Golden Dome

The Golden Dome is an educational and curatorial platform dedicated to studying intersection of art, metaphysics, and ecology. The Golden Dome produces exhibitions, performances, classes, publications, and artist residencies year round and nationwide.

We honor ideals of responsiveness, communal learning, and evolving artistic disciplines that foster magical community building, ecological awareness and non-hierarchy. The Golden Dome School’s practices seek to destabilize the authority of conventional structures of knowledge and power through an engagement with mysticism and the formation of heart centered communities of learning.

The performance work generated by the Golden Dome forges connections between art and the natural world through ceremony. All of our performances exist in public places and wild spaces so that we may directly connect to the spirit of place as we navigate what performance means in this time and on this land. Performances are often done for a tree, a body of water, or a particular community member to generate healing and connectedness.

This is a collection of photographs of the many performances that get made between us - intimately, outside, and in response to our relationships with each other, this planet, time, space, and spirit.

The Golden Dome was founded by Eliza Swann in 2013, all photographs are taken by Eliza Swann.

Eliza Swann, Ripe for Pleasure, New York, NY 2012.

JC Zepeda, Justice, Wurtsoboro, NY 2018.

The Golden Dome, The Resurrection of Care, Echo Park Lake, Los Angeles, CA 2018.

The Golden Dome, Death Play, Wurtsboro, NY 2018.

Ava Zelkowitz, Justice, Wurtsboro, NY 2012.

Yumi Sakugawa, The Hierophant, 29 Palms, CA 2017.

The Golden Dome, The Ascent, 29 Palms, CA 2017.

The Golden Dome, The Resurrection of Care, Echo Park Lake, Los Angeles, CA 2018.

미친년, Rainbow Transmissions, Pershing Square, Los Angeles, CA 2019.

Kathryn Knowlton, The Hierophant, 29 Palms, CA 2017.

Corkey Sinks, The Hierophant, 29 Palms, CA 2017.

The Golden Dome, Pleasure Now, Joshua Tree, CA 2019.

Lily Benson, The Lovers, Wurtsboro, NY 2017.

Eliza Swann, Justice, Wurtsboro, NY 2018.

Este Sanchez, Shapeshifter, 29 Palms, CA 2018.

The Golden Dome, The Resurrection of Care, Gaylord Apartments, Los Angeles, CA 2018.

Laura Stinger, Golden Dome Teaching Script:

There is a connection between humans and the plant world and an interconnectedness that we can find internally on a sensory and psychic level. Almost as if DNA were speaking to each other across epidermal barriers. This rhythm, shape, and intelligence is created apart from the external factors which normally affect behavior and physical language. The internal loci of this personal physicality, the place that we can connect to plants with, is also divorced from neo-liberalism and homo/transphobia. Thus, this movement we discover is a manifestation of a future genderless physicality that is more related to a connection with flora than with our societies’ structures.

Warm-Up::

Mary Overlie Group Grid Walk - Only engage body with space and time as we all walk on an imaginary grid

Spinal Chord Wakening - Lying on back, rock pelvis forward and back, begin to create circles in either direction, figure eights. Let the movement start to roll all the way up your spine, let it move your legs, more and more of your body activated into a free improvised movement originating in the curving of your spine.

Gland Werk - Listen to physical/metaphysical/chakral description of function of pancreas. Begin to vibrate breath and sound into the pancreas while envisioning it in it's place in your body. Humming, sighing, breathing. Do this on your back, your side, with knees up, on hands and knees. Feel your consciousness start to move from your mind to your pancreas. There will be emotions, visuals coming from your pancreas. Begin to move your body as your pancreas wants to move, allowing the visuals and emotions to ebb and flow without grasping. Then take in the other people in the room, pancreas to pancreas. Allow sound. Step outside when you are ready, take the plants, rocks, communicate with them at the cellular level of your pancreas. Continue until you are done. Push your hands into the ground repeatedly, bring yourself back into your muscles and bones.