HÄXAN

Is it possible to carry out a truly and extremely magical act within the old and worn-out theater building? In this proposal by the artistic collective ÉSKATON, choreography, music, singing, stage machinery, lighting, projections, dialogues, liturgy, and performativity all serve this very question.

To that end, mythologies, philosophies, and rumors about witchcraft are placed in dialogue with those of contemporary stage creation through the action of a figure with a strange body, marginal appearance, and behaviors as desperate and masochistic as they are tender and delicate. An action that evokes demonized knowledge and practices, exalting both the aesthetic power of monstrosity and the danger of dissident bodies.

An action that could be a minor liturgy of ancestral origins that opens the gates of hell, or simply a playful variety show full of tricks where music surrounds you and makes you forget everything.

HÄXAN is the title of the 1922 Danish film by director Benjamin Christensen, which addresses the phenomenon of witchcraft during the Inquisition and influenced the emergence of the mockumentary. The film serves as inspiration and foundation for this work due to three of its characteristics: the formal blurring of documentary, fiction, and history; the social disturbance caused by its images—classified as disturbing, violent, and cruel; and the pioneering use at the time of special effects to portray the supernatural and the magical.

If in his era Christensen established a parallel between witch hunts and the impact of modern 20th-century psychology on the bodies of hysterical women, this work instead questions the role of theater within a society of consumption and digitalized cultural production.