dancing widdershins // cultivating a queer ancestral movement practice
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“Widdershins: the opposite of the usual, refers to walking counter-clockwise or contrary to the Sun’s course and is the traditional path into the Faerie Realm. From Middle Low German weddersinnes, literally ‘against the way’.”
I spent a lot of my childhood and youth in the liminal spaces created through the performing arts. I started early, taking orff, theatre, and dance classes in childhood, and went on to an arts high school as a theatre major. For a lot of reasons, I left that world in my later teens, but as things that are core to who we are have a way of doing, those parts of me never left, they simply changed shape.
One of the lasting impressions of those years was learning to think about movement, and how I inhabited my body. So much of dance and theatre training is a kind of somatics; I was taught to be aware that I had a body, and that it was something I could explore and expand beyond the ordinary or expected. Ironically, it was the rigidity I encountered in those spaces that ultimately lead to me leaving them, but a kernel of something more expansive and alive remained.
We all come from people who moved, movement is central to who we are.
As I’ve been carried into the deep waters of ancestral exploration and how my people understood their bodies, I’ve learned that some of my more recent, as well as my ancient Germanic and Celtic ancestors, understood movement to be vital to our lives. Fluidity, flow, trance, transcendence; alive in my tissues and cellular memory, alongside rigidity, numbing, disconnection, and harm.
When so many practices became accessible online during the pandemic, I felt drawn to return to movement: safe to explore from the confines of my living room. In the past year and a half, I have regularly practiced Gaga Dance and Continuum, explored Axis Syllabus and 5Rhythms, a handful of other workshops and classes, and I’ve returned to a personal dance practice rooted in intuitive movement that weaves in elements of ancestral remembrance.
In the spring of last year I participated in a class called “Witchdancing”, lead by Michael J. Morris, who is a non-binary queer witch, astrologer and dancer. The practice was rooted in an exploration of cyclical, seasonal change, through intuitive dance, movement, and the Witches’ Dance — a practice developed by the writer and dancer Alkistis Dimech. Her practice draws from pre-Christian European esoteric traditions and elements of Japanese butoh, informed by the writings of early modern demonologists and the historical records of witchcraft trials. Dimech bridges the post-modern dance methodology of butoh, with teachings and histories from her own European ancestry. She explores through her practice what she calls “The Occulted Body”. Her work seeks to summon the body that has been stifled, suppressed, and hidden through processes of colonization, and to re-engage with the unruly, brazen, and so-called demonic body.
I am compelled and fascinated by her work; it speaks to something in my queer body that longs for ancestral remembrance; a path for my own practice to evolve in new ways through a liminal exploration of the embodied histories of my people, that troubles normative ideals around the body. Here is her description of the practice:
As the central image in the formula of the sabbat, the sinistrous circling dance draws together the peculiar themes and motifs associated with witchcraft: shapeshifting, spirit congress, flight, forbidden sexuality, poison, violence, dream, horror. Its movement is palintropic, always returning to its beginning, and thus evokes the powers of arche and archaios: of command, of bringing forth, of the dead, and of the archaic. And binding it all in a weyward dance, daemonic communion with all, a common flesh (Alkistis Dimech, “The Brazen Vessel”, p.297).
Witch Dancing offered me a new experience of embodiment and opened a portal for ancestral connection through movement.
It was the first time I knowingly participated in a practice that had roots in my own lineages and ancestry and was taught by a queer practitioner (oh, the vital and joyful necessity of queer embodiment teachers). I experienced a profound shift in my somatic state without the shadowy discomfort of un-belonging or appropriation descending like a veil between me and the experience of my body. Witch Dancing invited an exploration of strangeness and the seasonal elements, explored the crackling rapid movements of fire, the levitation of wind and air, the fluidity of muscles, blood, and water, and the deep surrender to decomposition and renewal of the earth. This channel opened through the practice, and my connection to something powerful and mystical felt direct, clear, potent. My heart opened, my mind quieted, and a larger body, perhaps the bodies of my ancestors, moved through me. I was not in charge, but I was present, alive, aware of the power of this direct link to something ancient and sacred that moved through me in sweeping and subtle movements.
