Xeno-Euphoria (2025)
Single-Channel Video, 4:00

Xeno-Euphoria is a single-channel video that explores the ecstatic state of becoming alien to oneself. Set within a cyber-industrial arena, dancers gyrate and convulse around two central figures engaged in a ritualistic performance. The term xeno-euphoria was coined by trans theorist McKenzie Wark, who describes raves and clubs as sites where queer communities gather and dissolve the self through collective rhythm. In these spaces, the beat takes over the body, allowing one to become someone else—or something else entirely. Raves function as safe havens, offering liberation through anonymity and embodiment.

In Xeno-Euphoria, the two central dancers mirror one another, shifting in and out of sync as their identities transform. Surrounded by pounding sound and flickering visuals, their bodies flicker becoming both unified and fragmentated, human and machine. Xeno-Euphoria embraces dance as method of ritualistic worship and becoming. The rave acts as a queer techno-ritual: a place of joy, alienation, and radical potential where individual identity unravels and reforms in ecstatic collective motion.

Xeno-Euphoria was made possible with generous support from The Virtual Imaging Technology Lab (VITAL) and Department of Dance at Western Michigan University