Conceived in the wake of a global pandemic and the unanticipated need to create digital theatre, COVEN-19, or Magicks for Unprecdented Times as a devising project consisted of two witchcraft-inspired performances: a fall 2020 Samhain ritual and a spring 2021 Beltane ritual. The company of undergraduate and graduate theatre witches explored decentralized, iterative, slow, caretaking, queer forms of devising over digital platforms. The written portion of this thesis takes the form of a digital tarot blog: 22 (plus a bonus) interconnected essays and spells that interrogate feminist and queer theories as they pertain to the Coven’s devising process. This digital format not only reflects the malleable nature of the creative process, but it is also a kind of praxis that invites the reader to take an active role in meaning-making and resists an objective, singular narrative. Woven through these tarot cards are threads of utopian futurity, situated subjectivities, and anticapitalist temporalities. The essays and spells are primarily in conversation with adrienne maree brown, Judith Butler, Audre Lorde, Jose Estaban Munoz, and Starhawk – engaging with these theorists as thought-ancestors in order to activate rather than regurgitate their knowledges of radical hope and nonlinear process. The tarot deck takes a situated, backwards glance toward these ancestors as it grasps at seemingly impossible utopian horizons of collaboration and creation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:masters_theses_2-2132 |
| Date | 01 July 2021 |
| Creators | Clearwood, Maegan |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Masters Theses |
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