#devised theatre

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.

Bruford at Summer Hall, 3rd August

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:

Last evening, October 1st, the coven did our first ritual together to celebrate the full moon. We meditated on four incantations together:

“May you be safe, May you be happy, May you be strong, May you live in ease”

We grounded ourselves and sat in the moonlight, reflecting on these incantations and sending energy towards them for ourselves, for other members of our coven, for the people we love. Then, we wrote down the things we want to manifest in the coming month and placed them in a vessel, then left them overnight to absorb the power of the moon. We closed by voicing the things we wanted to manifest for other coven members and breathing together.

Some reflections from the coven on this ritual:

“I loved physically writing my manifestations and channeling energy into them and then putting them outside in the moonlight.”

“I adored the love and wrapped arms of the moon. When I was sitting and finding my peace in manifesting needs, I envisioned the warmth of the orange moon sinking it's rays of light deeper and deeper into my collective space. It was beautiful.”

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: