We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nawa alviar horton, known as Moonyeka. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nawa alviar horton, known as below.
Hi Nawa alviar horton, known as , great to have you with us today and excited to have you share your wisdom with our readers. Over the years, after speaking with countless do-ers, makers, builders, entrepreneurs, artists and more we’ve noticed that the ability to take risks is central to almost all stories of triumph and so we’re really interested in hearing about your journey with risk and how you developed your risk-taking ability.
One of the biggest values that I carry with me is the Filipinx cultural psychologies of kapwa. It would be a whole article in itself to explain the depth of this concept so I do encourage readers to do their own research. Though, I can describe to you the way I relate to it. First imagine an inner spool of silk in the place in your body that brings you the most feeling. For me today, it is in between my ribs. I feel my heart drop and beat here. This spool of silk is sacredly protected by the vessel of my body. My body and energetic aura is this outer-crustacean-egg shell. This silk connects through and to all relations, seen and unseen, between all time and space. My inner self connects to my community and spirits: full of QTBIPOC wonder, orchids, atmospheric rivers, wrath, the lands I am on, the lands I have been displaced from. It creates this golden web. As a pop cultural image, I see the fortified threads of fate from Disney’s Hercules. Inseverable. But more realistically, buoyant and with the ability to be released.
Kapwa is that interconnectedness, that sacred connection between us all. I allow myself the beauty of my animistic spiritual beliefs to hold me.
I did not grow up with the type of support needed to sustain the big dreams projected onto me. My artistry was expected to be a tool to pull my family out of a Section-8 poverty. This means maintaining normative ideals to assimilate to Western notions of stardom and success.
Be a doll – a straight one.
Maintain white aesthetics, posturing.
Stay in your assigned sex socialization.
Be everything for everyone, but yourself.
I was given mismanaged encouragement that was transactional, delusional and expected the impossible. I was, and still am, held by institutions that extract from me and make me some sorta poster kid. I dance with those shadows and even my most trickster-sin-eater-chimeric archetypes cannot outplay the impact of systemic oppression.
I often wonder what it would’ve been like if I had just more encouragement. If the racism, misogyny and queer-transphobia were kicked out of the room. Every “what if?” meets a deep knowing about what is beyond poverty-porn asking scholarships, fellowships, and QTPOC people like me being asked to measure our worth through the glorification of struggle. What is beyond the performance of being extraordinary all the time?
For everytime I was harmed by a mentor, an elder, or an institution that I thought would pour love and care into my cup I found a a renewable resource I could count on: wrath. I let my experiences of betrayal and heartbreak starburst me, illuminating with spectacular clarity of who I desired to be in a constellation of collaboration, care, and risk-taking with me.
What I found for myself is a need to be around people who believe in non-binary, bakla-centered embodiment processes, research, play space that commits to (un)rest. I want to be around people who are willing to be risk-taking with me, to feel the edge of balisong knife flutters of kilig* as a compass towards redemptive celebration. I leaned on the lineages of trans and femme extravagence and impracticality, strategic self-objectification, the whorearchy. I sprinkled hedonism as a way to necromancy my spirit from the compiled violence in my body.
Now, I sit in a circles playing a game of truth or dare: a ritual of truth by staring into new suns, an invitation to dare new worlds into existence. I needed a crew who could hold me accountable to the wars and revolutions in my body — how could I find myself again as a non-dysphoric mother archetype as chosen-leader-trying-to-choose-back-their-own-power as hurt child who knows another way? I took the risk of writing letters to my ancestors to look out for evil eyes and to carry back an ocean wave of ready or not! people. I risked sending emails to powerhouses in my life, my friends who I knew could honor or embody the trans magic of multiplicity, of mystery.
I fed my kapwa-altars promises to cut cords, dissolve tendrils, and keep focused. Then, I let myself swim in the boon of abundance that was right in front of me.
My practice of risk taking as been about getting clear about why “playing with fire” is necessary; and unashaming the parts of myself that are big, bad, and dangerous. Being dangerous is necessary.
Taking a risk meant dreaming beyond my dreams.
I gave myself the liberation to be risque, because why not?
Since then, I’ve been able to be dangerous not just by myself but with House of Kilig, where I have the honor of being an Artistic Director. I get to eat plant-based chicken nuggets and receive group hugs while I cry about white institutional rejection letters! I get to work within a range of disciplines such as dance, poetry, QT nightlife technologies such as Drag and Burlesque. I buy my flowers whole sale and make bouquets for myself for surviving.
