#coven-19

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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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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.