together of a lineage of renegade Black women.

I began chasing these legends down in real life. Taking train trips, road trips and flights to sit at the feet of my foremothers, to listen to their stories and be mentored in the ways of the ecdysiast - which is the fancy technical term for stripteasers given to us by American essayist H.L. Menken. Say it with me - ekˈdēzēəst.

It is on these adventures that I share in “Black Bombshells.” Recovery history and heritage of the urgently glamorous sort –  nestled in the history of America from Jim Crow to the present, seeping into every aspect of the arts in America – Jazz, theater, film and literature. Burlesque’s history in America reflects the segregation, discrimination and exotification that women of color had to contend with in all walks of life. The Black ecdysiast has touched it all and let it move through her body in disrobing revelations. “

Chicava Honeychild is a Universal Healing Tao teacher under the direct tutelage of Sharon Smith and Mantak Chia. Her work is about passing along this wisdom and the magic of inner space to women.  She is the Brown Girls Burlesque Creative Producer and founder of Sacred Chrysalis. Sacred Chrysalis marries the playful ecstasy of burlesque with Taoist womanly teachings, metaphysics and trauma release to create a space of renewal and creativity.