We recently had the chance to connect with Violet Moon MA and have shared our conversation below.
Violet, so good to connect and we’re excited to share your story and insights with our audience. There’s a ton to learn from your story, but let’s start with a warm up before we get into the heart of the interview. When was the last time you felt true joy?
With friends in nature. The moon was a crescent, hanging low, briefly brushing the mountain tops before descending behind them. We spent the day hiking for miles, talking, grieving, trying to find meaning in heartbreak. In that moment of dusk when the moon fell, a phone speaker inside a bear vault lid played 20s-40s swing music. We danced. We made our own music. It was spontaneous and serendipitous, and like co-created destiny. It was exactly right, and what I suppose magic feels like.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
My name is Violet Moon, MA (they/them) and I’m a dance storyteller and feelings alchemist. I build worlds to process trauma through movement, for anyone who feels like they have nothing left to know they’re worth and capable of creating the tomorrow that brought them to today.
Within my art practice, this looks like producing original work around the world rooted in authentic experience and expression, using extensive dramaturgical research and embodiment for raw, honest storytelling. I believe in the impact and power of creation, and that art makes us intergenerational healers. Outside of facilitating festivals and workshops across Texas and creating professional works, I aim to offer community tools in trauma-mindful consent, cross-medium local arts accessibility, and expressive arts therapy practices for creative development.
My extensive background in international study, therapeutic arts facilitation, and numerous guest artist contracts and collaborations is a privilege I hold with deep reverence. In all avenues, my continued research rests in the ever-evolving ways we connect and how to sink into deeper devotion for Life’s dance.
Appreciate your sharing that. Let’s talk about your life, growing up and some of topics and learnings around that. What relationship most shaped how you see yourself?
Every interaction I have ever had has revealed or fermented who I am. People show me— in my reactions to them— what I hold important, what I care about, they ways I hide from myself, and who I want to be. In that very vein, there are so many selves.
There are the relationships that distorted but shaped my self-view, impacting how I and the people that love me relate. Insecurity makes eggshells out of a personality. I tiptoe around others before they learn to tiptoe around me. This mirror to my faults, with discernment and grace, can be as much a portal to growth— if I let it.
However, the people that have let me fall apart, who listen, hold me, and make it safe to unravel, are my greatest teachers. They are people who love deeply. They are people I have loved deeply. They are reflective, earnest, and silly. They are true to themselves, and in doing so, create a world for me to do the same.
What have been the defining wounds of your life—and how have you healed them?
Countless. Truly I wish, like many, that I could pinpoint a few and claim victory. But, my wounds haunt me. They define my demeanor and presence, my approach to (or absence from) places and relationships. To say I have healed my hurt would imply my definition of healed is eradication. It is to remember without regression, and I fall all the time. That is to not say I have not found healing. I am simply not so sure “to heal” is ever past tense. Healing in its present continuous tense, however, feels more fitting. I see the mangled scar tissue of my past as something to live alongside of and learn to live with. I find myself when I grow in awareness and compassion of it, and learn how to communicate my reactions when they’re still impulsive echoes of survival.
In many ways, I am a survivor of other people’s powerlessness. I’ve seen great men steal the best of someone for the satisfaction of feeling less alone. I’ve heard horrors and lived nightmares. I’ve know everything to be waiting for tomorrow. For some, they need silver linings. A purpose to the madness. I think some things are just cruel; just evil; just things I don’t have the heart to understand.
In all of it though, I believe my strength comes from feeling so widely, so deeply, so vast I lose my breath sometimes. I want to let life change me into someone who cares more instead of less. I want to be someone who can transmute the unspeakable into hope. I want to be an alchemist of experience and a creator of the unknown. Often I feel endless humility for the fight in me. For the perhaps delusional but undeterred optimist. They believed in things so firmly and completely beyond their known life, that they built an everyday so beautiful, and full, and safe not even seemingly endless sorrow could stop its unfolding. For that, for my drive and compassion, for my connection to life and others, for the art that feels inevitable, I like who I am. Even while wounded. Even with healed never being in the past tense. There’s a bursting, cosmic fullness— a humanity— I cherish in choosing to be here, carrying everything I am as worth loving. Because even when I can’t yet, I know I will stay until I can.
Sure, so let’s go deeper into your values and how you think. What would your closest friends say really matters to you?
“What really matters to Violet is honesty. In art, in relationships, and in how we meet the world. They care about creating spaces where people can be seen in their full complexity, where movement, nature, and creativity become languages for healing. They’re driven by a belief that connection, to self, others, and the Earth, is not only the medium of growing as people but the core of what brings us meaning. For Violet, art is only performance when to perform means something; they use it as a form of care, truth-telling, and reclamation. Really at the root of it all, Violet cares about people. They care about Life because they choose so vibrantly to live.”
Okay, we’ve made it essentially to the end. One last question before you go. What is the story you hope people tell about you when you’re gone?
I hope people will say that I loved completely. Bordering on reckless. And that, in that madness, I was a whole person who did all they could to care well for the life that cared so unequivocally for them.
I hope, in others, I made a few people feel understood, and most people accepted. I hope my work helped shorten the distance between pain and beauty, self and other, the human and the natural world, and what feels possible in life after trauma. I hope people remember me as someone who cared deeply, who listened thoughtfully, who laughed fully and always asked questions. I hope they say, Violet showed me that I could turn the most unbearable feelings into a path of self-reclamation, liberation, and peace. Lastly, I hope people will say I was someone who never stopped believing in myself, in art, and in the possibility of people. That each could be a way of coming home and nothing was off limits when it came to creating a life of love, safety, and fulfillment.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://violetdanse.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/violetdanse
Image Credits
Consent in Partnership Workshop — Mollie Miller, Executive Director of Dance Source Houston.
Barnstorm 10: Dinner’s at 8 — Lynn Lane, Lynn Lane Photography.
Asch Building Art for All Event — Christian Greene, Tadaima.
