Developed with dancers over multiple residencies, Mystery Cult, an ongoing project, interrogates how to make and manifest an ideal world into being through ritual enactment.
The videos and performances draw together diverse threads of ongoing research into experimental performance and spiritual inquiry: 1970s radical feminist spiritual practices; occult homosocial Scottish Rite Masonic “Lodge Hall” Ceremonies from the late 19th and early 20th century (which connect to vaudeville); and 1960s “poor” theater (Jerzy Grotwoski, Richard Schechner and Judith Molina).
As an ongoing project, Mystery Cult imagines a world that elevates the urgent importance of women’s experience and asks—what do we want to ask our unconscious mind to value and celebrate? How do we enact that through movement? What different potential futures and worlds does that crack open?
Maya Gurantz 