New Developments & Big Announcement
Hi beautiful people,
In some ways this past year I’ve been out and about more than ever, gathering women through The Center for Female Sovereignty through its two programs Songbird Supper Club and Soulbirthing. Yet at the same time, I’ve been incubating my newest artistic work and not performing often, letting go of the expectation or the habit to strive. More about that below.
I feel immense purpose and pride in hosting Songbird Supper Club and doing all I can to make sure women’s voices are heard. I’ve learned first-hand that we heal within community. I’m so nourished by it and witnessing others feel that nourishment is the greatest fulfillment. The Arts Council of Winston Salem has given Songbird Supper Club a large ARPA grant over the next 2 years so that I can find a way to make this event sustainable for years to come. I’m so grateful to them and everyone who has taken part and cheered on Songbird Supper Club. I’m so excited about what is possible. Please let me know if you would like to be a volunteer or intern to take part in deepening our roots so this canopy can reach tall and wide, touching every part of our community and beyond. Please look out for ways you can help Songbird Supper Club be sustainable - through purchases of our upcoming merchandise, sponsorship, membership, and tickets to special events. It’s my mission to keep our monthly event FREE so that it is accessible and can always be a consistent gathering for our whole community. More here.
I am also profoundly fed by Soulbirthing - the group of women I’m gathering globally online and in the woods on retreats. I’ve witnessed women blossom through this gathering in a way that I believe heals centuries of oppression, abuse, and silence. When a woman believes in her own power, the world cracks open, and I believe this is essential to healing our relationship with Earth. Women can join us anytime and begin traveling the wheel together. It is donation-based. More here.
My new work has been underway for over a year now…and I’m seeing what it is and what it wants to say…all the pieces falling together. Because I haven’t been striving, it’s been a miracle to experience the magnetic pull of manifestation as people I’ve wanted and needed to collaborate with have come to me, rather than the reverse. I’ve always been the one to be reaching out and trying to make things happen with my projects, and instead I’ve been shown what happens if you just shine your light, the people you resonate with will find you. I’m so grateful, thrilled, and excited to be collaborating with some new artists. There’s also been something so essential for me to witness in myself: writing and creating this new music completely by myself. It has proven to me I can trust my instincts without second-guessing or minimizing my gifts. This year has been about inner focus and incubation in order to shed all the old and bring in the new. Some day soon it will all come to fruition. Thank you for being on the journey with me.
Shine your beautiful light,
Cashavelly
Three New Projects
Dear friend,
I’ve been immersed in 3 different projects this year I’d like to tell you about in this chonker of a post. As an artist, I feel like no art is fully shared if there is no village to share it with. I realized if I create art then I must also work to create a village.
With the way of the current world, it feels like there is no greater need than for women to gather. This year, it’s been apparent to me that what I’ve sought for so long could only be found in sisterhood. Sisterhood was one of those words I used to hate. It was a sore spot because a group of women seemed scary to me…full of competition and judgement. I’ve come to know that most or many women feel this way—we’ve all been betrayed or hurt too many times by one another, trying to survive the best we could in a male-dominated world. I had a lot of blind spots to how patriarchy affects my life. The isolation of women is one of the cruelest consequences. When we are isolated from one another, we are also isolated from our authenticity and empowerment. When there is no sisterhood challenging and supporting us, reminding us of our power, it’s easy to say yes when we mean no, bend to external pressures to be unproblematic rather than truthful, minimize our greatness, accept breadcrumbs rather than our true worth, or try to do it all alone, carrying the weight of the world. I’ve had the privilege this year of witnessing women face their greatest fears and create what they dream in their lives. Their bravery is the most potent medicine I’ve ever received. Just the other day in a group call, a sister said, after taking a big risk that day to live in her truth, “I know I’ll be okay because I have you all.” I feel the same.
Last spring, I founded The Center for Female Sovereignty. I wanted to claim that we are all artists, our lives the grand piece of art, what we create is essential to daily life, and what we leave behind of our souls’ work is a wilderness needed by our family, our village, the whole dang world in whatever tiny or big way…because all we create is a cascade of events, building off of one another.
The Center for Female Sovereignty now has two permutations to bring women together:
SOULBIRTHING & SONGBIRD SUPPER CLUB
Soulbirthing is open for 2023! And it is changing its shape. The women of this year are staying on for next year to continue to co-create and co-lead. It is now donation-based, has an online-only option, and will span 12 months following the ancient wheel of the female archetypes. It will also include travel for anyone who wants to join. We are going to France next month for a pilgrimage to the caves of Mary Magdalene and to steep ourselves in the artistic pleasures of Paris. We will continue to explore the world in 2023, sit with elders, and unearth the lost and oppressed wisdom of our ancestors.
