Coven 19: Magicks for Unprecedented Times

we are a coven of witches at UMass Amherst working together to devise a theatre ritual, and we’re here to share our process with you!

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Cleopatra-Justice VII

in coven we talk about the multi-faceted world of tarot, including the erotic version of the both the imagery of the cards and the meaning of the cards. this image right here depicts the famous Cleopatra on her throne with a fun twist: her nipples are free. 

[medvsathewitch]

art by waterofwhimsy

☽ medvsa ☾

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THE MOON IS TRANS -- by J. Jennifer Espinoza

we stan this poem, we stan the moon

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our starting point for research we want to do and practices we want to explore!

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New Moon Ritual 02/11/2021

We started rehearsal on a new moon in Aquarius, a time particularly good for setting intentions and manifesting the things we want. 

We began with a ritual, for which you will need pen and paper:

1. Get comfortable in your space - light a candle, grab a blanket, whatever you need to feel good where you are.

2. Conjure a connection - invoke whatever forces you wish in order to support you; they could be deities, the four elements, Audre Lorde, whoever you want. Think for a moment and mentally reach out, invite those beautiful forces in.

3. Grab pen and paper and write 2 lists - a list of things you desire, things you want to call in, and a list of things you want to let go of. Take as much time as you need. Whenever you can, think in the present - “I am” versus “I will”.

4. With your mic on or off as you desire, declare your desires - actively call them in. Read the list, lingering on things if that feels right to you, repeating something if you feel compelled to. 

5. Then, banish the things you want to let go of, actively sending them away. If the thing in question was once doing good but perhaps is no longer useful to you, you could say thank you before letting it go. If the thing in question is toxic or harmful, yeet it right out of your life with no hesitation.

6. Breathe and reflect.

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Springtime Plans

We’re a month into our spring semester at UMass Amherst, and the coven has been working for a few weeks on reestablishing community guidelines and laying the groundwork for a spring iteration of our work together - we collectively generated a vision for what we want to explore and set to research, this time diving right into ritual creation and coming from a place of deep knowledge about each other and our collaborative styles.

Here is our vision board for the spring semester’s work together:

Onward and upward!

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Inspirations & Invocations

As a coven, we organically developed a tradition of citation - whenever we did a warm-up or referenced something that impacted one of us, we made sure to share where our knowledge came from with the rest of the group. We also took a lot of inspiration from music and bonded together over a collaborative playlist. 

While we did not share all of our inspirations (since there were so many!) with the audience, here is one example of how we invoked the various artists we were inspired by in the performance, from the Gesture & Music room:

This eve, we would like to call forth the strength and energy of those living, breathing bodies who have inspired our practice and its elements. May they grant us movement alongside our art and our practice and our coven. We call forth the energies of the great Buffy St. Marie, the astounding Florence Welch, the effervescent Kate Bush, the mystical Sharon Spence, and the ethereal FKA Twigs. May these witches grant us groundedness in our bodies, connectivity to our souls, and progression through our art.

Many thanks to all of the teachers, artists, and humans who inspired us and aided us in our work.

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Gesture and Music Room

In the Gesture and Music room, the coven members leading the space invoked musical and literary figures who served as inspirations for us in our process, the led the audience through a gesture and rhythm exercise.

First, they were invited to tap a rhythm on their bodies, playing with tempo, rhythm, and intensity. As they tapped, coven member Matthew Gover read a piece of text inspired by the coven’s incantation creation work. 

Then, coven member Nicole Bates started playing music on her guitar, introducing a new element to the space and inviting the audience to grow their gestures and respond to the music as well as the following prompts:

Gesture that softens and holds

Gesture that energizes and intensifies 

Gesture to smash the worry

As the gestures built and crested, Matthew read the text and the music continued, before the group began to wind back down with tapping and lighter gesture work.

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Rage Room

In the Rage room, coven member Helen Rahman delivered a poem she wrote on the theme of Rage, and then the audience experienced a guided meditation about the nature of their rage, where they had a conversation with the rage that lives within them and perhaps understood it more deeply.

Once the audience felt more in touch with their rage, they were invited to respond to the following prompts in the chat while the coven members leading the room wrote them down to create three poppets for the final ritual:

What are you angry about right now? Who are you angry at right now?

What or who makes you angry from your past?

What invokes feelings of injustice and betrayal?

What systems do you want to burn to the ground?

What deserves to burn -- what do you want to see turned to ash, to never return?

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Writing and Drawing

In the Writing and Drawing room, the audience was first asked to draw in response to the following prompts:

Draw the energy you have been carrying today. Whatever that means to you. Did you feel purple today? Did you feel like you were a cloud, or did everything kinda feel like mountains? Did you feel like a goose? It’s up to you!

Draw anything external that has been causing stress or anxiety for you. Then put it somewhere inaccessible. Draw it somewhere inaccessible, whether that means drawing it and getting rid of it in a cathartic way, running it under water, or putting it in the freezer. 

Draw what you’d like your energy to be tonight.

Then, the audience did an intuitive tarot exercise where they responded to a random tarot card via the following prompts:

Think about your card for a minute. It’s okay if you don’t know the card at all. If you do know the card, that’s great! You don’t have to look it up if you don’t want to.

