In 2015 I began working closely with the river Wyre and its river stones in Lancashire, UK. Working with somatic, choreographic and physical practices to alter perception, I explored how body and stone co-remembered his/herstories embedded in the land.

During my first week there, I experienced three visions that revealed a deep time entity I came to know as the “stone-womxn”. These stone-womxn who were both human and stone, and continuously birthing the land. Whilst one of the visions shook me as I witnessed the moment this entity had been violently cut, my perception of the stone-womxn revealed to me that their existence (and its imagination) was still circulating enough for them to announce themselves to me. Perceiving vertical time (kairos) rather than the very humanly imagined horizontal (kronos) time, opened the possibility to experience the visions as layers of memory in the land, all co-existing and therefore concurrently available to participate with.

I subsequently found the site to be where the infamous Pendle witch-hunts were taken - twelve “witches” (nine women and two men) accused of witchcraft and ten executed in August 1612.

Embodied and site-specific performance practices are used to both travel to sites of historical trauma whilst unearthing possible new futures out of the reparative potential of collaborating with river and stone, and the otherwise to colonial violence still being propelled by the land. This “embodied archaeology” enables an ecology of care that spans material and immaterial engagement with more-than-human and ancestral presences. 

The project situated itself within decolonial environmental discourse, and connected the legacy of the European witch-hunts with ongoing settler-colonialism, specifically the exclusion of indigenous ways of knowing in current land rights disputes; the formation of whiteness around property; and the severance of spirit, orality and more-than-human sovereignty from politics and personhood. 

It resists the politics of recognition between indigenous and settler culture in settler-colonial states, and the continued enclosures of land, bodies and ways of being which overwhelmingly affect people of colour, indigenous and marginalised communities.

Between 2015 and 2019 this research was shared through site-specific performance (Stone Throat, LADA + LICA, 2015), choreography for stage (Wishbone, The Yard Theatre 2016), one-on-one river stone constellations (Almanac, SPILL Festival, 2016), duet for stage (Cove, The Yard Theatre, 2017), exhibition (Hag Constellations, Goldsmiths University, 2018), ▲(Kule Theatre, Berlin) workshops (Chisenhale Dance, Ponderosa Dance, Martin Gropius Bau), a sound piece and ongoing site-specific performance improvisation “The Unearthings”. 

You can find my Practice-based PhD “River-Stone-Ceremony; Towards a Material Poet(h)ics of Nonhuman - Human Witnessing” here.