Dream Community

Hard to believe it’s been 10 years since I went to Taiwan for 3 months with a rag tag group of talented and wild freaks to put on a New Orleans-style parade in Taipei alongside other carnival artists in residence from Bali, Brazil, France and beyond. We didn’t only build a massive float but also put on countless last minute plays to a theater full of press and media. I also taught costume making to 130 architecture students who spoke a different language than I do and hadn’t signed up for textiles. In the Dream Community we were frequently coerced into wearing a bikini for all kinds of major events, including my surprise birthday wherein numerable strangers sprayed me and Nina with shaving cream. It was a strange and manic and confusing 3 months that probably altered my life forever.

There were two things that I remember so fondly from that period of time: being respected for my creative opinions and ideas, and going running through the jungle every morning at dawn. I get to know so many places by running through them.  I’m not good at it–I don’t go very fast nor terribly far, but it allows me to enter a romantic trance state where I am able to notice things I wouldn’t otherwise. I would wake up and go running along a trail into the mountains where I would see old men fishing + old ladies doing qi gong and little street dogs with prayers tied around their collars. I would run until the top where I could look out over the city. On my way down I would visit a tiny Buddhist temple tucked away in the woods for a little morning offering. I did so much thinking about my life on this run—who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. I look back 10 years later and see how much of those things I did in fact accomplish and how I became so much of the person I sought out to be. Taiwan was the first time that I had quit drinking for an extended period of time, which I would end up doing permanently two years later. This residency in Taiwan was the moment I decided I wanted to commit myself to a life practice of art making. I began to take myself seriously there, in all places, a comically absurd place called the Dream Community. I had my own studio, infinite materials, and nothing to do but make things. Ten hours a day, just designing, sewing, building, papier-macheing, making. One day each week we would explore the stunning country where we were residing. 

I ate the most delicious food I’d ever been lucky enough to behold, for months on end. I became obsessed with eating snails and rooster testicles, delicacies harder to come by in the US. I saw some of the youngest mountains in the world, jagged and dramatic and prone to avalanche. I am so grateful to have witnessed Ghost Month and all the rituals for honoring and celebrating the dead, that gave me so much insight to the ways that I connect with spirits in my life. I wandered markets all night and took some Mandarin classes with a neighbor and soaked in hot springs up a cliff, but mostly I sewed and sewed and sewed, and learned so much about the challenges and joys of teaching which have continually aided my current path. Hard to believe it’s been 10 years.