Chicagoans can spend International Women’s Day in a spellbinding way by witnessing the bewitching power of The Other Witch. This isn’t just a dance by choreographer Nejla Yatkin—it’s a multimedia, multilingual ritual that reclaims ancient power through movement, sound and video.
After her high-octane performance at Chicago’s Epiphany Arts Center on March 8, Ms. Yatkin will perform throughout Central America. Fortunately, the Guggenheim Fellow found time to talk with Rebellious before flying out on her international tour.
Janet Arvia: As a German American artist, what does International Women’s Day mean to you?
Nejla Yatkin: International Women’s Day holds deep personal meaning for me. I grew up in Berlin surrounded by the Wall, in a city shaped by division but also by powerful ideals of freedom and equality. Witnessing the Wall come down taught me that transformation is not abstract. And it truly happens through bodies gathering, moving, and insisting on change. Those early experiences shaped how I understand dance as a living expression of resilience, resistance, and hope.
International Women’s Day also reminds me of how many women have been written out of history, their voices silenced, their wisdom dismissed, their bodies controlled or erased. The Other Witch emerges from this absence. The work is not about the witch as myth, but as memory a sort of an embodied archive of feminine knowledge that was never allowed to be recorded. Through breath, rhythm, and movement, the dance becomes a way of listening backward and forward at once, reclaiming what was lost and allowing it to live again through the body.
Your March 8 performance takes place in the main hall of the Epiphany Arts Center, a former church transformed into a venue for contemporary art. What is the significance of this location?
Presenting The Other Witch in this space is both radical and controversial. To place a work centered on the witch, a figure historically persecuted by religious institutions, inside a sacred architectural structure fundamentally shifts how the piece is perceived and experienced. The building becomes part of the choreography. Its height, resonance, and memory amplify the dance, charging the space with tension and possibility. What once enforced silence now holds movement. What once condemned the body now witnesses it in power.
How do you view the witch?
For me, the witch is not a fantasy figure but a symbol of resistance. She represents women whose knowledge was never sanctioned, whose power did not come from institutions, and whose wisdom lived in the body rather than in books. The witch is what happens when intuition, sensuality, and independence become threatening to systems built on control. My interpretation of the witch is deeply physical. She carries knowledge through breath, rhythm, instinct, and movement which are forms of intelligence that have historically been dismissed, feared, or erased. When women could not speak freely, the body became the language. Dance became survival.
The Other Witch is inspired by Mary Wigman’s Witch Dance which premiered in 1926. Why do you think this topic is still relevant after 100 years?
Because dance is always in conversation with the world around it and not only reflecting events, but revealing how those events are felt in the body…Wigman used the body to express what people were living through emotionally like anxiety, grief, desperation, and uncertainty. That approach feels strikingly relevant today…We live in an era of rapid change, fragmented realities, and invisible threats. Information moves instantly, yet truth feels harder to grasp. We are surrounded by misinformation, digital manipulation, social media “trolls,” pandemics, and faceless systems that shape our lives without revealing themselves.
The danger today is often intangible everywhere and nowhere at once. The witch returns in moments like this. She emerges when logic alone can’t guide us, when institutions fail, and when the body must once again become a source of knowing. Like Wigman’s witch, my witch does not illustrate events, she gives form to the emotional landscape beneath them. She dances fear, confusion, resilience, and the urgent desire to survive and transform…The witch is not bound to one era. She surfaces whenever the world is shifting too fast to make sense of and reminding us that the body often understands long before language does.
Your work incorporates a live performance with a film you made during COVID’s lockdown, yes?
Yes. The Other Witch exists both as a live performance and as a film created during the COVID lockdown. When theaters closed, the work had to transform, much like the witch herself…When the work returned to the stage, it changed profoundly. The live version opens with a newly rendered projection mapped onto my cloak almost like a holographic apparition of Mary Wigman coming to life or more like a visual merging of lineage and presence. The ending also shifted, moving away from cinematic resolution toward something unfinished and alive.
My intent is not to present a fixed character, but to allow the witch to arrive anew each night. The performance becomes a ritual of listening where breath, audience, memory, and moment converge. What emerges is never exactly the same. The dance is shaped by attention, by risk, and by trust in the unknown.
The Other Witch is a solo performance. What are the perks and pitfalls of being the only one on stage?
[It’s] both liberating and demanding…Being alone means there is nowhere to hide. Every hesitation, every shift of focus, every emotional wave passes directly through the body. There is no collective momentum to lean on, no shared timing to catch you if you fall. The responsibility is total and not just physically, but also emotionally, and energetically…The pitfall is exhaustion of holding that intensity alone.
The perk is intimacy. A solo creates a direct transmission between performer and audience. We breathe together. We enter the same space of vulnerability and attention. In that shared focus, the performance becomes less about spectacle and more about communion.
What can audiences expect while watching The Other Witch?
Rather than offering comfort or explanation, the performance invites audiences to be together inside that transformation: breathing the same air, sensing the shifts, and allowing the cycle to continue through them. And of course each live performance is different. Like weather, it cannot be controlled only encountered.
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The Other Witch includes a post-performance talk with Scott Lundius and the artist as well as a DJ/VJ set with Pat Michael and Enki Andrews. Click here for details and here for tickets.