CONTRIBUTORS: Muf’UNtu
SESSION DATES: Wednesday, October 30th | Thursday, October 31st | Friday, November 1st | Saturday, November 2nd
SESSION TIMES: 18:00 – 18:30 EET | 16:00 – 16:30 UTC

Fugitive Sounds I’Ntu Endings, Worlds, Views is a unique sonic experience led by AfriKan fugitive sound artist Muf’UNtu, performing with the mythical lamellophone KhaliBaba on the great-grandmother’s Trail. This offering is a sonic migration that takes listeners on a journey through wild soundscapes, where endings and new beginnings emerge from resonant echoes. Drawing on themes of fugitivity, post-human worldviews, grief, and care, Muf’UNtu invites participants into a space of intuitive exploration and creative processing. The performance acts as a portal, opening into otherworldly places where ancestral voices blend with modern sensibilities, challenging how we engage with the world around us. KhaliBaba, more than an instrument, serves as a vessel for re-storying and revitalizing the place. By disrupting conventional ways of hearing, Muf’UNtu’s performance encourages a profound recalibration of our relationship to endings and transformation. This offering taps into the primordial soundscapes of Ubuntu, a call to unity with a twist, where the boundaries between the self and the world blur in a trance of interconnectedness.

CONTRIBUTORS: Krista Dragomer
SESSION DATES AND TIMES :
Wednesday, October 30th – 20:00 – 21.00 | 00:00 – 1:00 UTC (October 31st)
Thursday, October 31st | 9:00 – 10:00 EDT | 13:00 – 14:00 UTC
Friday, November 1st | 20:00 – 21.00 EDT | 00:00 – 1:00 UTC (November 2nd)
Saturday, November 2nd | 9:00 – 10:00 EDT | 13:00 – 14:00 UTC

Our Becoming Monster Art Director and Intercessor will offer daily metabolization sessions to engage with practices of monstering. These sessions are a space to explore how the conversations, theories, ideas, exercises, artworks, and new ways of thinking and feeling offered in each day of the festival may be ecologized through each of us. How do you sense into the corporeal and material presences of these encounters? What intimate forms of being-with do you feel in the unlanguagable spaces of the territory you call yourself? How might you practice observation without capture? Pulling from her Drawing on the Senses practice, Krista will guide participants through open-ended exercises to support the process of metabolization. Come with paper, pencil, and any other materials you are called to explore with. You can learn about Krista’s Drawing on the Senses (DOTS) practice here.

CONTRIBUTORS: Northern New Mexico Fugitive Sanctuary Mountain Dancers
SESSION DATES: Every Sunday in October
SESSION TIME: 14:00 – 16:00 MDT
LOCATION: Santa Fe, New Mexico | U.S.A.

A collective constellation of humans traversing this strange cartography is convening to craft a collaborative artistic creation with images, words, nature, and other contributions, woven and stitched into the Hallowed Scroll of the Monster. The final collective creation, as well as the process, will be documented and shared during the festival. Welcoming curious souls who wander by for a peek into the cracks, every fugitive act inscribing a previously unexpressed expression indicates the seeds that have been sewn and will continue to grow in this local setting and wherever else those involved wander. The group gathers every Sunday in October in a Co-Creative Convening to craft and stitch the scroll. Space is limited; contact Kyla for location and details: kylaskosmos@gmail.com.

CONTRIBUTORS: Aimee Wilson & Nico Wolf
SESSION DATE: Saturday, October 26th
LOCATION: Únashay Grief Sanctuary | Abiquiu, New Mexico
TIME: 16:00 – 19:00 MDT

An in-person Noria Grief Café at Únashay Grief Sanctuary as a kind of preliminary stirring of the pot for Becoming Monster. Noria Cafés are a hybrid of guided and exploratory sharing of what hurts, in a curious reverent community. They are an opportunity for us to become better 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩-𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘴 and companions in what can (often) feel a lonely and isolating experience. They are ever shifting and becoming, just as grief-love is ever shifting and moving within us; and a radical way to be together in these times. We’ll be working with the theme of: it’s not a side dish, speaking to the notion of failure, imperfection, shame, and all that we wish to hide from the lens of perception and experience… when perhaps it is the juiciest marrow of intimacy and belonging, to be in the ‘mess’ together. Contact Aimee at Únashay for further details: inquiries@unashayhome.com 

CONTRIBUTOR: UndoBar
SESSION DATES: Wednesday, October 30th – Sunday, November 3rd 
LOCATION: Auroville | Tamil Nadu | India & online everywhere at particular times

Theatre of Tiredness is an invitation to explore and experience one’s neurodiversity and disability as a way of queering our ecology through feral & collaborative undoing with kindred kins. This 5-day ritual on the lands of the Tamizh people near Auroville in South India – held and nurtured through kinship with the landscape of forest, ocean and villages – in the presence of bovine, canine, feline and equine bodies, shall see us inhabit their ecotone of co-sensing on our skins through sound, smell, and sight. It will be a space where queer and trans* therianthropic bodies are revered through stories and symbols. With the aid of movement through multi-material semiotics: ceramics, textiles, pulp, analogue films and edibles namely, we shall invite the lens of more-than-human kin with their postures of pleasure and play to co-create a framework of celebrating our collective monstrosity as a subtler threshold of what it means to be human in today’s world. To restore rest as a practice, the Theatre of Tiredness is a committed integration for creators, artists, designers, and filmmakers who find themselves in the intersectionality of neurodiversity, queer/trans* ~ness, coloured-ness, disability, and indigeneity.

