Performances & Events
Online Events
Shadows on Cave Walls
May 9th, 2020
In light of the Shelter-in-place order and Covid-19 we're creating a streaming show over Twitch/Zoom/Jitsi to celebrate togetherness in spite of our distance. Gather around the digital fire and let us tell you stories and make shapes on the wall with our human bodies. 'Shadows on Cave Walls' is an investigation of human perception and storytelling as a vital part of our humanity.
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Recent Performances & Events
Momento Vivere
June 15, 2019 - June 30, 2019
2786 Bush street, San Francisco, CA 94115
WitchTech Rituals presents an immersive art installation by director Ashes Monroe. The first in a series of explorative, immersive, and theatrical art spaces. The first weekend is a casual open house with a small collection of pieces before the official opening for the rest of June that will include another level of immersive artworks and ambient theatrical performances. If you're interested in San Francisco's underground art scene you'll want to make a stop by this transformed ephemeral popup in the Fillmore district provided graciously by the Artivism unused spaces project.
'Memento Mori' is a latin expression for 'remember that you must die' , which expresses the awareness of mortality, with an emphasis on death as a trigger to prioritizing what truly matters in life. 'Memento Vivere', latin for 'remember that you must live' is a comment on this expression, with the added sentiment that we may somehow be distracted by our lives themselves. Our lives are a collection of memories, dreams, aspirations; an entanglement of experience and reconciliation of those experiences. Our identity is a story that we tell ourselves using these experiences. Each time we see, smell, feel or hear something, a memory is created or entangled with past memories, coincidentally changing our past, future, and the ephemeral space that we call the present.
Come and be present with us.
Memento Vivere Gallery Images
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Recent Events
Down with the Ship
June 28th, 8pm-9:30pm
Down with the Ship is an off-kilter, ill-prepared, circus-filled ode to "home" and all the unpacking that the terms entails. Hear about our sentimental imaginary voyage through all types of homes. Part kindergarten play, part badly acted epic theater, part circus show, part political statement and then somewhere along the way we run out of parts and let you leave.
Come and see friends of WitchTech and Circus Automatic play together in this piece about finding where we belong. Awkward giggles and spontaneous feels guaranteed.
Cast & Crew:
- Ashes Monroe - Storyteller, Director, Concept
- Eka Boo Button - Rope and Character
- Gemiah Kurzfield - Straps
- Anastasia Sauvage - Aerial Silks
- Maggie Powers - Dance
- Ismael Acosta - Dance
- Sophia Constance - Butoh Dance & Character
- Toni Cannon - Chinese Pole & Acrobatics
- Kevin Armour - Racket and Character
- Fleeky Flanco - Chinese Barrel
- Aki Hasegawa - Production Assistant
- Orion Griffiths - Juggling and Acrobatics
Past Events
Kintsukuroi
March 15-17, 2019 at 8pm nightly
Monument, 140 9th St, San Francisco, CA 94103
This piece meditates on the beauty of repairs and what comes when you allow yourself to fall apart and be put back together. How you put yourself back together is as important as how you break.
Poet and spoken word artist Joyce Lee is back with us from Colombia on a special occasion to tell her stories as the red-thread for this exclusive three day performance. She's joined by supernatural bay area circus and Butoh talents to create an avant-garde mixture of theater, circus and personal stories to tease out an ineffable experience that you'll have to see to believe.
Soundtrack
Cast & Crew:
- Joyce Lee - Storyteller
- Anastasia Sauvage - Aerial Silks
- Sophia Constance - Butoh Dance & Character
- Yuko Hata - Contortion & Dance
- Toni Cannon - Chinese Pole & Acrobatics
- Fleeky Flanco - Production Assistant
- Aki Hasegawa - Production Assistant
- Ashes Monroe - Concept & Director
Kintsukuroi Trailer
Live Performance Images
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The Boy Who Died Wolf
May 11th & May 12th, 2018
Monument, 140 9th St, San Francisco, CA 94103
The show features Jamie DeWolf our storytelling monster accompanied by the physical magic of Darius Drooh, Fleeky Flanco, Rachel Strickland and Anastasia Sauvage. The production also boasts ambitious costume design from Sophia Constance and enjoys visionary Artistic Direction by Ashes Monroe.
After Raised by Wolves and Into the Mouth of the Wolf, this final experience comes full circle and connects us with who we were in the beginning. Before all of the highs and lows, before the trauma, before the transformation, raw and fragile, The Boy Who Died Wolf shows that in order to grow you must first burn the past to the ground. About the monsters inside of us, It is a hallucinogenic blend of circus, true life stories, and the whirlwind of trauma that we all must accept as who we are.
The Boy who Died Wolf is part storytelling part circus show. Storyteller Jamie DeWolf (nationally recognized slam poetry champion and acclaimed storyteller as seen on NPRs Snap Judgement) accompanies a modular collection of world class circus talent known for their genre-breaking work. Our storyteller walks us through illustrated memories that describe literally and metaphorically our youthful arrogance, transformation, and costuming into a monster all the way to the end where we meet him in his vulnerability and fumbling hopes. Each circus act exemplifies some odd facet of this complex jewel our storyteller brings to us.
Notes
This show was the third and final in a series of shows with the wolf as a totem animal. These shows started under the umbrella of Circus Automatic, another troupe founded by Tim Barsky and Fleeky Flanco, we produced two of them purely under that umbrella until the final show, that was produced by WitchTech AND Circus Automatic. Most of the reason for that was symbolic, though the organization before-hand was largely the same, this was the only one that was officially directed by Ashes Monroe.
- - Sophia Constance, who was originally invited to do costuming, wasn't officially in the show until the last week of rehearsals. She ended up closing the show with Jamie DeWolf in a passionate butoh piece about suicide, and the decision to keep living.
- - Anastasia Sauvage and Jamie DeWolf are both scorpios, and they both (coincidentally) have real scorpion tattoos that were referenced in one of Jamie's stories.
- - Darius Drooh's ending piece was both about self-abuse and an hommage to the physical fight with Edward Norton's character in Fight Club. It was performed to an instrumental piano rendition of "Where is my mind" by Maxence Cyrin (a cover of the song by the Pixies)
Cast & Crew:
- Jamie DeWolf - Storyteller
- Anastasia Sauvage - Aerialist
- Rachel Strickland - Aerialist
- Darius Drooh - Dancer
- Sophia Constance - Butoh Dance & Character
- Fleeky Flanco - Hand-balancer & Assistant Director
- Ashes Monroe - Director & Art Director
- Aki Hasegawa - Production Assistant
The Boy Who Died Wolf Trailer
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Past Events
Re:Memory
June 4th-June 7th, 2018
An investigation of personal and collective memory using live performance, dance, video, glitch art and neural networks that reveals our fabricated identities in the context of nostalgia.
Produced and directed by Ashes Monroe, pictured in promotional image: Rachel Strickland
Performers:
- Sophia Constance - Dance and Butoh
- Yuko Hata - Dance