Waking the Witch

Synopsis:

In Waking the Witch, you, the audience, find yourself in early modern Europe or the American colonies, brought before a Witchfinder. The world is tense, and people live alongside a host of constant threats. This Witchfinder might be self-appointed, but he is certainly backed by powerful men, sure of his mission, and convinced you are part of a secret cabal trying to destroy all that is godly.

Your neighbors have accused you of various acts of maleficia, evil acts of magic that are only possible for those who’ve committed the worst of all possible sins: making a pact with the devil. The Witchfinder is prepared to fulfill the righteous duty of investigation, doing his part in stamping out this increasingly rampant heresy. He says you are to be walked: not tortured, of course, only asked to walk about this small room, this night and maybe more, without rest or sleep until the truth is discovered. The questions begin: Why does the tavern keeper visit you, and where did you get the knowledge to heal his son? Why did your neighbor’s illness start just a few days after she refused to give you alms? Why did the magistrate, his body protected by his godliness, suffer the death of livestock just weeks after you complained about him? Haven’t you been seen oddly close to small animals, a sign of owning shapeshifting demons known as familiars?

You are interrogated about this and more, though your answers matter little to the Witchfinder, who already knows what he believes. Still walking, the world getting hazy, you start to lose bits of time. You see things like animals, but they don’t seem real… or nice. The Witchfinder isn’t done: What happened when your body was searched for the devil’s mark? Did you willingly accept the devil, or were you coerced, and why didn’t you fight back? What crimes happen at the witches’ sabbath, and more importantly, who else was there? What do you say to all this which is apparent?

You are continually kept from resting, even as the present becomes fully unreal, and the Witchfinder seems to cast a shadow over the centuries to come. People like you, he says, will always be brought before people like him for judgment, people who will never believe you, or will, but won’t care. You are left with the question: How long can you walk?

The libretto:

The words and thinking of witchfinders and their successors. The libretto of Waking the Witch is derived through paraphrases and echoes of historical documents from the time of great witch panics (roughly 1450-1750 in Europe and what would become America), a time during which tens of thousands of people, mostly women, mostly poor, were prosecuted for crimes they could not possibly have committed. These sources include academic texts, pamphlets, and court documents, such as  Malleus Maleficarum (Heinrich Kramer, 1487), A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes (George Gifford, 1593), Daemonologie (King James, yes that one, 1597), The Discovery of Witches (Matthew Hopkins, the self-appointed Witchfinder General, 1647), the trial of Anne Roleffes (known as Tempel Anneke, ca. 1663), and documents from American witch trials in Salem and elsewhere (mostly mid- to late 1600s). These are supplemented with the occasional quote or paraphrase from modern American leaders and political movements whose statements eerily echo the witch hunters.

Inspired in part by Augusto Boal’s forum theater, Waking the Witch asks the audience place themselves in the position of the person being questioned in order to think about how we collectively come to be in situations of widespread misinformation and fearmongering and why the most vulnerable are so often feared and blamed. And then, to consider how we can respond, what we might do as individuals and as groups to change current and prevent future dehumanization, oppression, and moral panics.

The music:

Waking the Witch is meant to be appropriately eerie and spooky for its subject matter, while maintaining enough distance and sense of play to avoid being (re)traumatizing to audience mbembers. Tuneful, even catchy tonal and modal melodies are interspersed with moments of free improvisation. Like the ideology the Witchfinder espouses, the music begins in the late medieval church and ends in Americana. Styles and techniques like chant, Puritan psalmody, pastoral laments, Baroque dances, and fugue slowly turn into vamps with improvised solos, theme and variation with driving steady beats, fiddle chopping, slap bass figures, and moments that might feel like a witches’ sabbath celebrated on an Appalachian mountain. Much of the questions directed at the audience are in semi-improvised sections, allowing the Witchfinder, and later the familiars, to move through the audience, directing questions directly to them (the audience is not expected to respond; after all, the Witchfinder isn’t really going to consider anything that doesn’t fit his current understanding). Regularly, the Witchfinder repeats an invocation: Confess, confess, confess. Walk. It isn’t over yet.

The structure:

Waking the Witch, while not specific to any trial, location, or time period, still follows a common pattern in witch trials: suspicions between neighbors build up over years, often aggravated by environmental or societal stressors, eventually turning into formal accusations. At that point, authorities come to initiate legal proceedings, bringing with them a fear-based theology that connected injury, illness, loss of life, and loss of property with the idea that people could be imbued with special powers from the devil: witchcraft was therefore not just a crime against the community, but against all that was holy. In times when these authorities strongly believed in witches’ sabbaths or that witchcraft was a widespread problem, individual trials could turn into panics, as the accused were forced to name accomplices.

Waking the Witch sketches out this narrative within a single interrogation session. The opera is presented as a single extended scene in thirteen movements:

I Prologue
II In the midst of the disasters
III Accusation 1: The tavernkeeper’s son
IV Accusation 2: The neighbor’s wife
V Accusation 3: The magistrate’s estate
VI The Charges
VII Think On Your Soul (Trio for Animal Familiars)
VIII Proof
IX The Contract
X I Rise
XI The Sabbath
XII In the midst of the disasters
XIII Epilogue

The piano, cello, and percussion form the accompanying ensemble, while the flute, clarinet, and violin play animal familiars. Animal familiars were believed to be demons in the shape of small animals that were given to witches by the devil as agents who could work evil magic. These instrumentalists are included in the staging, following the Witchfinder and alternating between egging him on, adding to the ambience created by the ensemble, and playfully delighting in all that is happening. The Witchfinder doesn’t seem to notice them, and it’s not clear if they are real or hallucinations.

The piece also draws from sleep deprivation for its structure. As time goes on, a person experiencing severe sleep deprivation may lose their sense of time, become highly suggestible, and experience hallucinations. In addition to the possibly-hallucinatory animal familiars, he opera incorporates the idea of microsleeps, or short losses of consciousness that might happen involuntarily during extensive sleep deprivation. Keeping people awake through “walking” was a technique used in the witch panic in East Anglia during the English civil war. At that time and place, torture was illegal, but keeping people awake for several days was not considered torture. The microsleeps appear in the opera as brief blackouts accompanied by white noise; when the scene resumes it’s clear the audience has lost an undetermined amount of time. By the end of the opera, the Witchfinder seems to be speaking across time and space, affirming that fearful, powerful men’s desire to cry both “Witch!” and “Witch hunt!” will never cease.