Ritual and Reflection in Jax Neal’s 7 Days in December (2025)

Neal lying in the shower. Photo by Sol Diaz-Peña, courtesy of the artist.

By EMMA CIESLIK January 30, 2026

Content statement: This piece includes discussions of mental illness, self harm, suicidality, and climate disaster.

This past December, Jax Neal (he/him), a multidisciplinary poet, choreographer, and performance artist based in Los Angeles, California, performed his work "7 Days in December" at the Lawndale Center for the Arts in Houston, Texas. The 42-hour performance involved Neal lying underneath a running shower for 6 hours a day for 7 consecutive days, each day he would wear progressively fewer clothes until he finally lay under the stream of water naked. 

Born in Houston, Texas, Neal grew up Catholic and grew up performing with the internationally acclaimed poetry slam collective, Meta-Four Houston. Neal attended University of Wisconsin-Madison as a First Wave Scholar, the only full tuition scholarship for Hip Hop and Spoken Word Artists in the world. After graduating, he trained in movement techniques in the United States, Germany, and Brazil. He now practices a hybrid Gesamtkunstwerk, a practice mixing together performance art, physical theater, poetry, and dance. 

His first solo exhibition combines a strikingly vulnerable essay with physical tests of endurance. After the exhibition closed, I sat down with Neal to explore the ways in which his own personal history informed the creation of a unique ritual and ceremony about endurance. The message--persisting within a relentless storm--feels especially relevant today. 

The shower has a deep and powerful history, connected to how his grandparents’ home was devastated by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. In his accompanying essay, Neal reflects on the process of gutting the house that took on 17 feet of water, from the flora sofa to the love letters from friends who were already dead and stuffed dolls, lugged waterlogged into the front yard “to be piled up and counted for insurance purposes.”

Piles of waterlogged clothes that Neal shed after every day of the performance. He started the first day in a full suit and each day shed one piece of clothing before lying fully nude under the shower on the final day. Photo by Sol Diaz-Peña, courtesy of the artist. 

“Being in that storm,” Neal shared with me, “the water doesn’t stop and being under this incessant pulse, rhythm. I think a lot of ritual, music, ceremony, and a lot of the rhythm is a really big component. I think there is a parallel between the rhythm of my body trying to go forward and the rhythm of the rain also unending. I’m pressing the two together--my ability to continue and nature’s ability to continue coming up against each other.”

This tension between our ability to persist, to stand grounding in the storm, is not only connected to recovering and reckoning with this climate disaster but his own personal experiences with suicidality. “On these days when my own voice forgot me, I started performing a small, personal ceremony to keep the quietness at bay,” he wrote. “It was a ritual, all my own, belonging to a religion of one. If I ever wanted to take my life, I would go out into the Texas night and start running. I had no path or plan, no limit or direction. I just asked my feet to move me.”

“What does it mean to me, to lie down, and perform the very thing that I’ve been running from?” He writes. “Why am I so afraid of what happens when the body stops?” This is why he chose the shower as the centerpiece of his performance art. “The shower is the place we go,” he wrote, “to take the rain, to be drained of what we know, and what we wear, what we fear, and what we believe to see what is left of us when it’s all been washed away.”

Neal huddled beneath the shower. Photo by Tamirah Collins, courtesy of the artist.

Can the water at the heart of this performance be both a ritual in endurance and purification? 

“I don’t know how long I’d wait, underneath that water, which was cool and holy, washing mud off of my life,” he wrote.

This connection to purification ties not only to the ways in which purification can be both destructive and healing but also Neal’s own experiences being raised in the Catholic Church. 

“I loved growing up in the Church,” Neal shared with me in an interview. “It was a big part of my family. I grew up in Houston, Texas. My dad is Italian-American and my mom is Irish-American, the quintessential Catholic combo. When I was a kid, I kind of wanted to be a priest. It was the idea that there is something holy that there is a force or a power in the world that imbues it with meaning and importance and awe, that was so beautiful to me.”

But like many queer people raised in Catholicism, he quickly encountered the tension between queerness and “the laws and limits of what a religion would allow,” he said. After leaving the church, “I miss the sense of holiness in the world,” he admits. “I think that’s partially why I make the art that I do is an attempt to get back to the ceremony and sacrament. I think art is a way for me to frame this everyday holiness that is just within life at all times.”

When asked about how this manifests in his own craft, Neal cited painter Wilfredo Lam who drew on ideas of sanctity, specifically in the realm of Santería in Cuba. Lam trained with the Surrealists in Europe but when he came back to Cuba, he often said, according to Neal, that the “‘Europeans are kind of using Surrealism to kind of invent a Heaven that they need to escape facing what was done on Earth.’”

“For me, as a Cuban,” Neal continued, “I see holiness in the people that I live with, and so my paintings are not inventing some kind of surrealist dream that doesn’t already exist. I’m just looking closely at the beauty of the people that I already live with and giving it a shape.” This means finding holiness in the water at the heart of this performance, in the sanctification of the shower, which he describes as the “motion of living.”

“I think people look at this and think on the other side of this, I’ve achieved enlightenment, and I’m some kind of monk now, and maybe this comes with the reference to ritual and ceremony, the idea is on the other side of it there’s some kind of awakening or transformation and you’re a new and better person now, and maybe that’s true to a small degree, but the other bit of it is that the rest of your life is still in front of you,” he said. 

“The water itself came to be a personal symbol of time, that we are pelted with it and assaulted with it and that our lives just keep going and that can feel unbearable sometimes, like God, I just want it to stop and it doesn’t, and eventually, you begin to feel the sense that there is no beginning. There is no end. I’m just in the current of my life and it is something that I will bear,” he said. 

“I am never going to arrive at any kind of destination of relief or finitude or some kind of ‘now, I’m alive, now I’m happy, now I have what I want.’ It’s always moving all the time and that is the substance, that is the project, there is nothing to hold. It is all in the current. It is all to be experienced, and that includes despair and sadness,” he said. 

Neal huddled beneath the shower. Photo by Adam Mac, courtesy of the artist.

The Houston-based performance held special meaning for those who attended, as “a lot of people that were coming also experienced some kind of climate disaster or loss, if not one that I was specifically referring to then other ones that have happened in the area. I think ultimately--one, I just want people to have a moment to feel the holiness of their own lives,” he explained in the interview. 

And after the escalating murder of people detained in Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody and people protesting ICE, many people--myself included--will resonate with the feeling of the water, violence and devastation, continuing to fall, attempting to drown us. The shower can also be an allegory for living in fascism, an unrelenting storm of grief and murder that refuses to relent. 

“Fascism is fundamentally an attack on the belief of the spirit,” Neal said. “I think it tries to create the conditions in which holiness is irrelevant and if I know the world and my life to be a sacred thing, then I’m obligated to fight for it and to defend it and to create the conditions in which a life can be lived. I think fundamentally questions about freedom are questions about how we are to believe, how we can be within the world.”

At the heart of the show is the message, Neal said, that “if there is a certain kind of struggle that arrives, maybe this reminder can make it more bearable” because “I have a fundamental right to the profound, to the divine, and that we must create the conditions of a world that allow that.”