CONTRIBUTOR: Sara Rothwell
SESSION DATES: Wednesday, October 30th – Sunday, November 3rd
LOCATION: Wolves Lane Centre | Wolves Lane | London | UK & online everywhere on Friday, November 1st

We will create an interactive effigy / funeral procession / float / installation of all that is dying in our world: the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful. From politicians to the wales, from consumption to the oceans, from late stage capitalism to the rainforest, etc. All of these and much more will be visually and physically represented. Creating imagery, sculpture, sound, textiles, different grief and mourning practices and traditions to create the installation. The arc of the work will take place on November 1st where we will, with reverence, respect and ritual, take the effigy apart and then start its reassemblage into something new and possibly monstrous. We understand that we do not know exactly what lies on the other side of this mass crumbling, and that we need all hands on deck to build the shared dream of the artists, lovers, romantics, musicians, dancers etc. This will be an exercise in getting curious with the process and coming into camaraderie with the unknown and yet to be defined. More details about this event coming soon!

CONTRIBUTOR: Nico Wolf
SESSION DATES: Wednesday, October 30th – Sunday, November 3rd
LOCATION: New Mexico

An Homage to the Dying World & Pageantry of the Monstrous begins with a public funeral procession – an homage to the dying world. Participants work with the Unseen world in embodied ways to find visions of what deaths they’ll be honoring (ie. dying forests, oceans, whales, and also thought forms, politics, worldviews). In just one day, they will craft effigies of what they’ll be walking with in the procession. We then take these effigies apart, breaking them down into pieces. Over the course of five days work with the process of death and rebirth or the alchemical process of solve et coagula. In the journey, the pieces of these effigies and visual art pieces get recombined in monstrous new formations (forests patchworked with capitalism, oceans combined with political parties etc.). On the final day, these are brought out as a Pageantry of the Monstrous, led by the feral children. Through performance art, the telling of future stories and maybe even a good ole dance party at the edge of the Earth, we celebrate the monsters of these times, the abundant not-knowing, the absurd – not as an arrival but in recognition of the being with what is. Contact Nico Wolf for more details: schoolofliminalarts@gmail.com.

CONTRIBUTORS: Brae Weil-Sisk & Emma Schutz Fort
SESSION DATES: Friday, November 1st – Saturday, November 2nd
LOCATION: Butte Creek Canyon, CA | U.S.A.

Regional Participants in the Northern California and Southern Oregon areas are welcome to join us to delve deep into the art of making Large Scale performance masks. We will use these days during the Becoming Monster Festival to sculpt, shape and bring alive the Beasts of our imagination, creating wearable masks & actively bringing these monstrous creatures into the world. We will dance in the forest with our wild things, so come to the land to pray, feast, laugh, craft and dance into the night. This will be the first of our regional convening events and we welcome you to camp for the two nights and share time together in an unplanned way, while weaving in mask making and momsterous revelry with our creatures. Please inquire directly with Brae as there will be limited spots to attend and some minor expenses to participate: bweil@embodyalchemy.com

CONTRIBUTORS: Alexis Ioannou & Dita Vizoso
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th
SESSION TIME: 19:00 – 22:00 EET | 17:00 – 20:00 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

At every crossroads, or threshold, there must be a shedding – is that true? We arrive at the edge of what is known and, in our staggers of becoming, we meet the loss of what has been and can smell the sorrow for what will never be. Regardless of how the past was, it has shaped our edges and our centers. Becoming can be an act of trust in the unspeakable, and to tend to grief for what has not been, what will never be, is to nourish that trust into different positionalities in the world. We invite you to come honor all that… and the pains and stuckness and numbness that you may be carrying – for your own losses, those of your ancestors, of the world, and to trace twisted ways of “showing up” with responsibility. In kinship, through words and un-words, movement and stillness, breath and art-making. You will be guided — but not led — through this terrain. Three hours feeling different openings of the crossroads, through which the errant, fugitive and excessive ‘world’ can flow. Registration required. Maximum 16 participants.

CONTRIBUTOR: Laureline Simon
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th
SESSION TIME: 19:00 – 21:00 CET
LOCATION: tak Theater Aufbau Kreuzberg | Prinzenstraße 85 F | Berlin | Germany

Monsters Circle is a courageous, vulnerable and warm space to share all the emotions that we, as monsters-in-the-making, feel in our process of shape-shifting. We will welcome all emotions, including unfathomable emotions, and will encourage participating monsters to share their emotions through any media: spoken word, performance, visual or multimedia arts. Register for this in-person session here.

CONTRIBUTORS: Melinda Varfi & DJ Alma ∞ Omega
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th
SESSION TIME: 20:00 – 22:00 CST | 19:00 – 21:00 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

Grief, in white modernity is treated as a taboo. Most of us are expected to face it alone, to navigate its depths in isolation, and/or get it over and done with quickly, so we can get back to functioning & producing. Gratefully, many cultures around the world have long standing traditions of communal grief where mourning is shared and witnessed within the community. These practices recognize grief as a collective experience rather than an individual one, allowing people to process their emotions together. The cracks of Modernity are calling us to revive and rekindle this deep human longing to share, honor and release our grief together. In this Grief Rave, we’ll gather together in ritual space – a provocation to embrace our grief, to dance with it, to let it take whatever shape or form it desires. It’s a space where we honor both the past and the present, where we move not just to celebrate, but to release, to mourn, to remember. The rave invites us to return to the communal act of feeling together, and in doing so, is a contribution to all that is being composted & planted.

CONTRIBUTORS: Aimee Wilson & Nico Wolf
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th
SESSION TIME: 14:00 – 16:00 MDT | 20:00 -22:00 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

An online Noria Grief Café as a kind of preliminary stirring of the pot for Becoming Monster. Noria Cafés are a hybrid of guided and exploratory sharing of what hurts, in a curious reverent community. They are an opportunity for us to become better 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩-𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘴 and companions in what can (often) feel a lonely and isolating experience. They are ever shifting and becoming, just as grief-love is ever shifting and moving within us; and a radical way to be together in these times. We’ll be working with the theme of: it’s not a side dish, speaking to the notion of failure, imperfection, shame, and all that we wish to hide from the lens of perception and experience… when perhaps it is the juiciest marrow of intimacy and belonging, to be in the ‘mess’ together.