I get to celebrate grant awards like Andy Warhol Foundation’s Precipice Fund for our work Orchids roll their eyes. I can appear and disappear across dance festivals, living rooms, queer night clubs, galleries, and books. I have a T4T love fairytale that paid their marraige licenses in all $1s I saved working as a stripper. I got my hybrid-genre work published in the raddest trans and 2spirit journal: smoke and mold. I got to to realize and enter into my deepened community space holding by opening Paruparo, a QTPOC-centered haven. Annnnnnd to top it all off, I take a bath every day where I melt into some very generous flowers and sea salt.
I am multi-hyphenate, I am in many lanes because I took the risk and said: why oh why would I try to stuff all this multiplicity into a singularity?
Really, this piece is more of an acknowledgment that I am not doing it by myself, nor do I want to. Even the times I have found myself in isolation and obliteration, I was held. I am in a curse break of martyrdom, self-sacrifice that my own blood-lineage had imprinted as a survival technique. Damn, it is a wildfire of staring the unknown in the face. Here I am now, able to smile back at it because of my people. Salamuchi to: my spouse, Kai, who speaks whole oceans of belief into me, my twin-kin, Nikki who has taught me the eight placement Capricorn magic of grounded riot and bloom, The House of Kilig, you are all a dream come true — I am still shook that I get to make art, dream-make, heartbreak with you all; Living Altar witches: Ylva and Kiki – for bringing me back to ancestral, erotic, and ethereal realms; my friend-itor, Callum Angus, who helped me understand my relationship to the pedagogy of the dysphoric and the multiverse cohort that allowed me to furl and unfurl into different dimensions; Corinne Manning for showing me how to go deeper, and wider with my words, characters, and hybrid-genre writing WTFness!
And to all those unnamed, unknown, evasive as strategy ancestors; to my descendants — thanks for guiding me towards divine love.
As much risk as I put out — I hope these words flourish as an invitation for more chance, more risk to be made on people like me. The risk of toll, illness, and violently stolen spiritual and life is something I denounce. We deserve better.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
nawa alviar horton, known as “Moonyeka” (they/them) is a nonbinary Ilocano-Filipinx shapeshifter who takes form as a interdisciplinary performing artist, teaching artist, writer, choreographer, curator, scholar, and brujx. They have the honor of being the Artistic Director of The House of Kilig. With their diasporic roots sprawling up and down the west coast, Moonyeka embeds their space holding gifts at Paruparo as a co-founder. With a specialty in offering sensually sacred dance and movement-based storytelling experiences, Moonyeka’s performance, community organizing and divination work centers kapwa and kilig as a compass to imagine worlds where their communities can thrive.
They’re currently developing an upcoming work, Harana For The Aswang. Harana for The Aswang is an interdisciplinary performance work centered on the research of harana, a Filipinx serenade song form rooted in courtship and grief rituals.
nawa is a bakla shapeshifter who infuses QT performance technologies into their writing, worldbuilding with Aswang spirits in nightlife glamour, animistic drag, fleurotic channeling across various fields such as biomythography, hybrid-WTFness, and game writing. They were recently published in smoke and mold with their multiverse of work centering Waling-Waling Orchids; their piece Am I Hot Enuf 2 Kill?, a series of hybrid prose centering w(horror) and sirens, will be published Spring 2024 in The Holy Hour anthology, by Working Girls Press.
You can support my work by donating towards keeping Paruparo flying at: givebutter.com/paruparo, following @m00nyeka @houseofkilig @paruparo.pdx
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
1. Disruptor
Noory Kim was one of my mentors, who has since passed, who guided me towards an intersectional lens of moving through the world. As a young teenager, Noory pointed me towards books, resources, groups, and peers who helped me understand the way the spirit of systems of oppression move through everything so pervasively. Having that wisdom made it possible for me to have language where I didn’t have before to name the way power was aligned or being mis-used in any given room. I learned how to build necessary endurance around being a disruptor. This foundation helped me create embodied commitments to myself around the literal practice of liberation.
For people looking to broaden their scope I recommend reading work by adrienne maree brown, bell hooks, AK Press texts, and compensating those around you who are sharing those skills, unearthed by their lived experiences.
2. Desire
Undo your whorephobia. Recognize the whorearchy of capitalism around you.
Something I noticed in myself in trying to tap into greater archetypes of autonomy and decadent power was a wall of slut-shame and whore phobia that had counted on putting me into a shape that made sure I was as small as possible. Erotic laborers, sex workers and whores are all responsible for some of the most important medicine of this generation: consent culture, the internet, digital money exchange & cash apps, fashion, sexual health and reproductive rights, the opportunity to even access feeling like a baddie because you or your boo can buy lingerie, sex toys, and kinky lingerie. So often coaches of sensuality bypass the histories of sex workers. This self-chosen amnesia perpetuates the dampening done by systems of oppression that will proclaim our desires as sacrilegious.
