03/03/2026
The Night Battle: A Woman Remembers
Was Magic the Crime — or Was She?
For Festa della Donna, produced by the incredible at the Triad Theatre in NYC, I was commissioned to create a new work honoring women in the Italian American experience — kicking off Women’s History Month, Italian style 🇮🇹✨
My offering was a contemporary ritual inspired by Italian folklore, reimagined through the lens of a woman in the diaspora reaching for the magic of her ancestral roots.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, agrarian women spoke of night battles — fighting in spirit to protect the harvest. Over time, their visions were renamed, reframed, and recorded through the lens of the Inquisition.
So I asked:
Was it truly a battle of witches?
Or was it a war on women?
Dancing in black, I carried a wooden staff — a fennel stalk, a sorghum rod, a weapon, a tool, a staff of memory. I played nacchere while maneuvering the stick, creating rhythm as I moved — percussive, grounded, ritualistic. A modern battle dance. A reclamation.
Not a reenactment.
A remembering.
Tonight, the battle is not against witches.
It is against forgetting.
📸 Rob Klein .robnyc
Dancer/Choreographer:
