Scarlet Imprint co-founder Alkistis Dimech recently published an essay on the Witches Dance, which she claims as a catalyst for her own work in kinetic art. An excerpt says:
“In this essay I trace the haunted kinaesthetic and psychic territories of witchcraft through a history of disorderly movement and unruly bodies, and situate the dance in its sociopolitical context. The origins of the witches’ dance are to be found primarily in the narratives constructed by the demonologists from the late medieval to the early modern periods, and in the testimony of accused witches, but can also be sought in a range of other materials – textual, oral, iconographic, ethnographic and archaeological. Dance is a kinetic and kinesthetic tradition, it is communicated most effectively from one body to another; but the witches’ dance, a demonological fantasy, has been transmitted primarily through texts, and it is to these other bodies I will initially turn to retrieve the dance.
https://alkistisdimech.com/words/the-witches-dance.