I make sure to honor the lineages of aswang, medusas, magdalenes, and baddie spirits that swirl around me. The best way is to practice getting clear on my desires and to continuously acknowledge the work that happened before me to be able to access expressing my own desires. I set an altar for spirits of sex work. I make playlists and community spaces to slither and be in (un)rest with desire. I can actually be in conversation and collaboration with those spirits (living and not) as a way to to deepen my own innate beingness, expression and perspective.
Sitting into my compass of desire is one of the most radical things I could do. When I diminish my desire I am not honoring myself or the intellect, pedagogy, and magic that came before me, and will come after me.
3. Transmute and Transcend
Moving with a vessel of confident liminality: a non-binary creature-femme, bakla being full of diaspora, dissonance and expansive multiplicity – I had my eyes peeled open by swept up secrets underneath dusty carpets. I have looked between the walls and give my round of applause to the rot that continuously shows up in environments of pervasive, white toxicity. Like wrath, there is an endless resource of dissonance and violence that my eyes bare witness to.
In the everyday, the mundane is aggressive. I have wondered what to do with all the heart palpitation, paranoia, dysregulation that befriends me in just trying to get a cup of rose tea, or go buy flowers. I have surrendered over and over again to the expectation that gen pop will moth to a flame towards me with a flurry of cat calls and micro-macro-tears of violence. So, what to do with this? I practice rituals of love. I erect entire dreamscapes with friends and queer trans artists who cannot help but be so big, so wild. I am aggressive right back at the mundane. I find ways to live and live and live and molt and molt and molt. I carve out space to be with the practicality and impracticality of beauty.
I eat my favorite food, I ask my lover to make me a meal, I kiss their nose, I make dances, I get lost in a rabbit hole of new interests, I dry my orchids and watch them rebloom after dormancy, I write an email and then laugh with a co-worker about how ridiculous it is. I call a witch mother, a bruja friend and we deposess what lives in the corner of the ceiling. I watch my siblings’ music videos and watch them buckle the only way a Capricornian goat would, which is to say I watch them care stubbornly. I ask Athena to beat my face. I listen to Gaby cut the truth out of the room and hold it by its tongue. We drink tea.
I collect my heartbreak and burn away rosebud heads when I am tired, ashamed, and run down. I share what pearls come out of the parasitic process of trying to dream with impossibility and limitation. I count all the impossible diamonds and gleam my facet of it hoping we can all get spectral.
How would you spend the next decade if you somehow knew that it was your last?
For astrology nerds out there, I am in my Saturn’s Return.
So far, I have been experiencing this as a crossfit of dreaming beyond my limitations. Which is to say, falling into the deep mystery of not knowing nothin’!
It also has meant integrating abundance. My last year or so has been a surprising necromancy of dreams I forgot I had. Dreams I had buried and let go, are coming back alive. Dreams that I had forgotten bare their face like a rabbit suddenly hopping across the field of vision and then boom! Becoming the moon.
I got T4T married, when I thought I was never going to end up married. My biggest dream of finding a group of people who wanted to mold worlds and tell stories for the sake of practicing a world we believe in, happened in a sudden glory of a 2 week residency in Seattle. Here we are, making a visual album of indescribable, interdisciplinary magic. I watched the body glory of trans-masculine chests projected across giant walls. My friends and I danced in front and within that ocean of light.
Heidi Grace Acuna weaves tapestries that bless a QTPOC-haven of a space, Paruparo. I get to steward a space?! I get to wear orchid-euphoric looks full of gender expansive magic by Heidi Grace Acuna. I get to dance with Aries Silk, the warmest person and the most starburst dancer I know. I watch Gaby do backbends, into inversions, we tape eachothers’ chests sometimes.
The universe is cheering for me, and in this I get to finally grieve and attend every funeral for everything that has had to die within me and outside of me to get here.
As with most QTPOC of this world, I am dreaming and being at substantial levels while being under resourced. Some of the most frustrating things about perception is that just because the energy, vibe, graphic aesthetics are full of irresistabality, does not mean I am nearly as sustained as I should be. It just means I am resourceful.
I am exhausted by grants and donors where I waste my storytelling, time resource and sacred artistic magic on proving why me and my people matter, why liberation matters, why anyone should care.
I am tired of seeing my community of QTBIPOC folks who are malnourished by our systems, be the only ones who open their wallets. Our work deserves to be funded, appreciated, shared, adored, and platformed.
We are entitled to that level of care.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://msha.ke/moonyeka
- Instagram: @m00nyeka
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nawa-alviar-horton-2374322ab/
- Other: https://givebutter.com/paruparo https://www.smokeandmold.net/nawa-alviar-horton-waling-waling-palpitations
Image Credits
V Babida Heidi Grace Acuna Sam Choi