What part of this image strikes you first?

What does this world smell like? Sound like? Feel like (temperature)? 

What does this image make you feel?

What would you ask this figure?

What would they say back?

Finally, make your own version of the card.

Finally, the audience and the coven members leading the breakout room reflected together using the following prompts:

What card did you all get?

How did you feel about the card you got? 

Is there anything that sticks out to you? Any interesting symbolism? Did you incorporate this into your writings/drawings?

What are some things you like about what you made?

How did you feel while writing/drawing?

What were you thinking about while you were writing/drawing? Did your mind revolve around one thing? Several things? Nothing?

Do you wish you had written/drawn something else?

Did you connect your writings/drawings to comforting things?

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Breath and Found Object Room

In the Breath and Found Object room, we led a guided meditation in which the audience was first asked to look around their home and find an object for each of the following prompts:

find an object made out of metal

find something soft or fuzzy

find an object that reminds you of a sunny day

find something borrowed, inherited, or gifted from someone you love

find an object you haven’t touched in a long time

Then, we invited the audience to consider the physical features of their objects and what they might learn from their objects, culminating in five short incantations that we put together as follows:

You are strong. You are gentle. You are radiant. You are treasured. You are allowed to rest. 

At the end of the meditation, we invited the audience to share any reflections or show us their objects.

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for fun, a peek at some of the zoom theater setups used by members of our coven!

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Preparing for Performance

Throughout our rehearsal process, we had each coven member take turns leading a warm-up for the rest of the group, then took what felt most useful to us and did that together before each performance. 

Here’s our warm-up/pre-performance routine:

vocal warm-ups and tongue twisters

a breath warm-up led by coven member Helen Rahman

play an improv game called “5 Things”, where everyone takes turns thinking of 5 things about a certain topic (like “frogs” or “coffee”) off the top of their head

any stretching or private meditation folks wanted to do

charging quartz crystals with the intention to be brave, take up space, and to remember to breathe

visiting what we call our “coven dreamscapes” via a guided meditation created by coven member Parker Traphagen; these dreamscapes are special places we imagine the the coven to be together in, and range from cozy cabins in a forest to bonfires on the beach

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some full moon photos from the night of our first performance by coven members Matthew Gover and Tory Vazquez.

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A bit of an update to our first Incantation post - as we discussed out loud in rehearsal, we drew lines and moved the post-it notes around to figure out what sounded good.

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The Devising Process

Here’s a peek into our full devising process - we started with seven breakout rooms, which eventually whittled down to four, and did most of our group brainstorming on, of course, Google Jamboard.

Eventually, we found that it might be stronger to combine some of these ideas and ended up with:

breath and found objects

writing and drawing

gesture and music

rage

This allowed different coven members with different strengths to create rooms that synthesized their ideas into more cohesive experiences, and opened up opportunities for more collaboration between members of the coven. 

Here are some initial thoughts and brainstorming we did on the way the performance would work:

Throughout this process, as you can see, we felt empowered to ask questions and figure things out, and ended up dropping some elements that didn’t quite fit or that didn’t seem as interesting as other things. 

Finally, here are some of the themes we had floating around our minds: 

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In order to prepare the audience for the experience of Coven-19: Magicks for Unprecedented Times, we sent them some community agreements, a list of things to bring, and a survey that asked them to indicate what levels of participation (video on, speaking out loud, writing in the zoom chat) they were comfortable with. In that survey, we also asked them to choose a tarot card out of the four above - each corresponded to a different breakout room as follows:

Queen of Pentacles: Breath/Found Objects

Queen of Cups: Gesture & Music

Queen of Swords: Writing & Drawing

Queen of Wands: Rage

We didn’t offer any details about which room the audience member would end up in until they received the invitation to join it during the performance, so there was an element of mystery and intuitive choice in the pre-show survey. 

Here are the community agreements we shared with the audience:

In order to create a space we all feel brave in and that respects the needs of the audience and of the coven, we ask you to agree to the following and the coven will do the same:

no screenshots or photos during the performance

feel free to turn your video off if you feel more comfortable that way

eat or drink throughout the performance if you’d like

if you’re so inclined, add your pronouns to your name in zoom

allow yourself to be fully here - consider putting your devices in another room
 and closing all other tabs

We wanted to create a space that felt like our rehearsal space, because we built a space that was flexible and adaptable to everyone’s needs and felt like a place where we were all equipped to take care of ourselves and each other. Some of the most important things about our rehearsal space is that everyone in the coven could feel free to take a break from appearing on video, and that everyone could come as they are - if they needed to eat dinner, or came to rehearsal in their pajamas, that was a-ok. We wanted to extend the same grace to the audience. 

Here are the items we asked folks to bring:

something you love to eat or drink

pen and paper

a candle (or other light source)

a comfortable space to be in

your most magical self

The thing to eat or drink and the candle/light source were for the opening ritual, and many of the breakout rooms made use of pen and paper. 

We wanted to be really intentional about how to set the audience up for success and to communicate the nature of the performance and what their experience would be, while leaving a little room for curiosity (like what each tarot card meant).