NIGHT OF RADIANT DARKNESS

Excerpts of Alkistis’ 40 minute solo for the Night of Radiant Darkness, closing event of our Metamorphic Earth exhibition.

Choreography and dance: Alkistis Dimech
Music by Kevin Muhlen (guitar and electronics) and Angelo Mangini (hurdy-gurdy)
Costume designed and crafted by Katie Pollard

BPS22 Charleroi, Belgium.
21 January 2017.

sabbaticdance.com/
azimuthclothing.com/
bps22.be/en/

ON THE CREATION OF THE DANCE
Alkistis Dimech

I conceived the choreography in response to the immersive environment created by the Metamorphic Earth exhibition at BPS22, specifically the sense I had of the space as a cave whose walls and ground were alive with rippling, pulsing movement. I am inspired by the cave as a space animated by ritual performance, where dance, music and voice combines in the flickering light thrown by torches with the movement of animals across expanses of living rock. The importance of shadows, their unpredictable dance of light and dark, to the creation and appreciation of parietal art in the paleolithic, was key to choreographing a dance that would fuse with the video projections and music to create a poietic act as ’topical event.’

The role of chance in the interplay of images and sound against the dancing body, subjecting it to random distortions and occultations, heightens impressions of deformation and transformation, and traces a line from the present sorcerous art to the preshamanic sorcery of the paleolithic.

To further bind the video projections, music and body, I looked to the geometric signs of European Upper Paleolithic rock art, particularly as elucidated by James B. Harrod, as ‘gesture-movement-forms.’ These signs can be interpreted as descriptions of things and processes within the environment, as well as dance forms, and reveal an underlying metaphysics. I understand this metaphysics as existing equally in the present moment as in the deep past, being grounded in the elemental substrate of luminosity, sonority and terrestriality; the sensuous medium from which life – and art – emerges.

ON THE CREATION OF THE COSTUME
Katie Pollard

This is an ending which is also a beginning. A controlled unraveling.

One of the oldest instruments in the world, lur were Bronze era horns found in pairs deposited in bogs throughout Denmark. They were believed to have been crafted specifically for ritual purpose and were offered to the gods to secure fertility, a good harvest, and victory in battle for the Viking people. Bodies of water were considered holy places and were often used as sites of worship; bogs in particular represented liminality; seemingly endless, they encompassed both fluidity and solidity and were treated as a door to the underworld. Lur were believed to have been played in pairs during ceremony before being dedicated to the bogs and the gods; through these performances the horns and their music combined to become a single instrument utilized in communion with Other. As the products of time, craftsmanship, and resources, the horns were transformed – through their sacrifice – into vessels delivering both fulfilled and un-harvested potential.

I
In August 2016 at the Occult Conference in London Alkistis Dimech invited me to collaborate with her for her upcoming Butoh performance at the Metamorphic Earth exhibit in Charleroi, Belgium, in January 2017. Following conversations with Alkistis, the concept for the garment was born around the time of the Autumnal Equinox of 2016 in Italy, months before construction began. The project was initiated during a time of intense personal restructuring, and undertaken as an exercise in mindfully harvesting and redirecting that energy. Alkistis sent me Gast Bouschet’s Manifesto ‘To Sorcerors’ during the conceptualization period, and it served as a lantern in the dark throughout the design process.

How does one willingly submit to the intense process of massive structural change? How does one allow that change to affect all systems? To disrupt oneself in a fundamental way and still have the center hold? By channeling and funneling that energy into a new, uncharted shape, being both the agent of your own destruction and the silent, shaping hand that re-forms; author and subject; architect and midwife; sculptor and clay.

The development of the skirt became a meditation on the process of active dissolution and mindful reformation; to represent potential, transformation, and manifestation in a garment. After months of research, a handful of primary influences converged: Erte’s Egyptian costumes, the Japanese hakama, and deconstruction and subtraction as construction techniques. Within the design of the garment I wanted to include the formed and unformed, the structured and unraveled, in addition to referencing Alkistis’s ideas on the significance of embodiment; utilizing the process of creating art, along with the art itself, as tools to both enable change and catalyze further transformation otherwise inaccessible outside of mindful practice; doing so by utilizing the body – here, my hands – and the act of creating.

