BROOM DANCE

The many natures of Baba Yaga

Broom Dance backstage

Department of Illumination’s 10th annual Lantern Festival in Picton, Ontario. Photo by Alex Filipe @alexfilipe.photo

Baba Yaga’s house

Photos courtesy of Nicolas Aubrey @zoomstudiomontlaurier

Alison Gowan plays hurdy gurdy for Woman Who Holds Up the Winter Sky

Broom Dance is a shadow puppet show for winter and winter witches, a shadow song for the threshold, for the liminal lace between light and dark, between house and the howling wild. A luminous bow of song and cut paper to wild dark and to winter night.

We are currently developing this show. The first bones of it played at the Department of Illumination’s Firelight Lantern Festival, Picton 2022. In 2023, we developed Broom Dance in a week-long residency at MAK Gallery, in partnership with Startup House in Gananoque, Ontario. In July, we played at the Chants de Vielles Festival in Saint-Antoine-Sur-Richelieu, QC.

This show will be developed further this winter in studio at the newly transformed Dirty Paws Living Lab, part of the emerging Maitland Tower complex on the banks of the St. Lawrence River.