Why are you here? No, really. How did everything in your life align to lead you into this very moment? Destined at conception, or maybe at birth, to one day be in this city, at this newsstand, or at this website, reading this magazine? How did you get here? Maybe more importantly, why?

In a solo performance memoir held Oct. 19-21, artist Kim Thompson explored similar questions about herself. On an Uptown stage surrounded by black velvet curtains and graffiti-laced walls, Thompson wonders–how did she travel from a doorstep in South Korea into the home of her new conservative Christian family in Florida, only to leave that home, travel the world and come out queer?

Thompson’s “Timeline autobiographia: everything that is…” performance at Intermedia Arts asked the central question, “How did I end up like this?” Many audience members likely left wondering the same question about their own lives.

“Sometimes I wonder how far it is we have to travel to come back to ourselves,” Thompson repeats during the powerful self-exploration that includes spoken word, dancing, visual imagery, audience interaction, music and a multimedia slide show presenting photographs and sound bites from her past.

Bouncing back and forth through time, Thompson takes the audience through her recollections, exploring how she fit into her own life and why it played out the way it did. She takes us into her Evangelical family and the private school where her teacher mixed up three Asian girls’ names. She lets us listen to her pray for forgiveness as a young child and her decision to become a missionary. Later she takes the audience with her when she first kisses a girl and quickly feels denial about it. Her God-fearing parents think homosexuality is a sin, she explains. She tells us of how she spent three years as an alcoholic in Europe. She takes us into the eventual divorce of her parents and tells us that, “the loss of family, no matter how disjointed, hit hard.”

Audience member and artist Katie Vang said the performance was an example of “artists who bless the world with a gift, by sharing a real piece of themselves with their audiences. Not a lot of people can do that.”

Thompson echoes the sentiment, saying that her performance seems “very self-centered because it’s about my life.” However, she still wants her experience to personally affect those watching. “I hope everyone leaves and asks themselves ‘how did I end up this way?’”

The intriguing performance intricately intertwined a range of human emotions, from comedy to despair and from love to confusion, ultimately begging the question, “What are we results of?” Our choices? Our uncontrollable destiny? Our environment?

“I did not call Europe. I did not call the crossing of the Atlantic, just as I did not call America from that hospital doorstep in Seoul. These things and these places called me,” Thompson states. “Anything is possible when you’re born an orphan,” she reflects of her life travels, musing that she arrived on earth by way of a “silver stork with jetpacks beneath its wings.” A stork that would fly her to Korea, Florida, Europe and back again.

In an especially emotionally diverse scene, Thompson morphs into herself on her 30th birthday, where she ponders the same question she does on all of her birthdays: “Who is my mother? Does she think about me? … Or am I forgotten to her?” Thompson says to herself, “I am without beginnings… how can you miss a, a phantom?”

Thompson asks how she can know what to expect of herself when she doesn’t know her biological parents. What will she look like when she’s older? Where did she get her personality traits? What is in store for her?

“Did he hit you or did he hold you?” she asks her mother of her father. “And who’s the drama queen, you know, who did I get that one from? Because, I’ve got to know!” “Who’s the addictive personality and, you know, why’d you have to pass that onto me?” She demands. “And who’s the cynic sarcastic beast or is that one just, uh, you know, environmental?”

“Momma, who’s the queer? Tell me the truth, cause I know that someone in this DNA that you gave me is. I mean, I can’t keep being the only one in every family,” she asks in a quieter voice.

In a humorous scene, Thompson reminds us again that she was “left on a doorstep, adopted and raised by a wild pack of Evangelical Christian republicans.”

Her Baptist high school held banquets in lieu of proms. “Same dress-up and same food, but no dancing. Because we were taught that dancing leads to sex,” she says. In Bible class, Thompson says, students learned of the horrors of prom via videos. The videos showed the treacherous things that would happen to girls who went to prom, Thompson explains. Prom leads to premarital sex and premarital sex leads to life in a trailer park with your baby and their face full of SpaghettiOs. Or without a baby but a terrible unnamed STD instead. These girls have nothing left to say except, “Prom was supposed to be a special night.”

Thompson did not end up fitting into this conservative Christian mold, as she shows in her performance. In a dramatic culminating scene, Thompson dances while her spoken word recording plays with family and past photos flash in the background amidst alternating text of anti-homosexual rhetoric and responses. The audio says that it was “always the changes… unable to resist the call of time.” She repeats, “Sometimes I wonder how far it is we travel until we come back to ourselves.”

Thompson stopped by Minneapolis about four years ago, after making her way from Seoul to Palm Beach Florida, to England, Austria, Lithuania and more of Europe.

A relative newcomer to the Twin Cities art scene, she has performed at Patrick’s Cabaret, the Blue Nile and the Loft Literary Center, among other spots. She also co-created the now defunct S.A.F.E. program (Starving Artists Financial Endeavors) with Twin Cities spoken word and hip-hop artist Desdamona.

Thompson is a professional artist who works in many mediums–painting, photography, writing, printmaking and spoken word. Writing is her favorite pastime at the moment, she says, but she has visual art on permanent display in parts of Europe, including Austria and Lithuania.

“I like to learn as much as possible in all different mediums, so I can move fluidly through them,” Thompson explains. Expect new work from her for quite a bit longer too. “I don’t want to retire–ever.”

She never wants to quit creating art and she’s not sure if she’ll ever quit wandering the world or whether she’ll settle in Minneapolis for good.

She just might still have that silver stork, the one with jet packs beneath its wings, waiting for her.

Thompson’s performance was directed by Laurie Carlos, under a Naked Stages grant and mentorship sponsored by Intermedia Arts and the Jerome Performance Art Commissioning Program.

Naked Stages II runs Nov. 9-11 at 8 p.m. at Intermedia Arts, 2822 Lyndale Ave. S. The double-billed performances include “Dirty Bones: On Being White and Other Lies (History and Medicine)” by Ellen Marie Hinchcliffe and “Mirror, Mirror,” by Katie Herron. Tickets are $12, and the 9th is ‘pay what you can’ night; .