becoming ancestral mud

becoming ancestral mud embodies, remembers, and imagines femme and queer ancestors from my ancestral village in the northern Shaanxi region of northwest China. Weaving in oral history interviews with my relatives, creation story, folk songs, and Buddhist and Taoist spiritual worships, this solo performance offers a coming-of-age story that rekindles ancestral returns, queer lineages, and ecological entanglements.

How do we hold space for grief in the long duration of collapse? As the lotus grows in mud, what else might emerge in the cycles of violence and loss? How might we search for grammars of queer belonging within—not outside of—our abundant ancestral and diasporic lineages?