Witch Dance

Witch Dance by Chester Biscardi (b. 1948) was composed in 1983 on commission. It was first performed during the opening season of The Joyce Theater in New York City, with dancer Annabelle Gamson and percussionists Glen Velez and Peter Alexander. The work was performed in Staunton in 2011 in a new choreography by LeAnn Yannelli, and it is reprised tonight as an instrumental work for two percussionists. Biscardi adds the following notes:

I wrote Witch Dance for a reconstruction of Mary Wigman’s Heksedans (1926). Heksedans is based on fragments of the dance recorded in a 1929 film about Wigman and a description of her work in Rudolph Bach’s Das Mary Wigman Büch. The music takes its initial ideas from Willi Goetze’s 1926 score, originally consisting of three gongs, drum, and cymbal. These instruments stylistically reflect the primitive, childlike nature and austerity of the Expressionist period.
In the 1983 reconstruction, a masked dancer squats in motionless silence in the middle of a stage filled with harsh, white light. Her hands hide her face. She reveals herself slowly, backs of hands turning inward, palms outward, lips protrude, secret smile, terrible tension, trembling rigidity, the left arm suddenly pulled in with a jerk as the right arm shoots vertically upwards with its hand reaching into the air like a claw. These movements continue, syncopated, double staccato, sometimes soundless tension, incorporating powerful circular swings of the entire body, jerking of the head, all of which result in a circle dance. At times one hears the bare soles slapping the stage. After a return to the squat position, the dancer works her way out of the circle with fierce tempo, alternating with restrained trembling, moving toward an increased tempo and accelerated finale, leaping and running with a constant circular motion of the arms across the entire stage.

(c) Jason Stell and Chester Biscardi