CONTRIBUTORS: YG2D | Ned Buskirk & Chelsea Coleman
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th
SESSION TIME: 14:00 – 16:00 PDT | 21:00 – 23:00 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

A writing workshop with music offered throughout to inspire / soften / open / hold, with prompts focusing on creatively exploring our monsters of mortality [death, decay, grief and loss]. Participants might also explore the “monsters” of self and society – our own death and decay, so often in modern times considered to be “monstrously wrong,” as things that “shouldn’t happen,” or the monsters that desperately need confronting and reckoning, perhaps in the context of social justice or selfcare – cancer, pathogens, violence, war, chronic illness, mental illness, racism, etc. There is always room in You’re Going to Die spaces, and so then too with our Becoming Monster offering, for each community member to creatively explore what’s needed individually, resulting in a singularly unique communal conversation we all share – an experience never again replicated, simply ours and ours alone.

CONTRIBUTORS: Aline Shkurovich
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October  30th
SESSION TIME: 16:30 – 17:00 CST | 22:30 – 00:30 UTC
LOCATION: Huerto Tlateloco | Paseo de La Reforma Nte 742 | Cuauhtémoc | CDMX

Que retumbe en sus centros la Tierra: Our Monsters’ Pulse is a drum circle. A co-created action which will be carried out by calling 108 people to gather in Huerto Tlatelolco (Tlatelolco Food Forest), to play in a synchronized – or perhaps syncopated – way. These are the 108 pulses of our heart-drums. The drum has ancestrally been the instrument that opens the portals. This time, we will open a portal to take a downward journey into the depths of our decadence. An invitation to meet our decomposition. An offering for the compost. We will beat our drums to awaken the monster that sleeps within our consciousness, both individual and collective. After the first 108 beats, and once the portal has been open, we will participate and stay present to what-ever unfolds. We will dance with the erupting mountains. We will sprout the unknown, we will offer our hearts to the underground; where the mycelium lays deeply buried invoking the emergence of what we have not met yet. Write to Aline if you’d like to participate: alineshkurovich@gmail.com

CONTRIBUTORS: Sabrina Meherally
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th
SESSION TIME: 16:00 – 17:30 PDT | 23:00 – 00:30 (October 31st) UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

In a conversation between Bayo Akomolafe and Sophie Strand, Sophie asked: “How do we help each other hold positions that are uncomfortable?” This is an exploration around this question, and the process of what we might call “re-weirding.” We’ll explore how deviations from normalcy (such as disabilities, queerness, and ab-normalities) drive evolution and change. This inquiry stems from the personal question: “How do we love an invasive species?” in which Sabrina is examining how we can fall in and out of love as a result of binary / reductive language and carceral logic.

CONTRIBUTOR: Simone Johnson
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th
SESSION TIME: 21:00 – 22:15 EDT | 1:00 – 2:15 UTC (October 31st)
LOCATION: Online everywhere

This session will be a simple online circle where we share photos and stories about one person (i.e. a family member, friend, public figure, etc.) who has died. We will open ourselves to death, reflecting on how every human being before us, across spacetime, has passed away. One day, we will get to join them, finding belonging in death. During the session, participants will be invited to pay attention to how they feel as they tell and listen to stories in circle. Registration required. Maximum 20 participants.

CONTRIBUTORS: Brae Weil-Sisk & Emma Schutz Fort
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th
SESSION TIME: 18:30 – 20:00 PDT | 1:30 – 3:00 UTC (October 31st)
LOCATION: Online everywhere 

Join us where the wild things are for collective dragon tending and dancing with the beasts. What beasts lie in the dark corners of your psyche or of your embodied experience? How have you silenced their calls or deemed their contribution to your creative life to be unacceptable, too much, too unpredictable and perhaps an unimaginable force that might de-story you. The dragons of our untold stories, our unfulfilled dreams, the beast of our unimaginable failures and losses are waiting for us, they lie sleeping, perhaps gathering fury or scheming for an eruption into our conscious world, likely staging a disruption of our put together selves, they wait to distort our practiced masks of persona. Join Brae Weil Sisk and Emma Shutz Fort in a physical theatre exploration to entice the dragons, to let them roar and sing, bellow and fly. We will amplify and distort to find the grotesque within us, freeing their vitality into our life force stream… we we get ready to move & make sound. Have art paper and drawing materials close at hand. Registration required. Maximum 20 participants.

CONTRIBUTOR: Doerte Weig
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st
SESSION TIME: 10:00 – 11:30 CET | 9:00 – 10:30 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

Socio-somatic Monstrous Co-presence: Decomposing how we do power and authority asks the question: “How do we do power and authority?” Ecosomatic techniques will allow us to explore different modes of form and formlessness, power postures, co-presence and time, and appreciate what differences in mass, densities and temporalities of animal and plant bodies tells us about fear, control, and being controlled. Our inquiry is grounded in socio-somatics, a form of social organisation lived by egalitarian Baka groups, and which Doerte experienced during her time with the Baka. From this come deep listening and sensitivity in social relations as ways of decomposing modes of daily violence into power-with, whilst acknowledging that dismantling existing dominant modes of power-over is a monstrous transgenerational task. Registration required. Maximum 25 participants.

CONTRIBUTOR: Kai Cheng Thom
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st
SESSION TIME: 8:00 – 9:30 EDT | 12:00 – 13:30 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

Loving the Shadow, Reclaiming the Light: Somatic Shadow Work for Transformative & Loving Justice is an offering interweaving storytelling, somatic ritual, and collective art-making on the theme of “loving the shadow, giving birth to justice.” Participants will be gently guided into an exploration of how embracing that which is often seen as freakish, monstrous, or even evil is often the key to healing on an individual and collective level. Simultaneously, we will also excavate how clinging rigidly to notions of “good”, “decent”, and “normal” often lead to unintentional violence, oppression, and injustice. This transformative mythopoetic journey will leave participants with embodied understanding of: the duality of healing and harm, the transformative power of the Monster archetype, how to find and integrate the Shadow through the body, and how to pursue collective dreams of transformative and loving justice with greater clarity and integrity.