II
The garment was opened in New York City in December 2016. Construction took place over the course of the weeks covering the astrological Grand Cross that occurred in January 2017. A single piece of vintage linen, sourced while living in Italy, was torn into strips to compose the skirt panels – twelve in total – along with separate portions for the front waist panel and tie; they were separated into two sections – four for the front and eight for the back. The idea was that the front and back of the skirt would only resolve into a single garment when tied to the body of the dancer (the third). Each panel was stitched together with a heavy steel 1949 Pfaff sewing machine from Copenhagen. Since the voltage for the machine was not compatible with American specifications, the machine stitches on the skirt were walked entirely by hand. After connecting the panels, each strip was then ripped into four roughly equal portions from the hem to the machine stitches. From this point on the rest of the work on the skirt was done with either tweezers or a hand-sewing needle, under the light of a construction lamp clamped to a file cabinet, in three-to-five hour sessions between the hours of 9pm to 2am. The soundtrack consisted of Tibetan throat singing, crocodile vocalizations, audiobooks on Jung, Kevin Muhlen and Angelo Mangini’s preliminary recordings for the event, and silence. I thought a lot about caves as primal earthen wombs, and about sewing and weaving as the earliest of human vocations- as old as hunting, as old as moving, as old as scratching images on cave walls.

To create the lower portion, weft threads were removed one by one until the entire bottom third of the garment was only loose warp threads. The most challenging part was creating the transitional area between the loose threads and the composed panels – intruding with tiny cuts, just enough to create space without disrupting the whole. The middle – the most beautiful part – is where the magic happened. By dragging the needle across the fabric and following the shapes that opened, unexpected pathways and patterns emerged; tiny negotiations with individual threads. In one panel the phases of the moon were represented; another uncovered a cluster of eyes. Each panel’s final pattern was unknown at initiation and developed until it reached a point of correctness and completion.

The intricacy of the design was a response to Gast’s ideas on the value of work being in opposition to its visibility, and his utilizing the concept of the micro made macro for this exhibit. The patterns in the panels were nearly indistinguishable from a foot away and went largely unseen by the audience. Like the intricate patterns found in nature – spider webs or the veins of a leaf – they were delicate and temporary and not intended to survive the event but rather to exist as evidence of time, effort, and effect. In fact, throughout the dress rehearsals as well as on the evening of the performance, individual strips and threads detached themselves and were left in a puddle of moving images.

Read from the top down, the skirt speaks to the active and mindful dissolution of a structured state. From the ground up the skirt speaks to the process of formation – individuals finding one another, weaving together into chaotic, random patterns, and merging into separate but connected halves that require a third to be animate. The skirt is as circular as the process of transformation itself – what is structured will always unravel, and what is formless will always move towards coherence.

III
The skirt was carried to Belgium open and finished feverishly the morning of the dress rehearsal. To bind the skirt shut, a handful of phrases were converted into Morse code and the dots and dashes were used as a stitch guide; the words were spoken as they were sewn. One phrase was Gast’s, “Disequilibrium is necessary to the dynamic process of becoming”, while two others came from Alkistis, “Mara” – a proto-linguistic word meaning ‘womb’ – and the bone oracle symbol for ‘Bu’ (movement, dance), which was stitched in five places along the inside of the waistband and tie. Their words bent me towards them, and so were woven back into the work. My own words were included as well, but will remain on the black side of silence. It was a codification of ideas, a layering of experiences and philosophies. Like a funneling gyre, these influences narrowed down from concept to time and place to the very fibers of the skirt, stacking and collapsing on the night of the performance as each element bled into the other. Intention, person, place, and image folded into one enunciation: Kevin and Angelo’s music filling the space; Gast’s images covering every surface – skin, walls, cloth; Alkistis in the skirt, surrounded by and moving through the images, channeling; the skirt itself wrapped around a body, finally fulfilled and fully activated.

Throughout the process of creation, I thought often about the purpose of sacrifice; of the fate of the lur; of giving something up and by doing so making it sacred. The skirt is my lur – horn crafted into instrument. The result of many hours of work and love, it existed for and was given over entirely to the collaboration. The performance acted as a kind of punctuation, and Alkistis dancing in the garment was the playing of the lur – a single act that was simultaneously the only dance the skirt will ever have and at the same time all the dances it will not. The morning after the event, it returned to empty cloth.

Written in the shadow the Vernal Equinox, March 2017.

INTERVIEW WITH ALKISTIS DIMECH OF SABBATIC DANCE

What is Sabbatic Dance?

It’s the dance of darkness, ankoku buto, as I practice it. With butoh one always strives towards a highly individual dance. I’m not concerned with belonging to butoh as a style or genre, but in rooting the philosophy and developing the methodologies of the art in a specific terrain. That terrain for me is connected to the witches’ sabbatic dance, which I understand as taking place in a physical landscape, that is at the same time imaginal, affective and mythic. Essentially, it a place of encounter, and of strangeness.