In Soulbirthing this year, the women and I have discovered that each archetype simply is a starting place to discover all our inner potential energy and bring it out into the world. We create, design, co-create, laugh, dance, sing, dig in, tend fire, shed tears, move through our blocks…it’s a space we hold tenderly, so we can be all our flavors…so very human and goofy in the joy of connection. What we’ve witnessed one another create and manifest this year brings me to tears. To share a safe, loving sisterhood with women bringing our blind spots to more consciousness, claiming our authenticity, moving into the world empowered, boldly sharing our gifts in service, aligned with our values…feeds and nourishes in a way that heals those voids where we have been left adrift and isolated in our culture.
Soulbirthing 2023 begins in March. Sign up now.
Songbird Supper Club
The Last Tuesday of Every Month
6pm
West Salem Public House
Women artists gathered in houses in Winston-Salem this past summer and asked each other what we long for, need, and what is possible. Songbird Supper Club was born.
Songbird Supper Club is a cozy and casual performance series to celebrate women who create and express, or want to start! At Songbird, we shed all the pressures we've taken on and embrace our vulnerability so we can be our raw, authentic selves and experiment with our expression in a safe, loving space of friendship and support. We've got nothing to prove here. We can be messy. It might be your first time performing or sharing your vision--we are here to cheer you on, encourage you, and see you shine. Or you might be a seasoned professional who wants deeper connections in our community. QTBIPOC women are especially encouraged to participate. Each night will be hosted by an Emcee who will help us get to know 6 featured women. All are welcome! Bring your kids, friends, partners, and families! Let's build this village where we honor and uplift women and their visions, because we believe that all that we imagine is meant to be birthed into the world and shared.
Songbird is rooted in building trust and collectively healing patriarchal-conditioning that has led to sisterhood wounds, perfectionism, and outmoded belief systems that keep us isolated from one another and our magic. We want to fundamentally change the landscape for women artists in Winston-Salem and the surrounding areas. Songbird's goal is to always have your back and help make your dreams possible. Anything is possible when we do it together. Join us for supper!
Our first Songbird Supper Club on October 25th will have me as Emcee featuring local artists and musicians Ely B, Martha Bassett, Casey Noels, Hannah Pabon, and more.
I hope that every woman in town will hear about this. Please spread the word!
And what about the music?
METAMORPHOSIS was just that. I’m getting to know this new form. The album had its one-year anniversary on Oct. 1st. I’m deep in my next project, and am in the surrender I’ve grown accustomed to of not knowing when or if it will all come together. I trust the process now more than I used to. I seem to be on a 3-year cycle, releasing work once every 3 years. We’ll see if that happens again. I’m re-thinking a lot, unsatisfied that big parts of myself have not been fully expressed. I had a health scare recently and I felt a tremendous need to share my work in process, to feel the comfort of leaving it all out there to be known. I began to post on social media the poems or segments of what I write, realizing that every stage of the creative process is an art piece in itself. That it all will change as I create a new album shouldn’t mean that the stages of what it was are disregarded. I’ve been doing this daily writing in journals since I was 13, a relationship with myself to figure things out. To open it up feels like a lesson in vulnerability, in letting myself be seen as imperfect, authentic, messy. The Instagram algorithms really bury the poetry posts I’ve noticed, so if you’d like to follow along, please go to my page and like some posts so they show up in your feed.
Thank you all! I hope I get to see you at Songbird Supper Club on Oct. 25th.
Sending all my love,
Cashavelly Morrison
Official Premiere of Metamorphosis, the feature film, at RiverRun Film Festival
Join us April 24th at 6pm at Marketplace Cinemas in Winston-Salem, NC. Click here for tickets.
Metamorphosis, the feature film, is an official selection of RiverRun Film Festival, the Toronto International Women Film Festival, the Berlin International Art Film Festival, the Boston Independent Film Awards, and has won awards in the LA Independent Film Awards, the Montreal Independent Film Festival, the Women’s International Film Festival, and was named a semi-finalist in the Rhode Island International Film Festival.
In this avant-garde, experimental feature film, artist Cashavelly Morrison creates a long-form music video set to her new album of the same name. The film follows a woman in crisis who leaves her life of luxury for the wilderness, where a mysterious man leads her to unexpected revelations. Made primarily by UNCSA alums and shot in Winston-Salem and around North Carolina, this film has garnered numerous awards from festivals around the world. —RiverRun
METAMORPHOSIS has arrived!