CONTRIBUTOR: Owólabi Aboyade & Bridget Quinn
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st
SESSION TIME: 10:00 – 12:00 EDT | 14:00 – 16:00 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

Together, we will explore sensitive maximalism, a creative framework work of revolutionary aliveness. Owólabi and Bridget come from Detroit (Waawaiyatanoong) , a border city by the river where the trees of heaven and mulberry dance in the breezes alongside the people playing, surviving, making payment plans for utilities, displacing and being displaced. We will see how our existences as natural beings living on planet earth in a time of collapse and mass manipulations relate to our existence as people who grieve and laugh and fail and imagine. We will host a creative practice workshop for writing, sound or visual expression – whatever can be done with what you can have on hand and in chunks of 5 to 20 minutes at a time. Registration required. Maximum 32 participants.

CONTRIBUTOR: Camille Courier & Laura Winn
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st
SESSION TIME: 11:30 – 12:00 EDT | 16:30 – 17:00 CST | 15:30 – 16:00 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

Becoming Multiple: Exploring New Relationalities through Drawing and On-skin Sculpture is an online arts practice for people to explore their evolving relationships with non-human agencies in our rapidly changing contexts. Through an interactive session involving drawing and on-skin sculpture we invite people to experience the potentialities of becoming-amphibian, becoming-plastic, becoming-multiple, becoming-immobile-exiles, becoming-ruins. We will start by grounding the workshop in some key concepts from Simondon (images as parasitic organisms), Bennett (vibrant matter), and Morizot (diplomacy with living beings). These ideas will be invited into drawing and sculpting exercises, and shared through small breakout conversations and large group pattern-spotting. This is a prelimenary session to frame the inquiry & invite participants into a material-gathering process.Registration required. Maximum 20 participants.

CONTRIBUTOR: Wangũi wa Kamonji
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st
SESSION TIME: 19:00 – 20:15 EAT | 16:00 – 17:15 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

Can opening the doors to grief be interwoven with joy in addition to being a path to allowing more joy into life? In this session we’ll chat about this possibility and somatically play, pendulating our grief and joy to sense how they are related, not separate parts of the wholeness of Life.

CONTRIBUTOR: Muna AlSheikh
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st
SESSION TIME: 10:30am – 12:00pm PDT | 17:30 – 19:00 UTC 
LOCATION: Online everywhere

A grief ritual on Gaza, Palestine. This session will be combination of ritualistic opening /  meditation, and a sensorial experiential process with soft / fragile materials that the participants can work with in their own spaces, depicting the fragility of lives lost, especially children. It will include musical accompaniment in the background and an invitation to movement / dance / breaks, if need be. The session will close with an invitation for reflection from participants.

CONTRIBUTOR: Krista Dragomer & Beatrice Marovich
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st
SESSION TIME: 14:00 – 15:00 EDT | 18:00 – 19:00 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

Buried Alive: A Practice for Coming Apart explores the idea that dead things aren’t the only things we bury. We also bury secrets, impulses, treasures, and seeds. In this offering, Artist Intercessor of shadows and secrets, Krista Dragomer and writer, professor and Archaeologist of the Imagination Beatrice Marovich invite you into a special kind of burial practice. Beatrice and Krista will engage with the book Sister Death, written by Beatrice and with art by Krista, as a starting point into an exploration of the ideas, modes of being, thinking, practices, and objects we use to keep ourselves together. As a group, we will ask: what do we employ to stay on track, to continue to perform our humanness within parameters of the legible, and what might it look like to let ourselves come apart? Taking inspiration from burial receptacles, ancient and new, we will confabulate ways in which we might create our own vessels in which to bury technologies of keeping it together. This offering takes place over two sessions, on separate days. In the first session we will think, discuss, and plan. During the second session, we will share the vessels we have made.

CONTRIBUTOR: Jiordi Rosales
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st
SESSION TIME: 12:00 – 13:30 PDT | 19:00 – 20:30 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

Here are the days of tedium, of sweeping, preparing beds, cleaning up after the monster comes to town. Did you think your work would be more glamorous than fixing the roof after the storm? Of replanting the garden post-flood, or fitting sheets to the couch for the neighbor whose house burnt down? The monster wants janitors, not heroes. In this 1.5 hour online/offline session we will examine the ways that our work has had to become janitorial by nature due to the ceaseless mess of the world, how asking young people the age-old question: “What do you want to be when you’re older?” is, perhaps, affected by their crumbling future. You want to be an artist? Here’s your mop. There is a task for every sort of weather and creativity persists. We will root our conversation in the practical use of fire to maintenance forest systems and develop our ideas through various fields of labor/crisis. There will be time for contemplative janitorial practice to notice how a shared agreement with each other changes the work we do alone, and the opportunity to celebrate together the quiet maintenance that remakes the world each day.

CONTRIBUTOR: Melissa Word
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st
SESSION TIME: 16:00 – 17:30 EDT | 20:00 – 21:30 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

An intuitive movement workshop designed to get people out of their heads and into their instincts. Participants are guided by a series of open-ended movement prompts to go spelunking into the unpalatable dimensions of the self, loosening our more curated and monitored postures in favor of something closer to the bone. We go body-questing for the parts of ourselves that get wrangled and squished by normative, homogenized overculture, and humbly attempt to be led by our eclipsed bits on the sweaty dance floor! We will embody the grotesque and the not-nice, we will ruminate on the versions of ourselves we try hardest to tuck in, and practice romping around as them to see what medicines they have come to offer us. Part movement experience, part processing and debriefing. People with all levels of movement experience are welcome to this session. Registration required. Maximum 30 participants.

