The Witch's Dance - Winter Solstice Ritual Workshop: December 21 [VIRTUAL]

I am offering a series of ritual movement workshops (in-person and online) 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.

I am seeking participants who are interested in taking these workshops and would be willing to talk with me in an interview at a later date about their experience. Participants are encouraged to attend all or a majority of the workshops offered, however it is not a requirement to participate.

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.]

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, conjuring and releasing, 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.

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 virtually, over Zoom, 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, how to prepare and what to bring will be emailed to participants closer to the date.

- 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.

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.

Over the last 10 years, Jacquelyn has developed and taught “Ghostly Practice,” a constellation of movement and ritual techniques for working with memory, haunting, spirit, and the more-than-human through the body, heavily informed by over fifteen years of training in Japanese butoh, expressionist dance, physical and psychodramatic theatre, ritual practice and performance.

As an artist-teacher-scholar, she has performed, presented research, and led workshops across the US and internationally. Her writing appears in published articles and edited volumes. Recent publications include: "“All that is dark, potential, and quiet”: Riding the Hinge in The Witch's Dance," in Anthropology of Consciousness (2024), "“Disappearing Acts: Witchcraft Dramaturgy at the Crossroads of Exposure and Loss” in The Witch Studies Reader (Duke University Press, 2025), "Suffering the Spirits: Affective Excess in Early Twentieth-Century Spiritualist Séance Performance Technique" in Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural (2022), "‘Beware The Word': Butoh, Ethnotheatre, and The Limits of Speech," in PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research (2021), “Butoh Beyond the Body” in The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2020).

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 is also a certified integrative hypnotist who works primarily with artists, performers, and other creatives to overcome creative and emotional blocks, process and alchemize grief, and re-enchant their daily lives.

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