Who We Are
Larissa Kaul
Larissa (they/them) is an artist-practitioner combining their knowledge in community organizing, art, ritual, the energetics of transformation, and nervous system healing into social design. They recognize all of reality as part of a sacred and dynamic interplay that requires our grounded attention and participation in order to show up well for our current and future circumstances. This participation requires both devotion and lightheartedness, a wide capacity for truth telling and a sense of play that can allow truths to be breathing entities with a life of their own. As a mixed race (SouthAsian and European), non-binary creature with a trans-disciplinary focus they enjoy liminal spaces where colonial concepts fail, and where the most responsible way to engage is through attuned creative expression. Larissa hosts trainings and workshop-performances, and designs highly adaptable group processes that can follow the continuity between guidance from Spirit/Nature and specific actions and inspirations.
Darius "Dare" Carrasquillo aka Dare Sohei
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 UNDERWORLD PARTY, a collaborative vocal project called The 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.