CONTRIBUTOR: Sandy Buck
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st
SESSION TIME: 14:00 – 15:00 PDT | 21:00 – 22:00 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

Join us this October 31st – Halloween in many parts of the Western World – to release our regular selves into the night. Children, young and old, put on costumes to become something ELSE on this day!  It is a time where young ones direct adults from house to house. We open our doors to find our kids have been transformed into other beings! In this online gathering, we will explore the everyday clothing that covers our outer skin.  We will also prompt each other to try something different… our collective will decide on the journey.  We will keep it playful as well as pushing the edges of our regular daily realms. The session will also include a touch of ceremony, lots of laughter and definitely magic! We will provide a prompt – an invitation to create a character – to one person and explore the process of transitioning and then pass it on to others in the group.  We will be gently guided through this shapeshifting chaos. Please bring up to 5 items / garments that you might want to play with… anything counts.  Bring a friend/ partner/ children! Everyone is welcome! If you have questions please email Sandy at sandy@deercrossingtheartfarm.org

CONTRIBUTOR: Angela Silva Mendes
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st
SESSION TIME: 17:00 – 20:00 EDT
LOCATION: Sadhana Center for Yoga & Meditation | Hudson, NY | U.S.A.

This is an imaginary journey unto the deathbed which begins with a ritual in which each participant will envision their own deathbed setting. It is a playful pendulation between the ambivalence of the nervous system protection and the gifts of death as a constant. An imaginary dance beyond the binary of death as the opposite of life, instead working with death as a form of aliveness. A remembering of the wisdom of our mortality, tapping into the rhythm of how freeing the inevitable can be. The embodied acceptance of life as mortals. We will be working with drawing, movement and a set of questions to explore… with intervals of silence to allow for individual somatic observations and inquiries. We end with a ritual of moving through worlds and returning into the now and honouring what was touched. For more information and to register visit: sadhanayogahudson.com/events-workshops/

CONTRIBUTORS: Laura Ríos
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st
SESSION TIME: 20:00 – 21:00 CST
LOCATION: Centro Cultural Reforma | Emilio Carranza & Sabinos | Oaxaca, México

Geographies of Faith is a death ritual performance to say goodbye to our dead, those who were torn from life without agreeing. We will be asking participants to be tender and touch the performer’s body and other participants as if gathering pieces of dead bodies, and as if touching their own bodies, making together a collective grieving and tender choreography.

Geografías de la fe es un performance y ritual de la muerte para despedirnos de nuestros muertos, aquellos que fueron arrancados de la vida sin estar de acuerdo. Pediremos a los participantes que sean tiernos y toquen el cuerpo del intérprete y de otros participantes como si recogieran trozos de cadáveres, y como si tocaran sus propios cuerpos, haciendo juntos una coreografía colectiva de duelo y ternura.

CONTRIBUTOR: Omi Jones
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st
SESSION TIME: 7:00 – 8:30 PDT | 14:00 – 15:30pm UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

This workshop is designed to promote creativity, curiosity and the necessity of awkwardness for personal and social transformation!  Using elements of theatrical jazz—vulnerability, truth telling, innovation, virtuosity, polyphony and building together—participants will write, move (in whatever ways our bodies allow), and invent sounds to individually and collectively explore/create “blue notes.”  In music the blue notes are not easily found on the Western pentatonic scale.  This workshop will build off of this idea by encouraging participants to “find” their own blue notes, their own unique contributions to the cosmos!  No prior training or experience is required! Dress comfortably, bring writing materials, and open up to the process! Registration required. Maximum 30 participants.

CONTRIBUTOR: Sofia Batalha & Telma G. Laurentino
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st
SESSION TIME: 9:00 – 11:00 CST | 15:00 – 17:00 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

Through embodied ceremony, we will share ecological and mythological case studies on monstrification brought by each participant. We will listen collectively to the side of the (hi)story of the more-than-human / myth with contextual eco-mythological guidance from the facilitators and challenge ancient and contemporary monstrifying narratives surrounding biodiversity and humanity’s role in Earth’s ecosystem. We will also co-draw cartographies for the possibility of belonging to biodiversity and monstrosity by weaving the mythologies brought by participants with the studies of historical patterns of ecosystemic violence brought by the facilitators. Registration required. Maximum 25 participants.

CONTRIBUTORS: The Swiss Knot: Anne Murray, Eva-Maria Spreitzer, Yolanda Sokiri, Naveen Shamsudhin & Sanja Saftic
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st
SESSION TIME: 17:00 – 20:00 CET | 16:00 – 19:00 UTC
LOCATION: Zürich evirons | Switzerland

After tending to “the cracks” through somatic, relational, and generative practices – welcoming what sought to be witnessed while hosting Bayo in Switzerland in February – this regional “knot” aims to continue cultivating a unique space of “strange hospitality.” Embracing the monstrous, the group will explore what it truly means to center relationality as an intentional yet open-ended “communing”. Imagine walking in the woods, feeling the crunch of fall leaves under your feet, and building a fire as evening falls. Connecting with strangers and the strange within us through the simple act of sharing tea. Bring your curiosity, courage, and ways of playing to make room for the uninvited – daring us to look at what we do not (want to) see. These regional stewards are just the fibers; the festival is a call to incubate something relational, question the “known”, invite creative impulses to test “strange” ways of being and relating to one another, and tend to the becomings which will nourish unbecoming. Reach out for more information: tenswissknot@gmail.com

CONTRIBUTOR: Laureline Simon
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st
SESSION TIME: 17:00 – 18:30 CET | 16:00 – 17:30 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

Monsters Circle is a courageous, vulnerable and warm space to share all the emotions that we, as monsters-in-the-making, feel in our process of shape-shifting. We will welcome all emotions, including unfathomable emotions, and will encourage participating monsters to share their emotions through any media: spoken word, performance, visual or multimedia arts. 

