Nia Witherspoon’s latest work, Priestess of Twerk: A Black Femme Temple to Pleasure + Wisdom School is a constellation of experiences, engagements, and ceremonial happenings that center Black femme pleasure. The manifestations include a live spa/temple to pleasure, a ritual opera, a visual album, and a series of pop-ups that feature twerk meditations, altar-building, radical runway processions, sonic journeying, sacred partying, and an array of cleansing, grieving, and praying rituals installed in site-specific ways across theatres and performance institutions as well as public streets, bodies of water, and land sites. Jack Fuller’s work as a lead collaborator, she helps with ritual elements,  developing narrative, musical director gelling together the sounds, and as Priestess Pynk Nova bringing in the 2spirited feminine sun. The work is framed by Black feminist pleasure principles, aesthetics of care, and our ancestral birthright of healing.  Commissioned by HERE Art Center, and presented in collaboration with Musical Theatre Factory and Links Hall, among others. 

Priestess

of twerk