WELCOME TO MOONYEKA'S MULTIVERSE
WELCOME TO MOONYEKA'S MULTIVERSE
Moonyeka’s past interdisciplinary performance works have been presented in a spectrum of “high” and “low” brow art spaces and contexts that span festivals, living rooms, museums, queer night clubs, in diaspora and beyond. They have been the recipient of the George Newsome Humanitarian Award, Mary Gates Research Award, Arc Fellowship Grantee, Tina LaPadula Fellowship, Seattle Dances’ DanceCrush, Powerful Voices’ “Year of the Answer”, Precipice Fund Award and represented Seattle in KQED’s If Cities Could Dance docuseries.
Moonyeka’s dance and movement foundations found roots in the Street Styles Communities of South King County and Seattle where they engaged in cypher practices and freestyle forms such as Popping, Tutting, and Animation. They studied modern dance, improvisational methods, and dance ethnography at the University of Washington where they hold an Honors B.A. in Dance Studies with an emphasis in DXARTS production. Moonyeka is proud to be raised by PNW’s QTBIPOC show girl, burlesque and nightlife community.
Pre covid-19 Moonyeka directed WHAT’S POPPIN’ LADIEZ?! (a femme centered street styles festival), LIL BROWN GIRLS CLUB (a movement based mentorship program for young girls of color), and organized (e)merge: a movement based healing intensive for dance communities and beyond. They continue to serve as an art educator for youth with programs like Young Choreographer’s Lab in the PNW uplifting pedagogy that connects ancestral skills, boundary setting, and choreography as a tool to liberation.
nawa angel a.h., widely known as Moonyeka, is a chimeric creator with a multi-embodied presence in performance, qt nightlife, writing, experimental media, dance, teaching artistry and divination praxis. They center kilig as a compass to conjure erotically charged revolutions with animistic unapology, risque', and Ilocano imagination.
nawa's past publications can be found in smoke and mold; Khôra; The Holy Hour anthology by Working Girls Press; Seventh Wave's On Queer Family Anthology; Instruction Manual for a New Era with PNW Conceptual Art Center; Lilac Peril. They have been the recipient of residencies, awards and fellowships including Tin House, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art CXL, In Surreal Life, George Newsome Humanitarian Award, Mary Gates Research Award, Arc Fellowship, and Andy Warhol Foundation's Precipice Fund Award. nawa exists in the in-between, frequently emerging on Tongva, Chumash, Chinook, Puyallup, Duwamish lands; the Coast Salish sea. Waling waling palpitations is their first book.
Waling Waling Palpitations is a stunning debut that expands the borders of what a book can be. It is a gallery, a performance piece, an assemblage, a field of flowers collaged with concrete and decolonization. Angel’s lyric prose and images create a dreamlike state where queer histories clipped before bloom are allowed to bud with possibility, where orchids grow erotic rather than exotic and fiercely, devastatingly,Wild. I left this work shaking with pleasure, my mouth full of words sharp as bolos and soft as the silencing of the Waling-waling. If Waling Waling Palpitations is an altered state, let me never return to the norm.
– Jen Soriano, author of Nervous and co-editor of Closer to Liberation