How We Play
an introductory overview of our guiding principles, followed by a map of our various offerings.
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.
Further, 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.
The Animist Arts Ecosystem
There are many ways to engage with what we do, depending on your interest, experience and capacity. Not everything we do will be for everyone. Some events are completely open to whoever feels like joining, and other events require prerequisites and an application process. Please see below for specific details. You can click on each image to go further.
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Animist Arts Playground: Open to all, year round, subscribe through the Patreon, hosted on Thinkific. Includes approximately four live classes a month, a growing library of recordings, and an online community. This is the place to train on-goingly, to enjoy learning-through-playing, and get your “reps” in. One way to think of the Animist Arts Playground is as a training ground that keeps you flexible and inspired for the more intense events in your life like ritual-performances, community practice spaces, big changes in work or family, various medicine journeys, etc.
Between Sun & Moon: Adaptive foundations class, open to all. A temporary container with full rituals that happens a few times a year. You can take one course, or you can take them all throughout the year for a complete and build-able teaching. This series of workshops is an opportunity to practice and encounter artistic-animist ways of living as it is available to us according to the fluctuating movements of reality and the natural world. These practices are “healing” in the sense that they tend to result in greater feelings of connection, nervous system health and inner stability, skillfulness in all kinds of relationships, and everyday appreciation for our lives.
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We all go Home: Happens a few times a year, usually following a run of BSM. Open to all, NOTAFLOF. This gathering is mostly about “doing the real thing together”; addressing personal and collective backlog, getting an energetic and spiritual tune up for ourselves and inevitably our ancestors, and doing our part as humans to collaborate with Spirit and Nature for the benefit of all beings. We will not be offering much intellectual explanation or doing tight hand holding through each exercise. For more of that, please join our next Between Sun and Moon Foundations course.
'bodyaltar, in the night garden' - nondual animist sessions w./dare
AKA The Death Practice Group: Please click the image for full description. Open to all, gatherings are once a month.
‘Bodyaltar, in the night garden’ is where we will focus on all the many aspects of Death Practice for no other reason than the internal calling of practitioners to become intentionally closer to Death as base.
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Clown yr ghosts/Deathclown: This part of the ecosystem includes workshops, courses, and performances that vary year to year. Having an established grounding and clearing practice is required for participants. In our work, we often use the term trauma and ghost interchangeably to refer to ancestral and cultural patterns of distress that seem to operate beyond the power of our conscious choice-making. "Death clowning" makes use of conscious spirit play and creative taboo metabolization inside of an ethical animist framework, utilizing cross-disciplinary techniques.
Early 2023
Yearlong facilitation Training
Play & Pray Approach and Deathclown Method
Application required, prerequisites include at least one Between Sun and Moon course, or an experiential equivalent (talk to us)
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The Patreon: Year round engagement, open to all. Join the patreon to access podcasts, pop up practices, recordings, writing, art, and demos. What happens on the patreon varies widely as our own energy and seasons fluctuate. There is some online conversation back and forth on the patreon page, but for a better online community experience we recommend joining the Animist Arts Playground.
Custom trainings, lectures, demonstrations, and one-offs: We do guest spots in courses, create specific workshops and trainings for groups, bring demos to organizations, and run other events that might happen only once. If you're interested in working with us, get in touch
