Artistic Creation

Photo by Serena Gabriels and Kledia Spiro. Mobius 2025

Photo by Annielly Camargo. Danza Orgánica We Create Festival 2026

becoming ancestral mud

Devised Performance

Wenxuan Xue

2024-2026

becoming ancestral mud embodies, remembers, and imagines femme and queer ancestors from my ancestral village in the northern Shaanxi region of northwest China. Weaving in oral history interviews with my relatives, creation story, folk songs, and spiritual worships, this solo performance offers a coming-of-age story that rekindles ancestral returns, queer lineages, and ecological entanglements.

How do we hold space for grief in the long duration of collapse? As the lotus grows in mud, what else might emerge in the cycles of violence and loss? How might we search for grammars of queer belonging within—not outside of—our abundant ancestral and diasporic lineages?

Development History:

  • 2024 The Orchard Theater’s Performance Lab

    Dramaturg: Xingying Peng; Choreographer: DeVante Love

  • 2025 Tufts “Ecology Now” Symposium

  • 2025 Harvard Burning Refuge Conference

  • 2025 MIT Libratory Practices Conference

  • 2025 Mobius Performance at The Foundry

  • Collaborator: Zhonghe Elena Li (papercutting artist)

  • 2026 Danza Organica’s We Create Festival

    Collaborators: Juliet Salameh, Mar Parrilla, and Yarumi González

Wenxuan and Raje ring the bell by the altar. Photo by Yose Riandi

Wenxuan and Raje engage with soil from Jakarta and Shaanbei. Photo by Yose Riandi

Coastlines of Our Bodies

Devised Performance

Wenxuan Xue and Rajendra Amira

Jakarta, Indonesia, July 2026

This performance proposes tending to the coastlines of bodies as praxis for relationality. If the making of empires and nation-states relies on delineating borders between land and water, then the geologic shape of archipelagoes disrupts the logic of boundaries across matters, spatialities, and sovereignties by suggesting coastlines as sites of lateral relation. Like islands, one’s body contains minerals and elemental beings of the world, the Coastlines of Our Bodies then evokes hybridities and entanglements of flesh, earth, water, air, and spirits.

Bringing together Southeast Asian, East Asian, and queer diasporic cosmologies that tend to mythological, spiritual, and more-than-human intimacies rooted and routed through land and water. We ask, where does one end and where does the other begin? How might we imagine the archipelagos of our bodies, as a metaphor, as a geophysical scale, as an aesthetic form, and as a material relation, in order to stage choreographies of collective being?

Photo by Yolanda He Yang. Pao Arts Center 2025

Photo by Yolanda He Yang. Pao Arts Center 2025

ART BREAKS:

Applied Theatre and Somatic Practices

2025 and 2026

Pao Arts Center, in collaboration with BCNC (Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center) Family Services, welcomes Boston-based theater and performance artist Wenxuan Xue as their Artist-in-Residence. Wenxuan facilitates BCNC staff and childcare professional in exploring creativity, art-based self-care, and cultural identity, to foster stronger connections and a deeper sense of belonging among those who support immigrant youth.

Workshops will include nonclinical therapeutic activities, from papercutting to theatre. This initiative responds to high stress and burnout in immigrant-serving professions, equipping staff with arts and culture tools that support their work and well-being.