This shift in my practice has shown me I can move away from steps or protocols and move toward playing with principles through movement, sensory exploration, and proprioception, in a way that feels inherently queer. I have let myself move into not knowing, into present moment awareness, that lands in my body with an ease I have not known before. I find myself working with my lower body, waking up my pelvis, rooting through my feet, feeling the fluid strength of my spine, and let my body lead me where it wants to go. This movement practice offers an invitation to remember something ancestral through my body, to connect to something so ancient that it can only be felt through direct experience.
I have struggled for a long time to articulate a grounding for my practice beyond yoga, which I practiced for nearly 20 years. I am so grateful and indebted to the mostly South and East Asian lead cultural traditions from which I was able to first learn body-based practices. Without access to those teachings, I may not have found my way back to my body. The generosity and complexity of that fact does not escape me, especially when I consider the lack of consent and exploitation embedded in how many of those traditions came to be shared. The more I root into the truth of how so many practices are plucked and exploited from their cultural contexts, the more something calls me to deepen, to anchor and ground, to mourn and remember — with my own peoples. Exploitation of these practices is not something we can simply repair through acknowledgment and mutual aid (although these things are absolutely important), it also asks that we look to the very roots of whiteness as disembodiment.
I have been stuck here at the place of unknowing and loss, how do I reconnect with a practice that I am so estranged from by design? How do I do something that I don’t know how to do?
There is a cord pulling me toward my Pre-Christian, Germanic and Celtic ancestors, who have something to say about return and reconnection. I’ve struggled with the bypassing that happens so often in spiritual and Pagan communities, with the grasping for teachings that aren’t anchored in relationship or embodiment, and with heterosexist and homophobic notions of gender and sexuality, and the “sacred” masculine and feminine, that are romanticized and rarely unpacked. I don’t need a detailed protocol for a practice, but I do need some signs that I am not searching alone, some breadcrumbs to mark the way. I’ve been stuck with the question of how to begin to explore something that is defined by its very nothingness or absence. It is the loss of lineage and connection to embodied culture that forms the foundations of whiteness, so how do I begin a practice from this place?
Body as process, body as question, body as a verb.
Queering the body means shifting it from being a noun to being a verb; a body is not something one is but something one does. And if bodies are (at least in part) processes and acts we do, then so are body norms. By extension, if body norms are the product of reiterative acts of norming, they can be undone (Rae Johnson, “Oppression and The Body”, pg. 101).
Something liminal emerges, and queerness offers a signpost. In her description of the witches’ dance, Alkistis Dimech evokes the very movements, gestures, and sounds that were targeted during the burning times. She describes a practice of embodying what was used by the church to form the enemy of the “witch”, a practice that is “imaginal, affective, and mythic. Essentially, it is a place of encounter, and of strangeness” (p. 49). Queering the body then, offers a frame through which we practice in our very gestures, movements, interoception and intercorporeality, that which is non-normative, as a way to undo systems of exploitative power, to go against the way.
We move strange, we dance widdershins.
While queer embodiment certainly speaks to gender and sexual expression that pushes up against binary gender and sexuality, queering the body can be taken much deeper into the realm of queering all forms of invisible and unspoken power.
Queerness is visible, loud, and disruptive - but it is also gentle, subversive, and hidden in plain siGHt.
As a queer femme who has often been read as straight, I have felt in my very cells the power of moving through spaces as a form of disruption and confusion, like an unseen but pervasive web of mycelium moving across the forest floor. When I move in this way I can feel some kind of ancient trouble stirring, and my Old Ones moving closer. I am not replicating their exact steps or movements, but I am listening for the messages that come through me. I am letting my body remember that there is a wildness in me beyond this world, and I can feel it down to my very cells. Even if only for a moment, I remember.
Queerness happens in the process, in the liminal space of the unknown, in the magic of the strange and unruly. It is surrendering the need for answers and neat categories, and moves us towards what we envision, pulled forth by desire and longing for all of us to be free.