CONTRIBUTOR: Joe Culhane & Malaury Kuhorn
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st
SESSION TIME: 11:00 – 12:00 PDT | 18:00 – 19:00 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

Water embodies creation and destruction, nourishing life while also being a force of erosion and decay. This duality mirrors the exploration of descent, decomposition, and the complexities of grief. In this session, we will engage with Water as a caregiver in times of collapse, recognizing her as a sovereign, living entity carrying the wisdom of our non-human ancestors. Water, both gentle friend and grief-tender, encourages us to surrender and reconnect with the deeper currents of life. In a Water-Inspired Poem-Crafting Circle, participants will tune into Water’s rhythms, allowing her to guide us through these uncertain times. As participants craft poems, they will be invited to confront their sorrows while simultaneously celebrating Water’s capacity to sustain life and foster connection. In this way, the circle also becomes a place of playful inquiry. Together, we will honor and explore processes of dying, celebrate the cyclical nature of existence, and commune with the complexities of being in a world rife with uncertainty.

CONTRIBUTOR: Toni Spencer
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st
SESSION TIME: 19:00 – 21:00 UTC / GMT
LOCATION: Online everywhere

An awkward, affectionate, attempt at momentary transmogrification as inquiry… A thanks giving ritual to the generative nature of death and dying… A testing of a deck of cards for practical and oracular possibilities… In the growth based paradigms of modernity, the unravelling and falling apart that is essential to life has been lost in the stories we are told. Looking to the teachers of demise and emergence in the more- than-human world can offer something of a homecoming to our wider being. What might we encounter in hanging out in the company of vultures, maggots, forest fires or detritivores? What flirtations or invocations might arise in re/membering kinship with these ones?  This work taps into the wisdom of compost, termites and hurricanes, of elephant feet, beavers and fallen trees. This session is part of a wider inquiry you can read about here, and builds on the ten course: Vulture and the seeds of Vulture: A Compostancy / Un-Consultancy.

CONTRIBUTOR: Tamar Korn
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st
SESSION TIME: 15:30 – 16:30 EDT | 19:30 – 20:30 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

This offering includes two parts: a pre-recorded video with improvised voice and movement at the foot of the grand oak (& cedar) in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn. Drawing on previous & ongoing inquiry sessions with the tree(s) I’ll engage in an unfoldment of musical languaging, witnessing myself in a listening & questioning process of ambiguous interspecies communication. The second part is a facilitated  session of meditative vocal explorations & inquiries. What thought-sensation illuminates as we allow our voices to initiate resonance? Can we play subtly with loosening our internal sediments as we notice thought-emotions emerge amidst the strangeness of hearing ourselves become audible? How can we inquire towards holding capacity for these vulnerabilities of releasing and embodying expression with an intention towards freedom and compassionate listening?

CONTRIBUTOR: LaUra Schmidt
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st
SESSION TIME: 16:00 – 18:00 CDT | 21:00 – 23:00 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

An interactive workshop to explore hope, hopelessness, and being hope-free in times of increasing chaos. This will include grounding exercises, poetry, and space to connect with one another. It will include embodiment exercises, journaling practice, space for deep listening & sharing. We will be in authentic practice with one another as a process to move toward our edges of comfort/discomfort while trying to deconstruct ideas of hope.

CONTRIBUTOR: Anasuya Isaacs
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st
SESSION TIME: 17:00 – 19:00 PDT | 24:00 – 2:00 UTC (November 2nd)
LOCATION: Bay Area (exactly location TBD) and online everywhere

This is a sacred grief ritual to honor the Black women who were murdered by the State/Empire when they Became Monsters. In calling out their names, we honor their spirits so that their deaths will not be in vain. The host of this session, Anasuya Isaacs, shares about this ritual: “I am healing myself. I am addressing my fear – no, my terror – of being seen as a Monster because of my Black skin and female body… a body that knows that nothing and nobody can protect me from Empire’s authoritative power over my life and death.” We will honor the dead and celebrate the Ancestor Angels they have become. There will be song, dance, poetry and laughter in this grief ritual and celebration!

CONTRIBUTOR: Elizabeth Chapin
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st
SESSION TIME: Evening CDT
LOCATION: Austin, TX | U.S.A.

The Austin TX fungal knot will be making bread portraits of people in our lives who have died. It is an exploration connecting the idea of portraits, grief practices, eating art and digesting loss. We will then spend the evening making our beloved’s favorite food and end with a communal meal.

This is a private gathering for the Austin knot in ten’s translocal fungal carpet of bewilderment, An Infection.

CONTRIBUTORS: Mari Rossi & Charlotte Hankin
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd
SESSION TIME: 8:00 – 9:00 WITA / 00:00 – 1:00 UTC 
LOCATION: Online everywhere

In Making Sanctuary with Hermit Crabs: Molting as Speculative Practice, we invite participants to join us in a guided visualization practice with the hermit crab’s processes of molting and changing shells. Together, we will awaken our sensibilities; agitating and traversing our personal-collective relationships towards change and transformation to seek ways of hospicing modernity for more caring future/s. Through slow, arts-based practices, we will explore creative sensing-thinking-making with more-than-human worlds to speculate how to nourish our personal-collective molting sacs. In this experience, we will practice how to stay with the trouble of molting and shell-changing in unpredictable time/s, co-creating alternatives for unraveling, honouring and building our capacity/ies to be with the monstrous moments of becoming.

