broken limbs and broken roots

UNFIX NYC 2024

‘broken limbs and broken roots’ draws upon the figure of the witch as an embodiment of the forces of disturbance (natural, cultural, spiritual), while also drawing upon a modern western witchcraft dramaturgy and ritual eco-poetics informed by

broken earth, broken limbs and broken roots

(giving rise to new growth),

broken rivers

(giving rise to rapids),

and broken glass

(giving rise to a return to the land, to sand, to salt).

As an archival and practice-based research-informed work, this piece was prepared and presented as part of a larger body of ritual practice/performance in dialogue with Jacquelyn’s doctoral research on The Witch’s Dance at the intersection of theatrical representation and transformative, efficacious magic. In exploring the festival' theme of ‘disturbance’ within this particular piece, Jacquelyn is drawn to how the witch disrupts while she lingers in a utopic return as she dances brokenness, how the ‘nature’ of her dance engages with loss in service of life, as a praxis of not only revisioning but ritual regeneration.

What can be found within the broken places? What becomes possible within the liminal space that ‘disturbance’ and its sister breaks and rupture produces? How might the disturbance of the earth and its forces condition or give rise to its (necessary) reenchantment, cultivate a more potent relational magic, a signal towards ‘something more’, ‘something else’, an ‘otherwise’ interconnection worth attending to and moving towards?

Grace & St. Paul's Church - New York City

Solo performance by Jacquelyn Marie Shannon

Live percussion by Waverly Langston

Photographs by Krzysztof Sienkiewicz and Brandon Perdomo