These / This : or Flowering body blooming mind

Flowering Body Blooming Mind is a devised dance-theater work that treats embodiment, ritual, and imagination as generative forms of knowledge—ways of thinking that arise through the body, through metaphors, through the porous edges of the seen and unseen. Drawing on alchemical psychology, archetypal imagery, and shamanic imagination, the project approaches performance as a ritual act of reality creation. It blurs gendered binaries and loosens the grip of oppositional thinking, guided by the understanding that everything in the more-than-human world is both and more (Strand).

At the heart of the research is a medieval genre of Christian material culture known as the Enclosed Garden (Gowrley)—mixed‑media devotional assemblages where relics, flowers, textiles, and fragments of the natural world coexisted in intimate, contemplative shrines. I take the Enclosed Garden as a metaphor for queerness: a form that is bounded yet overflowing, enclosed yet endlessly generative. In this frame, queerness becomes both metaphor and manifestation of the multiplicitous nature of animacy, a reminder that life proliferates in unexpected directions when given space to gather, layer, and bloom.

Methodologically, the project works through devising and collage, assembling movement, image, and text into an embodied reliquary. The rehearsal process mirrors the epistemology of the Enclosed Garden—juxtaposition rather than hierarchy, accumulation rather than resolution, coexistence rather than synthesis. This approach cultivates a polytemporal, cyclical, and interdependent way of knowing self and others, one that honors simultaneity, contradiction, and the fertile mess of becoming.

Flowering Body Blooming Mind contributes to contemporary discourses in dance and performance studies by modeling alternatives to dualistic, linear, and individualistic frameworks. In a time of global upheaval, the project calls for a shift toward multiplicity and interconnection. It offers performance as a site of ritual imagination, queer world‑making, and embodied philosophy—a space where new paradigms can be conjured, tended, and allowed to take root.

https://doi.org/10.25820/0ezs-2x04