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Presented by feminist arts magazine Girls Against God, Wolf Moon Gathering was an intriguing afternoon of meditation, performance and collective song hosted at MoMA PS1’s VW Dome.

Billed as a “celebration of the wild female soul,” the event was hosted by Vaginal Davis and featured individual performances such as plant-channeling from Melanie Bonajo and a Goddess-evoking dance ritual by Johanna Constantine and J.Z.araA.. With dim, blue and red lighting, eerie musical accompaniments, and a stage adorned with flowers in the center of the room with the audience sitting in a circular fashion around it, Wolf Moon Gathering was distinctly pagan in both theme and feel.

The event began with an initiation ritual, featuring tea, sound and smoke blessings, and easing participants into a program with the stated aim of reunifying our fragmented, modern selves. Following this, Vaginal Davis introduced the program proper with a song urging listeners to reflect on objects of personal significance, while meanwhile a dissonant, crescendoing soundtrack was provided by Doug Wieselman and Danny Bensi, on saxophone and cello respectively.

A standout piece was Bryn McKay’s guided meditation, spoken with McKay wearing a hood with the design of a skull on the back of her head. The meditation centered on a volcanic lake, and guided the audience deep into a place in which earth, mud, air and water lose all distinction, and the idea of the lake bleeds into a cauldron, and then a womb.

Johanna Constantine and J.Z.araA.’s dance ritual suggested a similar kind of primordial femininity, this time tinged with violence and the imagery of warfare. When the Goddess, adorned with orange robes, emerges from her meditative trance it is with two scythes in hand, a symbolic display of power that is underscored when her body is then worshipped by her evoker.

Equally impressive was Melanie Bonajo channeling a potted plant, while the event’s proceedings wrapped up with a group chant and call to Skeleton Woman to dance ‘The Dance of Life/Death/Life.’ Bonajo’s performance though especially encapsulated the desubjectifying, boundary dissolving effect running through much of the event. As she urged those in attendance to become the potted plant, the misty, swamp-like atmosphere of the Dome and forest canopy lighting contributed to a sense of immersion, a quiet dissolving into the environment.

The kind of pagan sensibility on display within the event is entirely in keeping with Girls Against God’s titular opposition to patriarchal institutions of religion, and would appear to be something of a teaser for the magazine’s forthcoming next issue on “witchy subjects.” But it is also something that is tied to recent interest in witchcraft and the occult more generally.

In New York, trendpieces have recently zeroed in on a seeming resurgence of interest in the occult in Brooklyn, between the opening of occult bookstore Catland and the monthly Witches of Bushwick parties. In all of this, one might detect an anti-technological nostalgia for a time when humans were more connected to nature and to their own bodies. However, there is also a desire, evident in Wolf Moon Gathering’s performances, not to mention Girls Against God’s professed interest in ancient matriarchal societies, to explore other ways of thinking about power at a time when technology is drastically altering our understanding of both community and what it means to be human.

The Girls Against God magazine Wolf Moon Gathering took place on Sunday, January 26, 2014. Girls Against God Magazine is published by Capricious, co-edited by Bianca Casady and Anne Sherwood Pundyk. The Gathering included Fairy Goddess Mother Vaginal Davis, Bryn McKay, Melanie Bonajo, Johanna Constantine and J.Z.araA, Diane Cluck and Yasmine Hamdan, Rebecca Wright, Doug Wieselman and cellist Danny Bensi.

Beeld: courtesy Melanie Bonajo