Selah Sorcières

State Street isn’t the only local dance company hearing the call of vampires for Halloween weekend programming. Selah Dance Collective and Novus Contemporary Ballet – both run by Meredith Ventura – present Sorcière X Carmilla, a haunting double bill exploring witchcraft, desire, power, and “the dangerous women who refuse to remain contained.” Both Sorcière, choreographed by Chloé Roberts, and Carmilla, created by Ventura and Angelia Lane, were inspired by the Gothic imagination and its enduring fascination with women who exist beyond the boundaries of acceptable femininity, Ventura said in a press release. 

Sorcière – French for “witch” – employs visceral contemporary movement to consider the histories, myths and fears projected onto women whose knowledge, bodies, and power resist social control, with the concept of a witch as not simply as a supernatural figure but an embodiment of transformation, rebellion, and feminine agency. Carmilla, which has its premiere at the shows at Center Stage Theater October 30-November 1, is a one-act inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu’s groundbreaking 1872 Gothic novella about a mysterious female vampire and her increasingly intimate relationship with a young woman, which was published more than two decades before Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The ballet sets to choreography one of literature’s earliest female vampires, whose mysterious and seductive qualities are inseparable from the story’s undercurrents of queer desire. 

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