Dear creatures,
Find the new album METAMORPHOSIS on all digital platforms today.
I’d like to tell you, this album began with the aftermath of the #metoo movement. I began to feel like all my solace in finger-pointing men was a betrayal to the innocence I could see so clearly in my own son. I was awakened and softened by the fact that men are suffering too. I know that when I have been my most powerless, most in pain, limited by beliefs, roles, and expectations, and abandoned with no guidance and no grace, I have witnessed my own harshness…and loneliness. Hurt people hurt people, and we unconsciously dress Fear in Power’s clothes because the ego, when out of balance with the soul, will stop at nothing to preserve itself. But, as we’ve seen, anything acting as a surrogate for authentic power must be constantly fed, and in time will eat itself alive, destroying all in its wake.
I’ve learned over this journey that what provokes me or upsets me in someone else is what I am repressing in myself. My anger toward men pointed me to the fact that I had outcast whole parts of myself. I realized I had an inner man I had severely judged, abused, and abandoned. How could I truly love if there were parts of myself I could not love? I was activated to resurrect these inner parts, what I began to see as the inner man…that also lead me to the inner woman…and then finally to the beyond, to a genderless form…a wild, nameless creature made gloriously from the environment where it evolved, from the Spirit from which it was first envisioned.
This album, and the subsequent feature film, is about this journey…the meeting and marriage of the inner lovers in equal power and vulnerability; the resurrection of the raw innocence that knows what it loves, what it longs for, what its purpose is; the descent into the freedom of humility—that we are each both significant and insignificant in a larger interconnected story of constant co-creation and co-destruction, to be remade again and again. This album is the calling, the severance, and the threshold we all must cross to live a soul-driven life…a life in which the ego, so hell-bent on protecting us, becomes a dear friend in service to this inner calling, to this larger story, to transcendent Love—the Love that can hold nuances, paradoxes, the villain in every hero, the hero in every villain, and the parts of ourselves longing to be forgiven, loved, resurrected.
Compassionately yours forever,
Cashavelly
Photo by Heather Evans Smith
New releases, film screening, shows, press...
Many things happening! We had a beautiful release show on July 30th at The Ramkat. Thank you to all who came out. It was a spiritual homecoming for me and felt so full of love and gratitude. I’ve missed being with people. This album was made in service to something beyond me and I hope it will be a comfort, a tether, a friend to anyone going through the dark forest of life transitions. It drops October 1st on all digital streaming sites. Go here to purchase CDs or Vinyl.
Please join us for a free film screening of the film Metamorphosis set to my album of the same name on Monday, September 27th at 7pm at a/perture cinema in Winston-Salem, NC. The film has won Best Experimental Film and Best Music Video in the LA Independent Film Awards, and won Best Music Video in the Montreal Independent Film Festival. It is an Official Selection of the Toronto International Women Film Festival, the Berlin Art Film Festival, and was named a semi-finalist in the Rhode Island International Film Festival. The world premiere will be at a later date.
Find our first 2 singles “Metamorphosis” and “Match Me” from the new album on all digital streaming sites now. Check out the reviews and premieres:
"Local Artist Celebrates New Album - Relish, Winston-Salem Journal
Buzz Music in Los Angeles Premieres “Match Me” Single
Come see us at Upcoming Shows!
Saturday, September 18 at 6pm - An intimate Show at The Arts Place of Stokes County, Danbury, NC
Saturday, October 2 at 3:45pm - Bailey Park
Friday, January 14 at 8pm - Motorco Music Hall, Durham, NC
Look out for more shows to be announced soon.
Live Show Photos by Allison Lee Isley
Other photos by Heather Evan Smith
Film Poster by Krist Norsworthy
Album Release Show July 30
Hi beautiful music-listening super person,
Join us for our album release show July 30 at The Ramkat in Winston-Salem, NC. I’m so excited that I, Anomaly and David Wimbish (of The Collection) will be joining us. Break out your sparkly pants and come let all that pandemic repression loose! Get tickets here. It’s a party! I hope to see you there.
Love, Cashavelly
The New Album METAMORPHOSIS
OUT July 30. Click to preorder now.
To you,
This album is the result of a 3-year dive into my fears. I hope it will feel like a spiritual loving embrace to anyone who hears it. That is my intention. It is my soul work and the medicine I have to give the world.
Love, Cashavelly
