Go! Push Pops HOLY CREATRiXXX

Author | Katie Cercone | Go! Push Pops

HOLY CREATRIXXX – ritual gathering, divine incantation and mystical neo-shamanic coven – was Go! Push Pops’ first work overseas and most comprehensive public project to date. Commissioned by Alexandra Arts, a non-profit arts collective founded by the Norwegian artist Lotte Karlsen, HOLY CREATRiXXX was part of Alexandra Arts’s Pankhurst in the Park series honoring the late suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst. A women’s ritual igniting the inner divine feminine, HOLY CREATRiXXX took place in Alexandra Park, Manchester. Alexandra Park was once the stomping ground of some of the most radical suffragettes of European history, led by Emmeline Pankhurst and others.

Several forces came together to make this project a wild success, particularly the eclectic, funky crew of Manchester’s Alexandra Arts. A site-specific sculptural environment by architect Julie Fitzpatrick (in collaboration with students from Manchester University’s School of Architecture) showcased our performance work brilliantly. Based on the circular motif of our collective ritual endeavor and the arc lines of nature, Fitzpatrick’s stunning environment was an indoor sculptural forest garden cum futuristic exotic pleasure paradise. Projected on the wall in layers of rainbow light was the fairy footage we shot on location in the park, edited and veejayed by moving image duo Pablo Melchor and Bedos Mavanubu. Last but not least, a local troop of all-female LED hula hoopers called the Hooping Harlots came out to set the circular stage.

“Go! Push Pops of Mancunia was sacred, sublime, spontaneous and subversive. When can we do it again?” – Jo Bee

Go! Push Pops embarked on our mission to rightfully execute a woman’s ritual by recruiting the urban priestesses of (WO)Manchester. For the two weeks leading up to the final performance event, we met with our collaborators Jo Bee, Gillian May and Rebecca Sampson-Jorge. During this time we set up a coven of sorts, a meeting place in the park where we shared herbal tinctures, magical treasures, celestial communications and ritual chants. HOLY CREATRiXXX was a temporary intentional community of sacred sisterhood from which we organically spring-boarded into the creative consciousness of the Great Goddess.

Women have been circling up since the beginning of time. A circle is a declaration of sacred ground and a container of energy raised. Drawing together in a circle formation, we called on the Goddess as a channel of power. Through incantation, movement mantra and the transformative power of free play we honored the fierce fighter spirit of the suffragette legacy. Sometimes called “raising a cone of power” or “drawing down the moon,” our combined energies in careful equilibrium crystallized and magnified.^[i]  As Jo Bee enthusiastically recalls, “We wove our collective consciousness together into a semi-structured performance – HOLY CREATRIXXX – which transformed us into a powerful, colorful hive mind. As we danced and drummed, chanted and played, laughing and crying we became as “US”….multi-dimensional, human, animal, plant and alien. Go! Push Pops of Mancunia was sacred, sublime, spontaneous and subversive. When can we do it again?”

 Aesthetically, our ritual comprised a glittering bricolage of transcultural sacred traditions. Typically, as Push Pops draw upon the combined energies of the intercultural maiden goddesses of beauty, creativity and desire. Arretos Koura, an ancient Greek phrase for “the ineffable Bride, the Nameless Maiden,” is one who spins a cosmic dance, a divine flight from which all things are born. Arretos Koura is the original artist, the “transcendent unique” – the creatrixxx of all uniqueness.^[ii] Arretos Koura is one example of a myriad of creatrix archetypes sprinkled across the globe – glowing deities and devis whose generative powers hail the female form as metaphoric of the sacred source of life, death and regeneration.

There are millions of bodhisattvas walking the earth at this very moment and they are women. Women are natural warriors of compassion – they lead with love, conquer with love, teach, commune, share and transform by love. By calling the blissful light of the great Goddesses into our bodies and rooting into the earth with our footwork, we were able to expand our egos until they stood beside the Creatrixxx herself. Our collective endeavor honored the female Creatrixxx as primary. We named the Goddess our informing power, a psychic reality giving shape to the here and now of this heart-centered age.

Magical rituals are psychodramas, emotional outward bounds. Things get wild. When Jo Bee dropped that drumbeat all five of us jet-rocketed into the upper-echelons of the astral plane.  In addition to collectively agreeing upon movement mantras, vocalizations and gestures of power we executed in semi-synchronized waves and pulsations, the tipping point of this work was the way in which we all accessed that perfect point of synchronicity and mindfulness. We moved as one, breathed as one and glittered as one. Often, allowing for spontaneous eruptions and the chaos of the unknown to slither through the porous borders of our sacred circle like a fire bolt. In the nebulous space of free-form movement ignited the pyrotechnics of pure energy.

The Abuse of the earth and the abuse and exploitation of women are conditions of patriarchy, not inherent realities. Perceiving the natural world as holy is the earliest human tradition of the sacred. Zoomorphic forms such as birds, bees, serpents, butterflies and frogs trace back to the beginning of time when women were revered as the rightful sovereigns of nature, love and magic. Women conducted the folkloric rituals – living mythologies that acted out the transition from chaos to cosmos in animalistic dance formations. Ritual dance solidified a cultural worldview. Through the attainment of ritual ecstasy during the dance every member of the tribe obtained self-knowledge and intuitive instruction on how to live as a community.^[iii] In old Europe, dance was a unique mechanism governing rural life.^[iv]

The fusion and layering of ancient symbols in ritual dance was part of women’s role in sacralizing space, honoring the earth as holy ground and contributing corporeally to the normal course of the change of the seasons. Various personifications of the Goddess earth – her elements, plants and animals – were conjured up symbolically in the dances as an expression of the Creatrixxx. The HOLY CREATRiXXX and her cosmic dance of winds, waters and forests remind us that the world itself is created by the great cosmic dance of all forces everywhere.^[v]  As a contemporary social practice platform, our work fuses the radical call for social justice posed by the suffragettes with a contemporary feminist preoccupation with eco-feminism, spiritual ecology and the large-scale reclaiming of our sacred feminine symbols.

HOLY CREATRiXXX responds to the violent and wholesale erasure of female deities, and images of the divine feminine — and to the hijacking of the symbolic language of the goddess carried out under patriarchal rule. As Mary Condren writes, “the matricide attested to in patriarchal culture is a psychic as well as a cultural reality.” Although the ancient, matriarchal roots of pre-civilization trace back to powerful female religious leaders, shamanic empresses, priestesses and queens of the land… women appear today in the mythic realm of pop culture as diluted, 2-dimensional caricatures with derivative identities as virgins, mothers, whores, servants and wives.^[vi]

Culture is humanity’s continuous evolution through story, myth, song and dance. When we come together as a vibrant collective we remind ourselves that creativity is a predecessor of culture, not its artifact.  As artists we are blessed to catch glimpses of the archetypal realm –and our sacred duty is to communicate it in continually more conscious ways.^[vii] As a ritual co-creation, HOLY CREATRiXXX was ultimately about remembering our divine origins. In other words, reclaiming our female role as seers, prophets and poets…and using our Goddess given powers to usher in a new paradigm on earth.