The Witch's Dance Ritual Movement - Guest Teacher: LILITH DORSEY 10/15

The Witch’s Dance: A Ritual Movement Workshop Series

Join us for a special edition of The Witch’s Dance, a ritual movement workshop series facilitated by Jacquelyn Marie Shannon, featuring guest teacher Lilith Dorsey from New Orleans.

For this workshop, Lilith will share her unique expertise at the crossroads of dance, ritual, and Afro-Diasporan Pagan religions, drawing on movement practices informed by the African diaspora.

• This ritual workshop will be conducted in-person and will be approximately 2 hours.
• No prior dance or ritual experience is required. All bodies, backgrounds, and levels of movement and magical practice are welcome. Pre-registration is required.
• Additional information about what participation will entail, address, how to prepare and what to bring will be emailed to participants closer to the date.

Additional questions? Please email me at [email protected]

"My personal spiritual journey includes numerous initiations in Haitian Vodou, New Orleans Voodoo, and Santeria. In 1995 I became editor and publisher of the Oshun newsletter, providing accurate and respectful information about Afro-Diasporan Pagan religions. I hold an undergraduate degree in anthropology and my graduate degree comes from a inter-disciplinary program in cinema/television studies and anthropology. Training is vital in any discipline, but takes on special significance in a spiritual context. Voodoo, Vodou, Santeria, Candomble, Ifa, Obeah, Hoodoo, and for that matter any other African based religion survives on it’s lineage, history, and training of it’s devotees.

My first initiation came from Mambo Bonnie Devlin, more widely known for her phenomenal drumming and musicianship. Her music is available on iTunes, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in connecting with spirit. I then went on to join Priestess Miriam Chamani at the Voodoo Spiritual Temple in New Orleans. The temple does an immense amount of good works and is located at 1428 N. Rampart Street across from Congo Square, both locales a must see for anyone visiting New Orleans. While my Santeria house is led by Ochun Olukari Al’aye and based in Florida. I am continually amazed and inspired by my spiritual family there, who most recently gave me the opportunity to watch a ritual drum being crafted with a chainsaw.

My academic career focused most specifically on ritual dance and possession on film. Informed by phenomenal women like Maya Deren and Zora Neale Hurston who were filmmakers, ritualists and anthropologists, I went on to create an experimental documentary Bodies of Water, focusing on Voodoo identity and “tranceformation.” It has been shown everywhere from Harvard University to the living room of the Royal Street Courtyard bed and breakfast. My favorite compliment on the work, which was designed to be a synestetic foray into cinematic experience, came from a devoutly Catholic friend who said “Your film scares me; I feel like I am changing.”"

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General informatiom about the workshop series:

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.

These workshops are being offered as part of a practice-based research initiative supporting my dissertation. 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, 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.

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.

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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.

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).

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Venue to be announced to registrants, 123 TBD, New York, United States