the night garden

how this blog works

i am using this as a bridge, as a burning boat to get me to the next best shore. ultimately, the best shore is one where no corporations can gain power from my actions.

i do not “finish” articles, everything is always a work in progress/process. i often keep adding to writings after i’ve first published them for at least a few days. think of it as a living journal. a place where echoes can breathe.

time is not a river, time is an ocean.

Relevant Links

www.animistarts.art
patreon.com/animistarts (help support the work!)
my youtube channel
full playlist of my UNDERWORLDPARTY podcasts
dare’s blog thenightgarden (you are here)

Currently, as of Summer 2023, I am developing live events and art-experiments that showcase the social art practices and foster participatory engagement with the work. These are called Rhizomatic Choir, The Real Play, and Deathclown Methods. All are under a tree called Theater of Precarity. You can read about the work on this blog. Stay tuned for websites and tour dates in Portland and Seattle this September through November.

Digitally, I am transitioning into 3 month online intensive artistic training laboratories such as Deathclown Demo Group 2023 which starts Sept 9&10 2023.
I am also available for online creative coaching which you can read about here: Sessions with dare | Animist Arts

Bio

Dare (they/them) is an animist, multidisciplinary artist-facilitator and educator. Their work explores the integration of animist practices, liberatory anti-oppression principles and nondual theater arts, which can be pithily summed up as Death Practice & Deathclown.
They are based in Chinook Lands aka Portland, OR, USA.

Briefly, part of my work here is to tell people that the spirits are real and to help folks figure out how to tune their instrument (wholeself) towards that larger, more diverse, more multiplural conversation called Death. I do that through various modes of narrative art practice - poetry, writing, singing, movement, theater... I have a podcast called UNDERWORLDPARTY, a collaborative vocal project called Rhizomatic Choir, and various trainings in nondual theater arts (Theater of Precarity, Deathclown).

I design my art with and through lenses such as Queer Ecology, Disability Justice, trans-species animism, Dreaming and Deep Time Ancestry. Being of mixed-race heritage, chronically sick and "neuro-divergent" has been a wisdom path, poison and medicine in this life and informs all my choices.

Animist Arts (Directed by Larissa Kaul and Dare [sohei] Carrasquillo) create from a nondual animist lens, which means we treat all phenomena as beings and living systems that have inherent spirit-full capacity and agency and exist outside of human concepts of good/bad or right/wrong. We understand all beings to be interdependent and impermanent, compound parts of ecosystems and collective bodies that arise, transform, and decay at varying scales and timelines.

We engage with artistic expression and creativity as ancestral technologies around which diverse social processes can aggregate, mutate, and distribute according to specific needs and contexts. This can range from individual research projects, devising works of art, shifts in organizational structures, bringing balance into relationships and communities, and creating deeper awareness and adaptation across networks, human and nonhuman. 

Play-as-Learning, Indigenous wisdom principles, queer ecology and disability justice show us ways to ethically manage our human desires, pains and fears as we work towards harm reduction and equitable social systems–while simultaneously cultivating our personal and collective death practices for the benefit of all beings, seen and unseen; known, unknown, and unknowable.