Woven Between Worlds: How the Body Learns to Hold Multiplicity and Negotiate Hybridity across Borders, Histories, Cultures and Lived Experiences

Abstract

This thesis examines how embodied creative practices can function as a methodology for integrating fragmented and hybrid cultural identity. Situated within performance studies, Indigenous epistemologies, trauma theory, and diaspora studies, theproject investigates the body as a living archive that stores and reorganizes memory shaped by displacement, adoption, migration, and racialized training. Drawing from my positionality as a Guatemalan-born transnational adoptee raised in the United States and trained in Western concert dance, I develop weaving as an interdisciplinary embodied methodology integrating drawing, intuitive movement, meditation, and reflective writing. Informed by ethnographic engagement with Maya textile weavers in Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala, weaving adapts structural principles of interlacing, tension, and repetition into a movement-based research practice. Through iterative studio practice, community workshops, and performance installation, this methodology treats embodied sensation, dream imagery, and subconscious memory as materials for creative inquiry. The thesis argues that fragmentation produced by displacement and assimilation is not only narrative but somatic. While dominant archives often fail to hold diasporic and hybrid identities, embodied practice can reorganize multiplicity without erasure. Rather than claiming genetic memory or recovering a singular origin, weaving offers a somatic framework for holding layered identities in relational coherence. Through artistic research and performance, this work demonstrates how embodied integration can transform fragmentation into sustainable forms of knowledge, selfhood, and belonging.