Ritual is a highly visual live performance installation from multi-award-winning dance innovators Junk Ensemble in collaboration with acclaimed visual artists Jesse Jones and Aideen Barry, premiering at this year's Cork Midsummer Festival.
Led by dancers and musicians, audiences will move promenade-style through the atmospheric Marina Market warehouse and experience a collision of artists' responses, interrogations, and radical celebrations of the witch as a symbol of dissidence.
Below, Junk Ensemble founders Jessica Kennedy and Megan Kennedy and artist Jesse Jones give audiences an idea what to expect from this unique collaboration.
Jessica Kennedy and Megan Kennedy (Junk Ensemble): We have been researching and developing Ritual for nearly three years. Our fascination with the witch began when we started working on a children's piece loosely informed by Roald Dahl’s The Witches. The negative connotations associated to witches quickly became apparent and we threw ourselves into hefty research of the historical misogyny related to witches. Ritual explores the idea of the witch through a highly visual live performance installation in a fusion of visceral movement, striking visuals, and live sound.
Witchy artefacts at RITUAL rehearsals ✂️#BTS #junkensemble #thewitchproject #corkmidsummerfestivalhttps://t.co/ODE6uieRND pic.twitter.com/3HtUXci27Q
— Junk Ensemble (@junkensemble) June 7, 2023
Collaboration is a key element to our work, and particularly for Ritual, where we invited visual artists Jesse Jones and Aideen Barry and music artist Planningtorock to respond, interrogate, and reclaim the idea of the witch as a symbol of dissidence. The result of this is a fusion of moving sculpture, bodies and objects, projection, dance, live percussion (performed by Caitríona Frost) and tied together through Irene Buckley’s soundscape, Sarah Jane Shiel’s scenography & lighting design, and Katie Davenport’s costumes. The choreographic content with the dance artists explores disturbance & disruption, empowerment, subversiveness, 'the shadow’, and ‘the other’. We were drawn to the Flemish proverb, which informed Bruegel’s painting Dulle Griet: ‘One woman makes a din, two women a lot of trouble, three an annual market, four a quarrel, five an army, and against six the Devil himself has no weapon’.
There is a fair amount of risk involved with collaborative work and it can often stray from its intended direction, which is both the unexpected beauty and challenge in working collaboratively. The process for Ritual has evolved quite organically; we had creative group meetings with the artists over a period of nine months where we shared our interests and fascinations on the subject matter and referenced images, texts, and materials, which resulted in a combined list of materials, objects, and ideas that we then grew the work from.
Jesse Jones: During the making of Ritual, I was really thinking about how Junk Ensemble’s work is told through the body, it does not over-rely on language but at the heart of it, Jessica & Megan have an incredible instinct about form and storytelling. In early research sessions I began thinking about rituals and I remembered something that my dear friend and mentor Silvia Federici once said to me, that growing up an Italian Catholic, the smell of frankincense was so potent it had a physical effect on her body.
I became interested in how in the staging of Ritual we could incorporate a sensory trigger for the audience but also tell a story through smell. I designed a large Thurible sculpture for the project based on The Botafumerio in Santiago de Compostela Cathedral. The Thurible was particularly used after the Plague to cleanse the pilgrims and is connected to catholic idealogy around what is unclean and in need of purification.
For our ritual we are burning frankincense, sage, Palo Santo, and hair to conjure resonances. Smell is one of our strongest senses of memory and often what is suppressed or locked away can be opened by smell. It brings the experience of the work back to the body, right to the nose of the audience themselves.
Ritual is at Cork Midsummer Festival from 14th-17th June 2023 - find out more here.
Pics: Fiona McCann
