Performance art & ritual theatre

My Choreomania character began in the Mütter Museum's own promotional animation for the event, where a dancing demon in red leaps through a crowd of medieval skeletons. In an early team meeting with the museum's director of engagement, the visionary behind the night, the crew decided I was her: the one summoning everyone to dance to their deaths.

Every character I play grows out of some part of me, so the demon kept evolving. She became the embodiment of the Divine Feminine: a cosmic mother and sacred bleeding heart, dressed in red to represent the womb and in religious iconography drawn from my own recovering Catholicism. Half summoner, half madonna, she called the room onto the dance floor and kept it there until the plague took hold.

I let people see whoever they need to see. Guests that night saw Lady Gaga, Chinese New Year, Kim Cattrall's character in Big Trouble in Little China, Princess Aura from Flash Gordon and a Bene Gesserit from Dune. That is what I love about embodying an avatar: everyone reads her differently. I know who she is, and I mostly keep that a secret.

Animation: the Mütter Museum’s promotional reel for Choreomania 2025.

Dusty Delphi Dispensary was born at Golden Guy, a camp at Burning Man inspired by Shinjuku Golden Gai, the Tokyo neighborhood of six narrow alleys packed with more than two hundred tiny bars, some with room for only five people. In Tokyo, Golden Gai is where artists, writers and filmmakers have gathered for decades, behind unmarked doors, under dim lanterns, after dark. On the playa, the camp carries that same feeling: a maze of little lit doorways in the dust.

Somewhere in those alleys, at a secret address shared only by word of mouth, you find a tiny diner, hazy with smoke, and a New Jersey waitress who happens to be psychic. That is my character. She takes your order, pours your coffee and reads your fate from a deck of Uno cards: a Draw Four where the Death card should be, a reverse card for destiny, a prophecy served with a side of pettiness.

The whole piece runs on the mystery of the search: hearing a rumor, wandering the alleyways at midnight, turning one more corner and stumbling onto a mystic you were never quite sure was real. The diner exists for one night only, dreamlike and oneiric, and then it is gone. Ancient prophecy, modern pettiness.

I am now developing Dusty Delphi Dispensary beyond Burning Man, as an immersive performance for venues, festivals and private events that want a hidden world for their guests to discover.