But importantly, the sabbat points to a submerged history and territory – ‘a dark continent’ – of repression and exploitation, that had begun to be explored by artists and poets as well as feminist and marxist intellectuals, confronting the accounts of demonologists, the historical records of witchcraft trials, and the graphically evocative iconography of the witch. All those elements were coalesced in time to form a ‘coherent’ other, an enemy. The formation of a witchcraft in the imaginative realm prefigures its baptism in flesh and action, and it is inevitably taken up by those marked as heretic (such as Jack Parsons and Marjorie Cameron). The mask is worn precisely because it affords – by virtue of its imaginative genesis and its very nature – freedom, license, and an ontological fluidity. This is why I’m not interested in debating what is or is not witchcraft and who is or is not a witch. That is a matter for an individual to decide for themselves.

I am especially struck by Catherine Clément’s description of the sabbat as the ‘reverse spectacle, the celebration, in which everyone participates, in which no one is voyeur’ in The Newly Born Woman, and by her analysis of the sorceress and the hysteric. I feel it’s imperative to interrogate such figures, at least for me as a woman who’s found herself outside or in confrontation with ‘orthodoxy,’ pretty much from the moment I first expressed myself. But also, as a performer, I’m not so much interested in the ‘show’ or spectacle as in ‘becoming’ and in communication as a deeply felt, revelatory, participatory, even conspiratorial, act.

In the sabbatic dance I relate the closed, interior and abject worlds that Hijikata Tatsumi evoked through his butoh to motifs traditionally associated with witchcraft and the sabbat – night, flight, metamorphosis, the erotic, the carnal, death, the grotesque or carnivalesque, the chthonic – and in the testimonies preserved in the historical record – of poverty, of rebellion, of weakness, of tortures inflicted, of silenced voices, of moral and existential censure.

Butoh, understood as the praxis of a philosophy always coming into being, is the basis of a phenomenological enquiry into the intersecting realms of the sabbat and the body that flies there. Butoh opens a way to apprehend and partake of, in the most visceral sense, the plenum of incarnate, animate life.

How did you get involved with butoh and how has it shaped your work?

Initially I came across translations of the writings of Hijikata Tatsumi in The Drama Review, in my final year at university. I studied the history of art and music of Asia and Africa; my interest was particularly in dance, theatre and ritual, and in having access to the library of SOAS, an absolute treasure house for me. Not long after, I saw my first butoh performance (Sankai Juku at Sadler’s Wells). With the writings of Hijikata, photographs of performances from those early days of butoh, and then experiencing the living art (albeit by a highly aestheticised troupe in a conventional theatrical space), I had my epiphany. What I imagined when I read Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double had been realised in Japan. I had to pursue this, though I had no idea how. I didn’t begin dancing in earnest until a few years later, precipitated by a crisis. A friend, or a devil, presented me with an opportunity to perform at an experimental music, film and performance festival he was putting on. I quite recklessly and jubilantly gave up my job, and any semblance of trying to maintain the compromised life I was living, and from that moment considered myself a butoh dancer. I started training shortly after that first performance, and for seven years lived an itinerant life, between my parents’ house, friends’ floors and squats. I lived by instinct, and the kindness of friends, and by throwing dice. During this time I carried on performing, dancing with experimental and underground musicians – and helping to pay for my dance training by working as an assistant to a dominatrix, an arrangement began after a chance encounter at one of my improvisations.

When I started Scarlet Imprint with Peter I stopped performing. The nature of my work shifted quite dramatically. It was an intense time – emotionally and magically – and I was very much thrown onto the occult battlefield, learning by doing, much as I did with dance. Without butoh and the various physical disciplines I’ve practised I would have been lost. So the body was present for me from the beginning of my engagement with the occult, and informed every aspect of that engagement: my work with Babalon, with spirits, my understanding of ritual, even typography and the construction of the book as talisman. It was at this time too that we began working outside together, attuning and orienting our magical practise to the land and the elements. This was when I began thinking about butoh, and dance more generally, in relation to the Western magical traditions.

What is the “occulted body”?

Firstly, and most simply, it is the body – nothing more and nothing less – but a body that has been obscured, overwritten, silenced. Going deeper, the occulted body corresponds to the hidden body, our insides. I equate this interior realm with the psyche, or subconscious. It is a world which we cannot see, but which we feel. I am especially interested in fascia, the connective tissues, which is our largest organ – and utterly remarkable, literally so. The fascia is the ground of consciousness, as the repository of memory, ancestral and personal, and as the source of the electro-magnetic, or subtle body.

