NiFe

Performance

Fortune Body

Fortune Body is a solo Butoh-informed performance exploring ancient pagan practices through a queer future-contemporary lens. Rooted in an Irish ritual predating Christianity, the work draws from traditions in which gender-fluid presentation was invited and celebrated. Figures dressed in the clothing of another gender would arrive as uninvited guests at weddings and communal gatherings, bringing mischief, revelry, good fortune, and transformation.

The performance engages the historical presence of gender fluidity among healers across time and place, recognizing queerness as sacred and vital for bridging worlds and enacting change. Playing with the archetype of the uninvited guest, the

queer body emerges as omen, catalyst, and gift: stirring what has become stagnant, reviving what has been forgotten, and opening new relational possibilities.

Through surrender, transformation, and Butoh-informed embodiment, Fortune Body explores how the unfamiliar can destabilize fixed identities and inherited social order, making space for new orientations of selfhood, relationality, and collective becoming. The work positions the body as a threshold where ritual, desire, disruption, and renewal converge, revealing transformation not as resolution, but as an ongoing process of reorientation.

a rhythm of living, the quiet, still, cavernous places, known to each of us.