In February 2020, Through the Hexenring premiered in Frankfurt at the Winterwerft Theater Festival at the Antigon Theater with Sara McFarland and Katja Wehe. It was a journey into the story of Frau Holle or Mother Holle. This one is known as the story about the paleolithic Great Mother of what is now known as Western and Eastern Europe. There are sites sacred to Frau Holle all over Germany, Switzerland, Austria. Ponds where the souls pass between the worlds, caves where she is said to live, megaliths she is said to have placed. Much like the Cailleach in Scotland or the Baba Yaga from the slavic countries, she is a wild old crone who tends winter, stone, water, sex and fertility and the wild animals are her kin. She makes weather, guides and creates the seasons, teaches spinning and the growing and preparation of flax, lives in the underworld (her stars hang in the roots of our trees), has tusks, receives the spirits of the dead, gestates the new babies, and passes through the lands at winter solstice with the spirits of the children to be born and chooses the mother for the baby. In her modern representation, she is a grandmotherly figure that shakes out her bed to make it snow on earth and has apples and bread that need to be plucked and taken out of the oven (a metaphor for sexuality, fertility and delivering babies), which the maidens learn from her when they enter her realm through the village well, after pricking themselves while spinning (my reading is that this is the onset of menarche). If the girl "behaves" while she is with Frau Holle, meaning she works hard shaking out the duvet so it will snow on earth, picking apples and taking out the loaves of bread, is kind and sweet tempered, prepares the food and tends the fire in Frau Holle'S home, then she returns to her world covered in gold. If she is lazy, selfish, mean and impudent, she returns covered in pitch.

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I understand this story to be a story of initiation, traveling to the realm of the Earth Goddess to learn the women's mysteries once a girl has begun to bleed. I also see in this story, the shift from the time of initiation to the "modern paradigm" having forgotten or been converted. As is strangely commonplace, the story is then twisted to represent the christian virtues of hard work, politeness and innocence and teach girls to not be lazy or rude or have their own thoughts. I am curious about this story for many reasons as a Soul Initiation Guide and Death Doula for the Great Dying, as well as an artist.  I am one who has been in service to this wild great mother their whole life.​

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Below are photos from the performance and two clips of the soundtrack - Gerde is the young woman who descends to the underworld of Frau Holle and returns with gold...