Death Dances from the Poison Garden is a performance series that evolved in the aftermath of my husband’s death. I investigate how the body processes grief through ritual, imagination, and transformation and integrating performance, wearable art, costumes, projected video, and original scores.
Three years ago, I began taking poisonous plant medicine courses. A poisonous plant meditation is a plant consciousness communication that involves meditating on the energy of a plant without ingesting anything. Three weeks before my husband’s death, I meditated with the poisonous Morning Glory flower, and I experienced a vivid vision of myself being buried and becoming a skeleton, then rising to dance in celebration and ride through the sky on a horse made of vines. This powerful vision of death and rebirth inspired me to translate the experience into movement with costume and music.
Some of the poisonous plants I have been researching are Morning Glory, Datura, Yew tree, Hemlock, and Mandrake. This work derived from my own grieving and is guided by the sacred experience of poisonous plant meditation and the power of dance.
When I translate these meditations into multimedia performance productions, the resulting effects are bizarre, quiet, reflective, powerful, cathartic, raw, ugly, beautiful, and contemporary, reflecting the duality of death and life inherent in poisonous plant medicine. I offer a reflection on the cyclical nature of death and renewal and the possibility of transformation through grief.
