Burial is a dancing intervention, inviting any dancer or those called to dance, to learn and perform the simple and meaningful choreography of ‘Burial of the (Witches) Women’, and to perform it together in the London wilds in a gift economy. The dance is a ritual that buries the women who were never buried, and never ‘witches’, and calls and celebrates their spirits and lives as healer, body worker, weaver, seer, dancer, sister, mother…back among us. And by doing so repairs the frozen parts in us, and the rupture in the tapestry of the feminine that once made a web for us all, passed down, body to body, embodied culture to embodied culture. But was torn by those persecutions and the distrust, suppression and fear that followed.
By re-birthing these actions of burial, celebration and acknowledgement that were missed, we bring movement in a flood of dancing that weaves communal recovery. And also connect to the Celtic rite at this time of year, which was never about ghouls but about calling our ancestors to be with us for the year ahead.
To somehow meet the strange nature of this territory in women’s lives (and a similar territory in the systemic reality of our dancing lives) there is no fee or payment to join as a dancer, and we will all call in an audience together. There will be an invitation to public, friends, neighbours and colleagues to come and be part, as witnesses and to contribute financially through a gift economy for the ritual, all dancers will share those gifts.
Write here to tell us you’d like to come as dancer or witness and more details will be sent soon.
‘Burial of the (Witches) Women’ was made by dancer and Rolfer Hayley J S Matthews, within the Sanctuary on the Fault Line movement with the woods and weather in which we’ll dance it.
Burial is part of 'Dancing Lost Gestures' , the second cycle of events of the Sanctuary on the Fault Line movement. A fugitive, feminist dance movement, liberating dance into a wild paradigm. Re-weaving body, land and the feminine into the world through herds of fertile dancing. More about the full cycle here:
https://www.ensembledance.org/dancing-lost-gestures
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