CONTRIBUTORS: Harshinee Rajkumar
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd
SESSION TIME: 15:00 – 17:00 IST | 9:30 – 11:30 UTC
LOCATION: Cubbon Park | Bangalore | India

We face unprecedented demands for self-awareness and critical examination of our lives; we’re expected to reveal our inner selves, often measured against standards rooted in dominant, often white, narratives. Many of us are left grappling with feelings of grief, confusion, and a disconnection from our true selves, all while being pressured to know and be more. We ask ourselves: what would it mean to imagine a version of ourselves free from these constraints – one that feels safe and connected to our true nature? While we acknowledge these systemic failures and injustices, we must reimagine and actively hold space for a greater idea of who we can be, or who we see ourselves becoming. This workshop will explore what it means to gently hold these imaginative visions of ourselves and allow them to exist. We’ll use artistic mediums to let celebration and grief co-exist. Participants will be encouraged to use materials and experience the tactile effects of creation. We will engage in activities to define, identify, grieve and envision ourselves. Write to Harshinee for more information and to sign up: harshineerajkumar7@gmail.com

CONTRIBUTOR: Anoushka Kumar
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd
SESSION TIME: 18:30 – 20:00 IST | 13:00 – 14:30 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

This session will create space to be with rawness and aliveness of our grief and fears, allowing them to challenge the edges of our stability and inspire new ways of feeling. The format will be blending embodied somatic practices with creative expression through expressive arts therapy. We will start with a somatic exercise to ground ourselves, allowing us to shed layers and deepen into the present moment. Participants will then dive into their inner emotional landscapes, exploring feelings such as grief or fear through crafts and intuitive art-making. Using recyclable and natural materials, found objects, or any available art supplies, they will transform these emotions into tangible forms. We will then engage with our crafted creations, listening to see if they wish to express themselves through sounds / movements / art. The session will conclude with a short journaling session and a group sharing, offering time to reflect on the experience and integrate.

CONTRIBUTORS: Frederike Doffin, anisa sima, & Manuel Lindner
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd
SESSION TIME: 15:00 – 18:00 CET | 14:00 – 17:00 UTC (including 40-minute walk)
LOCATION: Online everywhere

Transitional Momentum for Ecological Grief is a workshop with simple somatic exercises and an approach of embodied listening to create a frame where we intend to explore the liminal space between letting go and not yet knowing what is to emerge. We will come in touch with our feeling body and the fluid dynamics between joy and grief. We place an emphasis on imagination as a portal to kin-centric ecological awareness and will journey through inner and outer landscapes. In creating ‘momentum’ for micro shifts of larger transition processes, we unravel. The event is composed of a series of embodied approaches which stimulate empathy and inner-listening. We will guide somatic exercises, hold space for verbal exchange, and offer the opportunity to journey away from the screen in an effort to explore the interstitial zones between our bodies, wider ecological environments, and the digital realm. A 40-minute outdoor walk in your immediate surroundings will be part of the session. Registration required. Maximum 15 participants.

CONTRIBUTOR: Sarah El-Sayeh
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd
SESSION TIME: 16:00 – 17:00 EET | 14:00 – 15:00 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

A ritual ceremony of being undone, unhinged, unbecoming, irrelevant and blending. Embracing being a wallflower. An undertone of radical acceptance – of “undone” as a state of being, rather than something needing to be fixed. This offering is brought to you from someone who’s been on a Sufi path of remembrance, someone who’s been taught to not strive for credit, acknowledgment or recognition. Wallflowers tend to avoid the center, they don’t want to lead –  if they do lead, it happens from the sidelines, from the periphery.  The archetype of the “wallflower” is inspired by the book The Perks of Being a Wallflower. From the periphery, we have space to make observations and curate perspective – there’s another texture to belonging at the sidelines.

CONTRIBUTOR: Andrés Conteris | Casa Cultural IQ’ | Casa QATZIJ
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd
SESSION TIME: 9:00 – 13:00 CST
LOCATION: San Lucas Tolimán | Lago Atitlán | Guatemala 

During these end-times that we find ourselves in, when the life-support system on the planet is in danger, the forest beings are especially feeling the acute impact of how our species is not living in an integral, life-affirming way. Given this imbalance, we seek to engage in a dance of grieving and celebration with the ecology of the forest within the protected area of Cerro Nuboso Iquitiú. In this space, participants will be invited to feel, share, experiment and practice opening ourselves to the ineffable mystery, the unimaginable beyond knowing. This multigenerational gathering of humans will join with the nonhuman flora and the fauna community in ceremony. The wisdom of the children and the elders will be honored, while exploring creative ways for humans to grapple and engage with each other and with other living beings as we collectively race on a planetary level toward the precipice of uncertainty. In our ritual we will especially invoke the spirits of Mayan Kaqchiquel ancestors who have communed with this land for thousands of years. For more information and to RSVP, please call or WhatsApp: +502-4262-7944.

CONTRIBUTOR: Camille Courier & Laura Winn
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd
SESSION TIME: 11:30 – 13:00 EDT | 16:30 – 18:00 CET | 15:30 – 17:00 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

Becoming Multiple: Exploring New Relationalities through Drawing and On-skin Sculpture is a 90-minute online arts practice for people to explore their evolving relationships with non-human agencies in our rapidly changing contexts. Through an interactive session involving drawing and on-skin sculpture we invite people to experience the potentialities of becoming-amphibian, becoming-plastic, becoming-multiple, becoming-immobile-exiles, becoming-ruins. We will start by grounding the workshop in some key concepts from Simondon (images as parasitic organisms), Bennett (vibrant matter), and Morizot (diplomacy with living beings). These ideas will be invited into drawing and sculpting exercises, and shared through small breakout conversations and large group pattern-spotting. Registration required. Maximum 15 participants.

CONTRIBUTOR: Nahú Rodríguez
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd
SESSION TIME: 10:00 – 11:00 CST | 16:00 – 17:00 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

This sonic offering is for the transit of time: sounds as sensitive layers that allow us to touch the deep, to enter the chaotic harmony of time and its monsters. This offering is an encounter – a vibrant ceremony – that summons our sonic memory in gratitude to transformation and time. A ritual to honor the awakening of our own listening.

