Mycelia Memories




Performance | 30min | Spazio500, Palazzo Malfatti | Italy


A somatic offering to the intelligence of fungi, Mycelia Memories is a 30-minute live performance exploring the interwoven vitality of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Five performers moved as kin—human, fungal, and beyond—inhabiting the micro- and macrocosm of a living entity in flux.

The performance began in ritual preparation: sculpting “fruiting bodies” from mycelium leathers and wax-dipped fabric strips. These second skins—branched, porous, and tender—transformed the dancers into vessels of ecological memory.

We danced not only with our bodies, but with what our bodies could host:

Memories of germinating nuns, slowly diffusing algae, harlequins of decomposition, bees threading nectar through branching time.

We danced the desire to return to the source of life itself, to integrate with the soil, the breath, the rot, the root.

From chaos into constellation, from decay into nourishment, the performance unfolded like a spore cloud—transitory, fertile, collective.


Process: Created within a residency process of somatic research and costume making, Mycelia Memories is a live performance and audiovisual ritual offered to fungal intelligence and the interwoven vitality of land and water ecologies. The work begins in preparation, shaping fruiting bodies from mycelium leather and wax dipped fabric into porous second skins that re tune the dancers toward what the body can host.

Five performers enter an improvisation of kinship, moving as human, fungal, and beyond, inhabiting a living entity in flux. Gesture gathers like a spore cloud, transitory and collective, carrying images of decomposition and nourishment, rot and root, algae drift and nectar threading, as the stage becomes a small ecosystem of memory and becoming.

Performed by: Anna Kushnerova, Sofia Kovarich, Julie Becton Gillum, Alexandra Jane Wynne, Tejus Menon

Costume design and Direction: Anna Kushnerova