Madelyn “Maddei” Collins a.k.a. FunkyAshido
What is my narrative?
The moment I became a movement artist was the moment my voice couldn’t describe the world around me. A consonant pivoted from my mouth and to my muscle. Rolling like an R, waves of tense energy rattled my skeleton and chattered my teeth. My ear drums pulsed and throbbed as I desperately tried to untangle the noises of weeping and growling. This tormenting beat became so overplayed, my body formed muscle memory. This song of home conditioned me to move to a rhythm of fear. Eyes down, arms crossed, and footsteps quick and tiny like a mouse near an owl’s nest. I couldn’t tell anyone what I longed for, or the horrors that waited for me after school. So if my vocal cords were not my salvation, then it would have to be my body that would have to learn a new groove.
Dance was how I navigated my childhood adverse experiences (ACE). To disrupt the patterns of pain, I had to create different beats and mending movements. My journey as a creative practitioner began with my first talent show. As my soles felt the sturdiness of the stage my body was transported to a world of calm. Melodies melted my muscles as I relaxed into a gentle back and forth rock along smooth bars of Barry White. I imagined myself on a boat cruising into a storm-less sea. This was my first temporal art piece. A piece that reshaped the reality around me and for those three minutes, allowed my parents in the audience to give their energy to a better sound– a song of family. Since that moment, I have used dance and movement as my preferred art medium to create temporal art pieces centered in somatic healing and physically taking up and reshaping spaces in joy.
My narrative as a movement artist steadily developed as I continued to face senseless afflictions. A year after my talent show I would experience displacement from Hurricane Katrina. Like a button pressed on a remote, I was on a new channel… trying to comprehend the show I was transported to. Fortunately, my mother understood my need for movement and was able to secure a scholarship for me to dance at a school called Dancer’s Studio. For 8 years, this is where I would increase my movement vocabulary through modern and ballet dance. It was here that I expanded my imagination on how to use my body as a tool for expressing and healing through ACE. As my training continued into teens and young adulthood, I engaged in various styles, from lindy hop to street dance, and simultaneously building a narrative that I thought I would never feel again– a song of home. However, the beginning of my adulthood came at the same time as COVID, sharp political division, and a full-blown climate crisis. The reasons that made me move as a child resurfaced with a passion. I turned on my laptop and began to make the logo for my now continual temporal art series called Knox Community Street Dance (KCSD).
This continual temporal art series came at a time where COVID had devastatingly obliterated its way through the hip-hop and street dance scene for adults in Knoxville, a scene that I had begun to call home. The landscape of soil that had been lovingly tilled for had in three years turned into fields of concrete with nowhere to take root. As Knoxville began to rebuild and regather after the pandemic, it seemed like my style and philosophy for dance had nowhere to flourish. Recognizing the painful need for movement therapy and joyful gathering in my life, I decided to put aside some money from a paycheck to rent a dance studio space for a couple hours a week to see if anyone would join me. With a quick poster whipped up in Canva, I advertised what I coined the “Community Jam”. As I waited in that green pastel studio, I tried to push away my anxieties that no one would show. And to my forever grateful surprise, one-by-one, people familiar and new began lining the small four walls of the space. The evening was filled with laughter, movement, and togetherness that left my body buzzing and my face aching with glee. It was a song of community! It was then that I discovered a life truth, a regenerative environment is rooted in joy. With this North Star guiding me, I leapt forward into creating more temporal art pieces.
Since creating KCSD, I have continued to pour into this labor of love which has guided me down a path of exploring the methodology of somatic and generational healing in my works. To build a world according to joyful tenets of regeneration has expanded my mindset in how I construct performances, classes, and other artistic initiatives that can heal my environment, community, and self. KCSD’s temporal art pieces has shared its restorative energy around Knoxville, including stretching connective tissue into SpaceCraft (a local artist co-op), Black Girl Environmentalist Knoxville HUB program (an environmentalist enthusiast group), Royal YOUth Dance Ensemble (a dance school that works with young dancers with ACE), and The Bottom (a cultural center and bookstore that hosts programs based in community, culture, and creativity). KCSD’s temporal art pieces have organically grown in size and collaboration and I now seek to co-create works that not only reshape spaces in joy but can also spur community-driven actions uniting our complex shared-social ecosystems through our bodies.
Knox Community Street Dance 