Photo: Stephen Texeira
Amy Foley’s Let Slip the Witches is Flat-out Transcendent
By Sarah JG Chenoweth
The irresistibility of witches is markedly familiar, even if you don’t share the compulsion. From fable to brutal history to contemporary practice, their stories are streaked with a power and mystery that we cannot ignore. It seems that to be witchy is to have command of both the worldly and the otherworldly. That’s what Amy Foley captures in Let Slip the Witches: the equal earthiness and sacredness of the witch.
A few pieces preceded Let Slip the Witches in Foley’s show last weekend at ODC Theater. The first, A History of this Moment, choreographed by Robert Moses and danced by Foley herself, charted the keenly sensate role of the dancer/artist in today’s time and times past. Moses’ voice gushed meditations on the dance artist’s insightful and weathered body, their fears and ambitions, the impact and echoes of their work. Matching the stream of consciousness style of Moses’ delivery, Foley was impeccable. Every millisecond of the piece was punctuated with her razor sharp movement execution. But her demeanor was casual and genuine, as if in real-time conversation with Moses. She danced with a faculty and maturity we all dream of.
Thighs and Wages, a restaging of Foley’s 2016 work, tumbled through women’s experiences in a society rank with patriarchal tenets for bodies and wealth. Five dancers seemed to perform every move in the book: intense floorwork, classic turns, assertive partnering, lilting solos, eloquent gestures, sailing jumps. At times they had enough reserves to support each other in this cruel mess, and other times they had to retreat to their personal battles. The theme of combatting patriarchal harm was almost too abstracted to be clear. Even so, as four of the five women fell in eventual defeat, the piece poignantly expressed that “survival mode” doesn’t guarantee survival.
The next piece was First Love, in 3 Parts, and it was as charming as it was complicated. Nol Simonse, Tanya Bello, and Foley made and danced the trio. As they weaved in and out of solo, duet, and group material, the piece celebrated their abilities as outstanding performers. The whole thing swelled with fondness for one another and honor for their individual perils.
Finally, Let Slip the Witches closed the evening with impressive flare. It stands as a phenomenon—an event only truly understood by encountering it. But, here goes.
Let Slip the Witches opened and remained in near darkness, with the incomparable Kaitlyn Ebert running her hands down her throat, displaying a crown of gnarled fingers, bending and twisting just enough to suggest deviousness. Something was happening to her, but she was communing with it. Elena Martins, Karla Quintero, and Juliann Witt joined her shortly, blanketed in the shadows between a floral gobo light design. The four began a soft and serene incantation to set in motion the coming ritual. “Seeker. Goddess. Mother. Priestess,” they whispered as they demarcated the space with limb and voice. Their hush grew to declaration, and their movement correspondingly intensified, creating a layered quilt of sounds, reaches, prayers, curves, callings.
What followed was irrefutably badass. For the next almost hour, these sister witches shook, twitched, lunged, and leapt their way into a different dimension. As technical as they were wild, the women showed the resolution of the most tenacious beast. Their goal? To create a tempest, or maybe a public outcry. It could have been an ancient fertility ritual, or a funeral rite. Repetition of simple movements and walking patterns gave it the tone of a folk dance. But it was also a knockout modern dance piece, packed with arduous contemporary movement and skill.
At the seeming insistence of the lead sorceress (Ebert), each dancer had her moment of rapture. Martins flew through the space in a fury of jumps, convulsions, and spills, exhausting herself into a heap of heavy breath on the floor. Afterward, the coven surrounded her, picked her up, and took care of her, but was not “careful." Instead, they were task-oriented, as if this was the millionth time they had carried a comrade through her destruction, and they would do it a million times more: this is how we clean her up; these are the tasks we do to mourn, to make change, to acknowledge her passage. It’s just what we (must) do.
An actual, historic ritual—performed by primitive and modern people in order to manage the natural and unexplainable world—lies outside of aesthetic and technique, and only cares about the efficacy of the act (Highwater). Let Slip the Witches falls somewhere between ritual and performance. Aesthetic and precise choreographic structure were clearly paramount to Foley, but so was the unfolding of an uncultivated, task-based journey.
Moments of the work had the dancers carving out private exorcisms on the ground, while others had them gently bending into each other’s arms. Some moments firmly referenced popular associations with witches. We were gripped when the four stood like a small crowd downstage center, the house lights came up, and they surveyed the audience with vehemence. When they’d decided on a target, they’d point—arm and index finger hardened with condemnation. The scene reproduced the arbitrary rancor extended to women during the Salem Witch Trials. It was convincing. It was haunting.
But it’s the ending that elevated the piece to the phenomenal. Ben Juodvalkis’ music was literally rumbling our chairs and bones—the driving drum beats of ancient peoples—and the dancers were whipping up a fifth, metaphysical body that swept around and above them, so turbulent that its tendrils reached out and curled around us too. Shuffle, slap, clap, snap, shuffle, shuffle, pivot, switch, slap, slap, snap, shuffle, switch. They outlined distinct spatial patterns and rhythms again, and again, and again. An invigorating frenzy of mathematical, determined orbiting and pounding. By this time, their hair was down and thrashing, full of sweat and tangles, further freeing their energies. This section truly made the work. Without it, we may have enjoyed a conceptual dance piece with attractive witchy imagery. With it, we were entranced in something that felt primal and important.
Let Slip the Witches rang of some matriarchal pagan time, one in which women’s moves are seen to possess the wisdom and magic it takes to enact rites of passage and to defy physics and create energy. The piece feels feminist because of how power was defined and used. While it was clear that forces were acting upon and inside these characters, it was also clear that they had authority over themselves. So much potency came from their ability to endure and transcend, not just the insanely physical (dance) feat before us, but also millennia of labor, public shaming, and bludgeoning that they conjured up.
At last the dancers lay on the floor, collapsed and panting. We expected an ending and would have been satisfied with it. But, the lead sorceress hopped up and goaded the others to do the same, as if to say, “We still have our work to do.” So they continued, with only slightly less vigor, to close the ritual, repeating the calls to seeker, mother, goddess. They ultimately settled into a warped, yogic goddess pose—fully flung, pulsing, wrecked, exposed, and robust, goddess.
Highwater, Jamake.“History as Ritual.” Dance: Rituals of Experience, Toronto, Methuen Publication, 1978, pp. 39-44.
Sarah JG Chenoweth is a dancer, teacher, and writer based in Oakland, California.
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