Ghostly Practice In-Person Movement Ritual Workshop: October 13 (Monday)

In-person Ghostly Practice guided group movement meditation and ritual workshop.

Each workshop experience unfolds as an exploration around a theme through Ghostly Practice techniques, collective breath-work, sensual stimulation, guided visualization and movement meditation, and the offering and activation of intentions, grounding, and time for reflection.

This workshop is offered in part as an extension of my PhD research on what I have come to call "." This is a study that seeks to develop theory around Ghostly Practice as a constellation of movement and ritual techniques for working with memory, haunting, spirit, and the more-than-human through the body, approaching haunting as a modality of (re)enchantment—activating, dynamic, transformative— that carries a dramaturgical force, a site wherein change can occur through a “something-to-be-done.”

The work, developed and taught in workshop format over the last 10 years in New York City, offers a critical and creative modality for investigating spectrality and liminality, memory and haunting, energy and affect, and alternative temporalities, informed by 20 years of training in Japanese butoh, expressionist dance, physical and psychodramatic theatre, and ritual practice and performance. Drawing significant inspiration from Japanese Butoh and Symbolist, Spiritualist, and Expressionist theatre in its approach to performance as a liminal mode of consciousness that can be affectively apprehended as a haunted encounter.

No prior experience with Ghostly Practice, ritual, dance, theatre or performance is necessary to participate.

There are a limited number of spots available for each workshop date. Pre-registry is required. Please only register for workshops that you can commit to attending. If you need to cancel, please do so at least 4 days prior to allow space for someone on the waitlist to join.

- This ritual workshop will be conducted in-person in the East Village (NYC) and will be approximately 3 hours. (Address will be emailed to all registered participants. Location is subject to change.)

- Masks are not required, however you may choose to wear a mask if you wish.

- Accessible to all bodies and ‘levels’; movement can be gentle, responsive, and exploratory improvisation, with stillness always welcome. (Participation will require the ability to close your eyes and hear spoken instructions. If you have specific accessibility needs or questions, please feel free to reach out, and I’ll do my best to accommodate.)

- Additional information about what participation will entail, how to prepare and what to bring will be emailed to participants closer to the date.

- This class is offered on a sliding scale, according to your means.

- Additional questions? Please email me at [email protected]

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Jacquelyn Marie Shannon is a theatre, dance, and ritual artist and PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY in New York City interested in magic, witchcraft, and ritual; theatres of death, haunting, and mourning; queer and feminist performance; materiality, affect, and dramaturgies of the body. Her work gravitates towards questions of presence and transformation, enchantment and whimsy, the supernatural and the extraordinary, spirituality and sensuality, and the tenuous relationship between life and death. She is intrigued by how performance conjures, making the invisible visible, apprehendable, or encounterable, and how people are moved and make meaning within the sometimes blurred line between stage magic and ritual magic, spectacle and spirit.

As both a scholar and practitioner, Jacquelyn is especially drawn to performance and artistic process which engages witches, ghosts, spiritualism and seance, necromancy, western esotericism and the occult, thaumaturgy, animism, shamanism, puppetry, vaudeville, sideshow, as well as other queer or marginal registers of performance that extend beyond bounded notions of body, space and time, that cultivate and operate as and through liminal and altered states, alternative temporalities, synesthesia, visions and dreams.

Jacquelyn holds an MA degree from Indiana University in Communication and Culture where she studied expressive modalities through theories of affect, performance, and visual and embodied rhetoric, as well as an MA degree from NYU in Educational Theatre where she researched process-oriented and affect-informed theatre education, and an MPhil from The Graduate Center CUNY in Theatre and Performance where she studied histories and dramaturgies of magic, enchantment, witchcraft, and the supernatural in performance.

As an artist-teacher-scholar, she has performed, presented research, and led workshops across the US and internationally. For the last 10 years, Jacquelyn has led group ritual movement workshops on what she calls “Ghostly Practice,” a constellation of techniques for investigating spectrality, liminality, affect, memory, and alternative temporalities, heavily informed by over 15 years of training in Japanese Butoh, expressionist dance, physical and psychodramatic theatre.

Recent publications include: "Disappearing Acts" in The Witch Studies Reader (Duke University Press, 2025), “Butoh Beyond the Body” in The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2020), "“All that is dark, potential, and quiet”: Riding the Hinge in The Witch's Dance," in Preternature (2024), "‘Beware The Word': Butoh, Ethnotheatre, and The Limits of Speech," in PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research (2021), and "Suffering the Spirits: Affective Excess in Early Twentieth-Century Spiritualist Séance Performance Technique" in Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural (2022).

https://jacquelynmarieshannon.com/

Host or Publisher Jacquelyn Marie Shannon