05/28/2026
Delicious Earth Arts Residency (DEAR) is back! We will be hosting Tal Molesworth and Shvii Rosen the last two weeks of June. Our mission of growing food, creating art and weaving community brings all the things we love to the same acre of land and under the roof of our 102 year old farmhouse. This is an opportunity for Tal and Shvii to be in the same place and to see what grows in thier collaboration. Please read on for more about them.
Tal Molesworth, (he/him)
Tal is a Lover of love, seeker of depths and soul questions, a community builder, a bringer of play, movement, and nonverbal knowing, and a song maker/carrier, whose special interest is people and relationships. He is trans, – genderfluid, gender q***r, transmasc, trans gay boy – q***r, white, anti-Zionist Jew. Tal was born and raised in San Francisco, California, and currently lives in Oakland (Ohlone Land). Tal loves to create spaces where people can unmask in their bodies and expressions, removing social obligations, in the hopes of creating new ways and worlds of connection and possibility for human relationships. After graduating from PC in Spring of 2021, Tal went straight into grad school at the California Institute of Integral Studies, earning his degree in Integral Counseling Psychology in December of 2023, to become a registered AMFT, and is currently finishing earning his 3,000 client hours towards becoming a licensed therapist in CA. Besides seeing clients in a private practice setting, Tal runs two community spaces in the east bay for q***r and trans people, a song circle and ritual space, and a movement improv jam. He is also currently an organizer for a big community singing retreat that will happen in August 2026 called Mountain Song, and is a teaching assistant for a professor at CIIS. Tal expresses his creativity in his community spaces, and enjoys performing drag with his friends at the Open Stage events that he hosts… his latest performance being a Heated Rivalry inspired drag duet.
I stay engaged in performance, both witnessing and expressing, because truly every time I witness or perform, something inside of me changes, I am transformed again and again by witnessing in or expressing in the Live, Raw way that performance offers. People putting their bodies in front of audiences to say… hey this is important to me, will to me be forever one of the bravest and most powerful things someone can do to comment on the personal and collective crises of whatever moment we are in. I am very excited to spend time in Prescott creating performance, because it is at Prescott College that my performance spark got lit. With mentors like Delisa Myles, Jay Ruby, Mayfield Brooks, and Ruth Pongstaphone. Prescott has a deep resonance in my senses… I can still smell the dry/wet earth smell after monsoons, and the ponderosa pine sap when I pause and think about the land. I can feel the expanse of the space and the confinement of the place. It will be such a gift to be at the farm for two weeks, creating in a place based way and using the land and the house as intertwinings of the performance, not separated by theatre stage and audience rows. I love when the everyday becomes sacred, and the sacred becomes every day, as I imagine is possible in being hosted at this residency.
We imagine that many elements will be present in our performance work together, dance, writing, singing, improvisation, clowning, drag… Shvii and I birth a lot of our performance out of play with each other… repetition and transformation, repetition and transformation. I feel drawn to working with them because when we are together and just hanging out, the playful expression of us always feels like it could turn into some kind of performance art very naturally. I feel like we perform because we live, and we live because we perform. For me performance is an extension of my aliveness and with Shvii that feels met and caught and cradled and explored. Our themes together are forever unfolding as we unfold in our lives, and we have so far explored themes of Jewishness, q***rness, transness, neurodivergence, s*x and s*xuality, being in separate places, how the past/present/future will meet in our exploration at the farm, improvising with repetition to hold onto something and let it go at the same time, forever transforming.
Shvii Rosen, (they/them)
I will travel southeast to Prescott– Hohokam and Yavapai Apache lands– a former home of mine (2016-2020), from the place I now make home (2021-), unceded Snuneymuxw territory on the Salish Sea, colonially known as Nanaimo, BC, Vancouver Island, Canada. I grew up in Tkaronto, “where the trees are standing in the water,” Toronto, Dish With One Spoon Territory, in an Ashkenazi Jewish family, at Bathurst and Wilson, which remains a predominantly Jewish and Filipinx neighborhood. I have lived in a few other places as well, maybe driven by a diasporic / sagittarian / neurodivergent / q***r, trans need to leave and search, to be able to accept and root. The creative community that I am lucky to be part of in Nanaimo is strong, and fills me with inspiration and a feeling of embeddedness, so that when I travel I wish to bring that spark with me and share it, and whatever I learn while away I intend to bring back. I also am who I am in the context of anti-Zionist Jewish movements, and many q***r, and liberatory Jewish spaces. Though I am relatively isolated in this identity in the small city of Nanaimo, the educational, ritual, and political work that happens within and between so many organizations on the worldwide web allows me to continue to learn, stay connected, and encouraged, and this supports and shapes me.
Since graduating from Prescott College, I have worked as a (in no particular order) homeschool (Unschooling) educator, server, farmhand, baker, bookseller, gardener/tree pruner, groundie, professional dancer for a contemporary choreographer briefly, barista, and too many odd jobs. I recently completed a diploma in Expressive Arts Therapy at the Vancouver Art Therapy Institute, and I am hoping that some day sooner rather than later I might become someone’s therapist! Otherwise it would all be for naught, and who wants that! In 2024, my partner Alex and I co-founded Mellow Drama Studio and Theatre. It’s an exciting time for Mellow Drama as it continues to take shape and serve as a multidisciplinary performing arts / multipurpose community space in downtown Nanaimo.
Creatively, I have explored lots since graduating from PC! Thanks to so many influential professors/mentors/friends I learned from at PC and met through the PC network, including Jay Ruby, Dana Cohn, Sheila Sanderson, Zoe Hammer, Mary Poole, Delisa Myles, Jonathan Best, Nathan Montgomery, Christopher Mankowski, and Dey DeyGuzman, my eyes were opened to artistic and political avenues that sent me well on my way to keep learning and trying. I have continued to train in Physical and Devised Theatre, Dance Improvisation and Butoh, as well as in Clown. I have been making and performing solo, as well as collaborating in several different projects and contexts. Nanaimo has really hoisted up my sails as an artist and without it I’d probably be a rotting boat covered in barnacles. A few projects I’ve been part of, just so you can admire their names and/or know I was there if you’re ever writing my biography: Eye L***a, Bats at the Mill, The Living Faeries, Tremulous Blur, A Penny A Sketch Productions, Sir Loins, and Sarah’s Harmony- yes, it’s a Sarah Harmer cover band. How’s that for some CAN-CON for ya? Look her up ya dum dums!
Tal and I share a lot, in certain ways we are very similar, and we are also so different! We share trust, physical / nonverbal / verbal / musical languages, creative chemistry, and questions, and I am really looking forward to our residency– getting to spend time on the farm, and stirring the sweet, fiery stew that we brew together. Having the chance to finally GET DOWN TO BUSINESS AND PUT ON A GODAMN SHOW after all these years. I think artmaking is so silly and also is a superpower, a way of being in contact and conversation with whatever it is. Art is survival, art is soothing, art is lifegiving fuel, art is human and real, art is nonlinear, art is stimulating, art is Torah, art is meaningless, art is beautifully superfluous and disgustingly superfluous, art is fleeting, art is education. Sometimes we need to make art in order to take care of ourselves and each other, because we want our own art and we want each others’ art. Thank you so much to Delisa and Earl for this opportunity and to the community for welcoming us. It means a lot to get to return to such a special place, ponderosas, junipers, granite boulders, javelinas, creeks, old friends and all… and be given the time, space, and support to devote myself to creative practices that I love, a chance to zero in and meet whatever process unfolds.
