Greetings All—-
I am so excited about all of the changes happening at WitD right now. While I am moving away from a position of artistic/executive directorship and the beauty of collaboration is beginning to uplift our mission into a present/future of greater care and possibility…I am slowly finding ways to release and move more into the periphery while keeping the creative work and teaching that I do as a resource that I hope will have greater opportunity to expand and connect without the holding and control of so many systems. This bio page may find a new home or may disappear…or may be joined by the bios of others…or turn into a project page eventually. In the interim, I am going to start by simplifying….cleaning house and discarding what no longer works. So much change in this moment. So many of the old ways dying. I am grateful to feel them go.
-mizu
mizu desierto (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and nonbinary feminist farmer whose life = art research explores themes of gender fluidity, ancestry, social deviance, and radical creative living. They are the founder and a current collaborator of Water in the Desert, a hub of numerous projects, including: The Headwaters Theatre, Gay Gardens (GG Ranch) & the annual festival that is Butoh College.
This is a rough documentation of a first iteration of a work-in-progress exploring loss, ancestry and gender fluidity. It was shown at Performance Works Northwest in Portland, OR in June of 2018.
Excerpts from a workshop with Mizu Desierto at The Portland Institute of Contemporary Performance. Video by Karla MiLugo. January 2019
The Local Culture Project began as a dialogue amongst a small group of women artists (Emily Stone, Tracy Broyles, Mizu Desierto and Kestrel Gates) inspired to more fully integrate our creative lives into our daily living. As a kind of experimental score, we decided to spend a year together, taking our movement practice out of the studio and into the natural environments from which we eat and live---exploring our ideas around localization from an embodied perspective.
Excerpts from the evening length work of Mizu Desierto's American ME-- an absurdist, ensemble, butoh-theatre extravaganza into the underbelly of American culture.
Artist Statement
I am sustained and inspired to create because it nourishes. It nourishes my wild self as it nourishes my contemporary art self, my relational self, my neurotic self, and my poetic self. They all have a place to exist freely in the realm of the creative. And this I feel is essential to human experience.
I discover work through observations of fleeting moments….precious and difficult. daily and ecstatic. This is why I still create—because it is one of the truest places for me to know the depth, complexity and beauty of all it means to be human. It is the place I can be the most honest, the most free of social conventions and boxes, and the most natural me. I am drawn to raw and rough expression, experiences that make me unsure of whether I am laughing or crying, and bodies/minds/actions on the edge of living. Social and Ecological issues, not always addressed through abstraction, are also an underlying impetus of my work. Diversity, Wildness, Culture, Domesticity, Presence and Gender are topics I often wrestle with in both my daily life and creative life and I believe it is through engaged creative practice and awareness that we can best begin to understand these things and develop more compassionate ways of being in the world.
This is also why I am drawn to teach–in order to share these enlivened and embodied moments with others as a means to support the liberation of the human creative spirit. In my workshops I am interested in providing the opportunity for deep self and collective inquiry through present and invigorated physical practice, thoughtful creative practice and wild states of primal intimacy.
-mizu desierto