The Witch’s Dance
Ritual Movement Workshop
I am currently offering a series of ritual movement workshops, facilitated in-person in New York City and online over Zoom, as a practice-based extension of my PhD dissertation research on The Witch’s Dance and dramaturgies of magic and witchcraft in contemporary performance and ritual praxis.
These workshops are being offered as part of a practice-based research initiative supporting my dissertation. I’m especially seeking participants who are interested in ritual performance, embodied magic, and the dramaturgical force of the witch. However, experience or affinity with any of these subjects is not a requirement to participate. No previous experience in ritual, dance, theatre or performance is required either—only your curiosity and willingness to explore the body-mind as a site of magic, transformation, and personal agency. [See below for more details on the what/why/how of the series, though understand that a degree of secrecy about what we will be doing, and why, is necessary for the magic of the work itself. I’m happy to answer specific questions you may have as best as I can.]
The What & The Why:
In the series, participants will be invited to encounter, embody, and engage the witch not simply as a metaphor or archetype, but as an affecting presence—a catalyzing force that haunts and moves through us, transforming the body into a site of enchantment, resistance, and ritual power.
I view this work in part as an applied form of ‘Ghostly Practice’ where we seek out those spectral affecting aspects of the witch that haunt our personal and collective cultural memory and re-member the witch as a transformative force itself that can be experienced and engaged with as/through haunting within a ritual container.
Rooted in my ongoing dissertation research, these workshops will unfold as guided ritual gatherings that seek and summon the witch’s force into performance. Each session revolves around a theme and invites participants to engage the witch in The Witch’s Dance through modalities that may include becoming and unbecoming, activating and witnessing, conjuring and releasing, dreaming, reviving and revisioning. Drawing from techniques in modern Western witchcraft, ritual dramaturgy, dance, and somatic practice, my goal is to create and discover the conditions for and means of access into experiences of enchantment and embodied power through guided journeys of intuitive movement and collective ritual acts that engage deeply with the witch’s transformative force.
Workshops in the series will be offered both in person locally in NYC/BK, and online via Zoom (They will be separate events, not hybrid) and will be approximately 2 hours.
Accessible to all bodies and ‘levels’; movement can be gentle, responsive, and exploratory improvisation, with stillness always welcome.
Additional information about what participation will entail, address, how to prepare and what to bring will be emailed to participants closer to the date.
If you would like to join the email list announcing workshop dates and locations, send me a message below.
If you are interested in organizing an in-person workshop outside of NYC, I’m very open to traveling. Let me know.