Esta ofrenda sónica es para el tránsito de los tiempos: sonidos como capas sensibles que nos permite tocar lo profundo, llegar a la armonía caótica del tiempo y de sus monstruos. Este ofrecimiento es encuentro –una ceremonia vibrante– que convoca nuestra memoria sonora de agradecimiento a la transformación y al tiempo. Un ritual para honrar al propio despertar de nuestra escucha.

CONTRIBUTORS: Oaxaca Butoh Lab | Mar Inés Cardoso & Alessandro Bo
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd
SESSION TIME: 12:00 – 12:30 CST | 18:00 – 18:30 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

Butoh is a practice of undoing the form of the human body, erasing the personal and identitarian gestures and of opening oneself – beyond known boundaries – to the unncany, the unpredictable, and to unknown beauty. The monstrous manifests itself as “the other,” that which astonishes us, generates questions and pulses within us, waiting to become visible in the flesh and manifest in the perceptible field. Over five weeks, a circle of Butoh practitioners in Oaxaca, is delving into a creative laboratory process, dwelling on the philosophical aspects of the composition, exploring what creative process is… in order to enter into the work without knowing what will arise. In the process, they inquire about the complex meaning of ritual, death, endings and the possibility of something new arising. There is a precise focus on the body, the intricate details of technique that may unravel habitual movements and embody concepts from a non-rational place. The lab culminates in a short film (videodanza) which will be screened as a part of Becoming Monster.

CONTRIBUTOR: Krista Dragomer & Beatrice Marovich
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd
SESSION TIME: 15:00 – 17:00 EDT | 19:00 – 21:00 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

Buried Alive: A Practice for Coming Apart explores the idea that dead things aren’t the only things we bury. We also bury secrets, impulses, treasures, and seeds. In this offering, Artist Intercessor of shadows and secrets, Krista Dragomer and writer, professor and Archaeologist of the Imagination Beatrice Marovich invite you into a special kind of burial practice. Beatrice and Krista will engage with the book Sister Death, written by Beatrice and with art by Krista, as a starting point into an exploration of the ideas, modes of being, thinking, practices, and objects we use to keep ourselves together. As a group, we will ask: what do we employ to stay on track, to continue to perform our humanness within parameters of the legible, and what might it look like to let ourselves come apart? Taking inspiration from burial receptacles, ancient and new, we will confabulate ways in which we might create our own vessels in which to bury technologies of keeping it together. This offering takes place over two sessions, on separate days. In the first session we will think, discuss, and plan. During the second session, we will share the vessels we have made.

CONTRIBUTORS: Kate Morales & Robin Bean Crane
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd
SESSION TIME: 18:00 – 19:39 EDT | 22:00 – 23:39 UTC
LOCATION: Atlanta, Georgia (location TBD) | U.S.A. and online everywhere

What if theater could unblock stuck monsters and open collective space to heal illness? In this participatory performance, two applied theater practitioners perform excerpts from their shows Água Loves a Monster and Groverflow. Both shows debuted in the summer of 2024 and experimented with the process of using ritual theater to metabolize the illnesses that arose from untended monsters in our bodies – personally, systemically, and ecologically. Moving with our cancer and endometriosis diagnoses in connection with the escalation of genocide and collapse, we chose to explore deeper roots of healing through the container of art making and play. In the session following the performances, we invite participants into dialogue about our processes, and close with an invitation into embodied digestion of the shows that allows us to try on some of the devising practices we used to honor our monsters onstage and apply this to your own healing journey. Please reach out to Kate Morales if you wish to attend in person in Atlanta: kate@asthecrowfliesdesign.com

CONTRIBUTORS: IWTOTH (Improvising with the Other-than-Human) & Craig Slee
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd
SESSION TIME: 23:00 – 1:00 (November 3rd) UTC / GMT
LOCATION: Online everywhere

Fugitive Embodiments: Shape-shifting, (Dis)ability, and the More-Human-Than-Human explores the stories we tell ourselves about power, about ability, health, and suffering always posit an Other. But what happens when we ask who the Others inside us are? What if, as the human breaks and ruptures, something else is emerging. Something that has always been here, with humanity, since before the human existed. Part storytelling mode, part experiment in exploring fugitive bodyminds as agents of the numinous – wyrd oracles – the session will be a tracing of katabasis where the familiar becomes strange.

CONTRIBUTOR: LX Cast
SESSION DATE: Sunday, November 3rd
SESSION TIME: 10:00 – 13:00 PST | 18:00 – 21:00 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

As we feel everything monstrous metabolizing in our bodies, join us for Being the Wound, a space to rest, digest, heal, and/or feel the unhealed. A space to find refuge, recovery, and relationship with the unknown. After we’ve been becoming the monster for a few days, we may be in pain, in progress, or in parturition. Here we will sit in quiet and occasional live musical interludes. We invite you to come as you are, unpresentable, unprepared. We will be with ourselves and each other, connected, apart. It will be virtual, dark, sweet, troubling! Please register with the link provided to Becoming Monster participants in the welcome email.

CONTRIBUTORS: Erihapeti McPherson
SESSION DATE: Sunday, November 3rd
SESSION TIME: 19:00 – 20:30 PST  | 3:00 – 4:30 UTC (November 4)
LOCATION: Philosophical Research Society | 3910 Los Feliz Blvd | Los Angeles, CA | U.S.A.

Navigating death and dying has become increasingly complex. Natural life cycles are often overshadowed by assimilation, or rejected by authoritarian structures and corporate interests that remove control from whanau (families).  Erihapeti McPherson, wahine Māori (Kai Tahu me Kati Mamoe) is a healer who has been working alongside the dying for almost three decades. Experienced in all aspects of death walking – from rituals for the dying, to waka (coffin) building, to delivering tupapaku (the deceased) for cremation – she keeps the ancient ways. In Te Ao Māori (the Māori world), death is viewed as a natural part of life. Join us as Erihapeti shares her journey of reinstating these indigenous practices, one death at a time.

Purchase tickets here.