Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy

Fertility Revivalist

Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy is a fertility revivalist whose practices center the study and performance of dances that bring us back to life. Her work is sourced by the experiments, communions, and possibilities born of a deep and everlasting devotion to the correlations between our star systems, our moving bodies, and our fertility. An afrofuturist bush mother of 5 children born of her body, she has birthed many more starseeds who returned to the light before they could be known earthside, and it is from this dual consciousness—having lived and danced as both an invisible mother and a visible mother—that she creates.

Dancing Mother was activated as a spiral movement galaxy in 2005, and grew into a fertility temple as Mother Mother awakened to her calling as a fertility priestess, sacred nourishment practitioner, sovereign birthkeeper, ringshout synergist, and midwife of the long labor. Mother Mother nurtures dynamic movement laboratories for diverse audiences, and cultivates spiritual soft-houses where mothers and creators can be witnessed as they encounter the majesty of the ringshout and transform their relationship to their fertility. Mother Mother builds soft-time portals for those seeking to discover and translate their fertility codes, amplify the application of their divine creation intelligence to all dimensions of their lives, and embody the fullness of their mothering dreams for the children and creations they are birthing.

Raised in a loving family in Southeast Washington, DC, Mother Mother’s primary initiations into the dance were through ballet, tap, and modern classes on the weekends at the community dance school around the corner from her grandmother’s house. When she was 15 she began facilitating movement at her black Baptist church as part of co-founding the dance ministry. Supporting peers, grown women and elders alike—many who had never danced before or didn’t think they could dance—to find beauty and purpose in their moving bodies, sparked a lifelong joy and fascination with the dances we do privately and communally off the stage.

Stumbling through the awkwardness of being a dance minor at a college where very few brown bodies moved across the dance floor with her, Mother Mother majored in Africana Studies, did a semester in Ghana exploring arts, culture and dance, and, bridging her major and minor, completed a senior honors thesis about the work of dancer, anthropologist, and visionary choreographer Pearl Primus, one of the first creator foremothers that Mother Mother ever learned to connect with spiritually. In time these ancestral artist communions would come to be known as sitting with the mothers, a process that is a core part of her life as a dancing mother.

Trusting the dance to keep her, to bless her, to sustain her, Mother Mother opted out of further pursuits in academia, and after graduation began instead to unearth her true artistic voice amidst the changing landscapes of life as a teaching artist, writer, performer, and figure model. She danced in parks and prisons, on sidewalks and subway cars, naked in front of the mirror and barefoot at the edge of the sea, in open fields of weeds and wildflowers and underneath the wise, old branches of oak trees. She performed in theatres and street festivals, facilitated workshops in classrooms and hospitals, danced on film sets and at house parties, reimagined movement at airport gates and in grocery store aisles, created ephemeral movement sanctuaries with people rediscovering their bodies after despair and women rebuilding their lives in shelters. Mother Mother welcomed spontaneous collaborators to join her in the dance, reminding those who felt led by the spirit to dance, but who were sometimes hesitant to do so because of an illusion that they didn’t know how to dance, of one of her earliest scriptures: the breath is the first dance.

As she danced and danced all over her hometown, and across the country, and around the globe, Mother Mother increased her understanding of the power of her moving body to alter the energy surrounding her body, a practice she calls space activation. For many years she conducted experiments in public and unconventional dance spaces, affirming each time the vibrantly animating force that our dance brings to everyday spaces. In 2009 she premiered JOYISM!, a performance bringing those movement discoveries from the world into a theatre space and onto the stage. Mother Mother’s space activations opened the way for her to dance in new worlds near and far, as her movements took her from Baltimore to New Orleans, from Bangalore, India to Bali, Indonesia, and many other points in between. In 2010 she travelled to Trinidad & Tobago for a dance residency, and stayed longer on a hidden quest to recover her fertility radiance, quietly reckoning with the hard and lonely parts of being an invisible mother longing to be seen and celebrated as a mother. Still, her time there was wondrous and generative, and out in the open she delighted in dance explorations with other beautiful artists, made community with generous, local collaborators, played her first mas in Carnival, and witnessed the relationships of mothers, daughters, and sisters as a part of her longform movement constellation, The Mother Project.

In the years before giving birth to her first child, Mother Mother met with great heartaches along her path to becoming a visible mother. When the doctors and tests could not answer the gnawing questions about why her starseeds were transitioning early—what she would come to call protostar births—she turned to the dance to grieve, to rage, to dream, to listen. Mother Mother started to engage the ancient intelligence of the ringshout, a counterclockwise dance processional passed down to her from her ancestors who were once enslaved, as a vital tool for time traveling, spiritual communions, dream seeding and fertility revival. It is through the ringshout that all of her children made it miraculously through their womb-to-earth journey, and it is to the ringshout that Mother Mother returns again and again, for healing, for prayer, for clarity, for courage, for breath, for remembrance, for celebration, for birthing.

In the spring of 2016, when Mother Mother’s two eldest children were the babies, she began her intuitive self-initiation as a fertility priestess, a sojourn that would span four years, bring forth the next two babies, and reveal the title for her work as a spiritual leader, Mother Mother. During this season she was led to the majesty and devotional practice of the sunrise communions, and the early seeds of her scriptures and movement sermons started to take on form and meaning. In 2020, a few months after the birth of her fourth child, she opened the Fertility Abundance Garden, a sanctuary for mothers and a congregation for creators. In this holy experiment with other beautiful mamas, Mother Mother practiced sharing her acorn sermons in their raw state, the flesh made word, as the sermons emerge from the movements that come when she is deep inside the spin of the ringshout.

Ever conscious of her fertility superpowers, Mother Mother imagined a life of intentional presence with her children long before they were born. Wildseed, her family learning lab, is a natural evolution of the maternal intelligence that brought her children into the world. Resourcing the vastness of her motherself, her dancing body, and her fertility consciousness, she is constantly growing and refining the skills and practices essential for really being with her children as a multitudinous mothering entity. Ensuring softness, freedom, and curiosity are abundantly accessible to her children as they develop into their own radiant beings, Mother Mother makes spacious playgrounds for her children and other families to experiment with movement, kinetic learning, nature, literacy, and other fields of study.

An extraordinary archivist, Mother Mother constructs soft-time portals that preserve her creations, teachings, recordings, sermons, and offerings. She invites thoughtful engagement for those who want to experience her work and immerse themselves in the ringshout, movement rituals, and fertility expansions that she has been cultivating for more than two decades. Mother Mother is currently steeped deep inside a family artist residency, experimenting with design and public access models for soft-time installations featuring Dancing Mother movement constellations. She is also dreaming into expanded genres in film, performance art, and embodied textual experiments that give her stories life off the page, and create opportunities for humanity to play, question, and imagine how our future generations will remember us.

Mother Mother is ever growing, creating, and dancing with a reverence for her fertility majesties. She makes a life each day with her co-creator, Bushman, and their children Bloom, Wonder, Jubilee, Revelation, and Luminous Glory. Together they tend the love story that is The Family Dances, a boutique movement, capoeira, and wellness enterprise. Mother Mother and her family move softly across this earth, creating community, connection, and celebration with their art and hearts. She calls in the revival everywhere she goes, nurturing and inspiring the world to be a sweeter place for mothers with every spin around the sun.