Jacquelyn Marie Shannon

This ritual movement workshop offers embodied tools for ritual praxis through Elemental Cartography, a practice I’ve developed from my doctoral research on The Witch’s Dance as a constellation of embodied techniques that may be used to access and generate experiences of magic and transformation with and through the dramaturgical force of the witch in ritual and performance. These techniques summon, channel, and amplify the witch’s force, moving beyond metaphor and symbolism into direct, transformative experience in and through the body.

Drawing from my ongoing ritual movement workshops on The Witch’s Dance in New York City, this workshop session invites participants to map their body’s relationship to the elements—Fire, Earth, Air, and Water—through guided movement and improvisational provocations. Using the cardinal, fixed, and mutable qualities of the elements as choreographic and energetic frameworks for movement and ritual praxis, we will attune to their presence as they manifest in the body as heat, light, texture, rhythm, and flow. My aim is not only to introduce ritual and somatic techniques for engaging elemental forces in occult praxis but also to facilitate an embodied understanding of the transformative power of the elements’ cardinal, fixed, and mutable qualities.

Through ritual movement, we will explore how elemental forces move through and with us, shifting between states and shaping the way we sense, perceive, and direct energy. This practice is not just about moving with the elements, but moving as them—learning to embody and direct their power in magical work. This workshop offers a deeply experiential method for accessing elemental currents, using the body itself as a magical tool for conjuration, attunement, and transformation. By integrating movement more consciously and dramaturgically into ritual work, participants will cultivate a heightened sensitivity to energy, learning how the elements interact, transform, and can be consciously engaged and directed in spellwork and occult praxis.

Jacquelyn Marie Shannon is a ritual artist and PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her work explores magic, witchcraft, death, haunting, and enchantment, focusing on how performance conjures transformation and engages liminal states, altered temporalities, and otherworldly presence. Blurring boundaries between body, space, and time, she investigates practices rooted in hypnosis, dreams, visions, and synesthetic experience. Jacquelyn has performed, taught, and presented internationally, and for over a decade has led Ghostly Practice—a movement-based ritual method for working with spirit, memory, and the more-than-human. Her approach is shaped by over fifteen years of training in Japanese butoh, expressionist dance, psychodramatic theatre, and Western esotericism. As an artist-scholar, she is committed to performance as both magic and method. Her writing appears in published articles and edited volumes, including The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2020) and the forthcoming Witch Studies Reader (Duke University Press, 2025).

https://jacquelynmarieshannon.com/