Floralia - Xara Dulzura: 2004 April 23, 2004

Floralia - Xara Dulzura: 2004 is a weekend-long outdoor retreat at Madre Grande Monastery in Dulzura, California, half an hour East of downtown San Diego.

Proceeds will benefit Madre Grande Monastery, The Black Rock Arts Foundation, and the LEAP Arts Initiatives in the Lakeside School District.
"Xara" is an imaginary place, an art installation featuring jungle ruins, theatrical rainforest, waterfalls, winding paths and wooded bowers.
Participants move through this space, exploring and interacting with the environment and each other in completely open-ended ways. The experience is visceral and needs no explanation or introduction. But there is a backstory, and this provides a jumping off point for the Xara Dulzura retreat.

For our retreat weekend, we will take the entire valley and enfolding hills of Madre Grande Monastery as our world-within-a-world, our Xara. Nothing may be bought, sold or advertised. Participants are responsible to provide the gear and supplies they will need for walk-in camping in the monastery's meadows. Removed and isolated from the known world below, we will pre-enact the life of our future paradise as it celebrates "Floralia" with imagined rites welcoming the arrival of a new summer.

Participants become the people of our pastoral paradise, and their acts and interactions are the life of our future Eden. Groups and individuals present performance, music, workshop and hospitality projects for one another.
Performances are the rites of this future idyl, transforming the shared human vocabulary of symbols to live and give life again in new myths making no claim to faith or fact. And yet, those symbols are alive and move through art to produce authentic experiences of ourselves, without asking anyone to believe anything.

Whether in installation, performance or hospitality projects, costumes, kites, drumming, hoops, chai, yoga, poi or bellydancing lessons, decorative encampments and flags, gifts, or simply through open interaction and shared experience, each participant is responsible for bringing forth something of themself and modelling the life of a world we choose to live.
But ultimately, the last word belongs to Madre Grande herself. The outward appearance of our retreat is festive and playful, and the night time beat will move at 140 bpm.

But Madre Grande has her own song to sing, old and sweet and strong. And you will know something has changed, and know that you belong.