YOLOROBICS

YOLOROBICS began in 2011 and remains a sustained part of my practice. With Materia, I prepare gatherings through invitations, visual design, music, lighting, and ritual leadership, and participate in what happens in the room. Dance, chant, and sensory intensity give us ways to explore desire, identity, and shared spiritual experience.

I design the space, curate music and guests, lead intention-setting and offerings, and make talismanic posters. Sometimes this extends to styling and makeup. I think of my role as a psychopomp: accompanying people through a passage we make together.

An evening can begin with a shared dinner and breaking bread. We set intentions in relation to an astrological event or planetary hour, dress, and move into hours of DJs and dancing before a closing ritual. The intention shapes the music, looks and conduct. Eleusinian references and Butoh meet the varied spiritual traditions people bring with them.

Much of my audio work is part of YOLOROBICS. I test compositions in the gatherings, and composing and dancing inform one another. My compositions grow from the dancing body; I aim to capture or evoke moments of ecstasis, queer becoming and identity making.

The gatherings have taken place in private homes, at Public Works and the Stud in San Francisco, and more recently in Utah. The posters and photographs here are traces of that history; they represent only part of the practice.

These are closed gatherings. Their public documentation preserves participants’ privacy. In Movement Temple, I transformed anonymized recordings of the dancing into a separate video and sound work.