The dimension of the occulted body is both anterior and interior, and opens to us most vividly when we close our eyes. But it is always present, having to do with the dark senses, particularly the haptic and kinesthetic senses – and unbounded, because darkness dissolves distance and distinction. Movement is absolutely fundamental to what we are, what a body is, to our self perception. Its seminal role in self consciousness and subjectivity is elegantly put by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone when she writes: ‘In effect, movement forms the I that moves before the I that moves forms movement. Spontaneous movement is the constitutive source of agency, of subjecthood, of selfhood, the dynamic core of our sense of ourselves as agents, subjects, selves.’ Through dance, or any kind of serious play, we can tap into the deeper strata of our selves. In the same way we can fashion possibilities from our physical material, or allow other selves to appear.

Why do you feel that it’s important for witchcraft become a more embodied practice and in what ways is this related to your work with the goddess Babalon?

Babalon is a goddess of incarnation and transformation. I see her waxing presence amongst contemporary heretics as foreboding her swelling force in the world. Her incursion into our world manifests in myriad ways: it volatilises and excites the sensible world to carnal dreaming frenzy; and this irruption of vision, of revelation, cannot be governed. I draw strength from this power of imagination entering our flesh: the possibilities, the joy and pain of sensation and experience that comes with it. This is why she is for me the goddess of witchcraft in our life-time.

As to the question of the body in witchcraft, if we understand witchcraft as a body of practices that have been, and are, anathemised by political, religious and social orthodoxies, it is the body which marks us as ‘other.’ If we understand witchcraft as a body of practices that give rise to heterotopic space, it is always around the body that this space comes into being for it exists through the practices of bodies, in essence, through movement. This is the dynamic at the core of my understanding and experience of the sabbat: the witches’ dance and the flight to the sabbat are analogous, and manifest the terrain of witchcraft. But for me, witchcraft is also an art of touch, and of the tangible; whereby the phantasmic, remote and subtle is drawn into the sensible and immediate, and seen; and the body is sensitive to and conversant with the elements, because it is of the elements and in the elements.

ln my magical work I’m engaged with the elemental and sublunary world – a world submerged in matter – I do not consider it lesser or evil, it is what has birthed us: arche and telos. I nature and time my work within the lunar cycles, by the fluctuating periodicity of my menstrual rhythm, to the wax and wane of the moon, to her stations, and the stellar influences.

How is dancing a magical act?

For me, it is to do with crisis and transformation. I hurl myself into the unknown, I encounter the other in my body. It is never the same, and there is always risk: the dance is both seduction and auto-da-fé. Dancing creates a space for the encounter and the transformation to take place. And there is a kinetic intensity to this space, which is related to the quality of movement, to the play of tension through the body, to the splitting and multiplying of self, to the sacrifice of self to the generation of selves. In this way I remember and invoke the witches, demoniacs, ecstatics, hysterics, whores, the mothers who came before me.

What are some ways that people can incorporate more movement into their magical practice?

I suggest we begin with the understanding that movement is our prelinguistic mother tongue, and the body as the basis of all language: spoken and written, as well as gestural.

Notice how the body speaks, all the time, so that in every act we appreciate how much is communicated and accomplished by the way we move. Think of calligraphy or drawing, how the line is the visible trace of movement, how it brings to light an inner or hidden dimension, an image buried deep in the psyche, an emotion. All movement communicates, opens a passage between what is hidden, inner or occult and what is in the open. And everything we do is movement. With this understanding we can deepen every element of our practice – from simple actions like dressing a candle to more complex processes like creating a circle. I know that the thought of incorporating ‘dance’ into magical practice is daunting for many, but recognising that when we lay a spell or awaken an effigy, for instance, the animating quality of movement in these acts plays a critical role in the outcome. Dance is precisely this animating and affective force that drives the cycles of creation and destruction.

Do you have any upcoming projects that you would like people to know about?

I’m currently working on The Brazen Vessel, a collection of my essays, with those of Peter Grey. That should be published this Summer. Also this Summer, I’m looking forward to dancing in Benevento. My mother is from Naples, the closest city – it is a place where I have blood in the ground, and a region with a great deal of witchcraft history, traditions and lore. It will be an improvisation as part of a butoh festival, and I’m interested to discover what comes through.

In process is the creation of a new dance cycle, an apokalypteria, which has to do with revelation, with what is coming. I am interested in this idea of ‘the end of prophesy’ as a sealing of vision and revelation, and the fatalism that goes with censoring the oracular or visionary. Through the dance I want to create a space for the oracular and visionary to emerge from the body with all its transformative potency.

https://newjackwitch.com/blog/2017/2/28/interview-with-alkistis-dimech-of-sabbatic-dance