Welcome to NEVELand.
Here you will find a curated selection of the natures, textures, effects, affects, sensibilities, sounds, tastes, temperaments, and temperatures of this Ecotone.
I hope you feel at home.
If you do, consider donating to my world-building efforts via Patreon.
NEVE (they/(s)he) is a multigender, multiracial, multiply Disabled, multidimensional, multidisciplinary terpsichorean artist of the stage, street, field, stream, and screen. They are a mixed Sudanese Nubian who grew up in Lenni Lenape country and is now living in Duwamish and Coast Salish lands and traveling wherever they have access and an invitation. (S)He is a 2020 Pina Bausch Fellow, a 2022 Arc Artist Fellow, and a 2022 Disability Futures Fellow.
NEVE loves life, the delights and pains of embodiment and love, the sparkle-ache and promise of growth, the higher power inside all of us, the earth's lullabies and war cries, drinking color, and kissing/thinking/dreaming/learning/winning with their local and international queer family (especially their cat child Caravaggio whose IG is @catmasteroflightandshadow ).
NEVE believes in God(exxes), Collective Access and Liberation, Transformative Justice, Land Back, Right of Return, Reparations, Anarchism (in relationships and governance), the Loch Ness Monster, the Multiverse, the concept that all living beings are people, and You.
They are currently a contributing writer for the South Seattle Emerald and collaborate with their confidante in arms, fellow Seattle multidisciplinary artist Saira Barbaric as themselves, and as Mouthwater. Visit them online at nevebebad.com, and on IG at @nevethoh, @mouthwaterdance, and @nevedeguelderrose.
Stay tuned for news of the 2024 Mouthwater dance festival, which Mouthwater is producing as Velocity Dance Center Made in Seattle artists.
How long did it take you to get here? Are you sweaty now, are you different?
Do you feel your scapula, your kidneys, your lungs, your femurs, and your uterus, your bladder, that distended warm little thing, like they're really a part of your body now?” She-dragon, whose name was Lana, I remember them announcing it now, lifted her coiled orange tail in the air and stretched the logic of its line in front of her by descending from her seat onto the stage floor.
"You look like somebody. Little curls hmm, something with the way your butt sits on your seat. Do you want your palm read?
Is it you?” I hoped it was. Whatever that meant. Lana paused longer this time and we were all suspended in this unlikely balance, like an egg on the equinox, upright without help, spinning without end. The pause was so long that I anticipated her remounting that magic carpet of words too early and was startled so by her voice in thin air that I had to turn away from it to brace myself against vertigo. Her voice now less magic carpet, more elevator with its drop and pull.
If you want to slip in and out, real quiet, calm, unnoticed, don't come with me.
My body has never been the camouflaging type, so I chose to roll with it.
I grew up rotated and brown and with a taste for glitz and roses. Looking at a photo of me from when I’m seventeen, plunging neckline Jessica Simpson hot chartreuse dress, purple circles painted on my cheeks, behind the ears wet with some Night Queen oil, my mom tries to find humor in her own anxiety at my outlandishness. “They’re going to remember you for 50 years in this town!” It’s a small postcard town in New Jersey, a mill town, but also not really surviving off the mill part anymore, other than its red face in paintings sold in novelty shops. A bit Gilmore Girlsy, and though my mom hates the fast quippy way the Loreleis speak, we are a single mother and an only daughter. We do drink a lot of coffee, and crawl headfirst into the nest or cavern or corn maze of one another. We were always teetering on this sweet hysterical edge of laughing and crying, heads thrown back or held tight on our necks, trying to decide how we really felt about something before it was too late.
There is a tale of a woman who could take off her head and make soup from one grain of rice. Sometimes she is an old woman in rags and sometimes she is a haughty princess. You must serve her aims no matter what.
She tested girls’ generosity, humility, modesty, obedience, and faith.
How the good girl chose the plain eggs and not the ones covered in jewels. Or she brought the pitcher of water to the woman’s lips. Or she did not laugh or make a sound at all. Good girls are tactful, subtle, obedient, quiet, agreeable, and pretty.
Girls who advocate for themselves, say no, shine it on, make noise, or react are bad. The bad girls get frogs falling from their mouths.
I guess I wonder if it is possible to do what you want- disobeying orders respectfully, lovingly even. Breaking rules is always seen as a sort of violence, but never their existence in the first place. Circumstance doesn’t matter. If you break code, slippery amphibians follow you all your life like a cursed reminder of your boundary-crossing ways.
Before Femme,
I was just gold eared
and red-lipped and black line eyed
discovering directions but following
only in the cover of soft harsh night.
Before Femme, I took myself
for granted. And I took you for granted too.
I asked my girlfriend fucked up things like,
“Why you wanna dress like a boy?”
And she asked me fucked up things like,
“Why, aren't you really straight anyway?”
She lived, hot sad planets away
on Long Island, and I lived,
zipped in a cocoon of my own spinning,
in New Jersey, with my mom.
Who knew only, that I liked girls,
I slept with men, and she had tried to tell me
that whatever it was was ok.
I didn't touch myself.
I didn't touch myself.
I didn't touch myself.
Before Femme I was a girl.
And there was nothing sexy about the way
I crawled through clothes hangers,
and brambles, in the wooded places,
behind all of us, or at the body
and gender menacing mall.
I folded into and out of danced embraces,
flung my purse over my shoulder as I gritted my teeth,
marched back home with my crutches
when my power chair died in the middle
of my white skinned red eyed packed brick strong river antique town.
And everyone stared, not saying what they saw.
There is some amount of velvet blackout
curtain rub on the old stage,
ascent out of time,
Before Femme.
I don’t remember my sense
of self falling asleep under
heavy sleeping bags and lover’s hands,
maybe I just worried less.
Found a silver bullet to transform
my private snowbeasts
back into human drifts and mounds.
I wake up and I am on some porch steps
further North, this girl, no mama,
new words for you now, this Femme
has just told me that I am Femme!
Has brown ponytail
round ass off-black dress on-black line eyes
gold ears and moonlight voice.
Is handing me these red lipstick stained cigarettes to share
and I have never felt so warm all over my body.
Is this the beginning of the world?
When the fir trees whisper to low hanging sky,
the smoke signals curl, and it occurs to you
why you have had a body?
Is this what the First Femme knew?
That warmth is as much
a circumstantial behavior as a temperature?
After femme, I looked around,
and slunk towards my path in daylight,
kissing everyone I liked with lipstick on,
touching myself in the afternoon curve of my bed.
Or Are You Old Fashioned? Below is my CV/Résumé.
NEVE ™, Lover of Low Creatures, LLC™© 2021