Dirt Crone is a wordless feminist performance ritual combining Butoh, clown, and live singing.
Set at the edge of the human and the wild, the piece follows a witch/crone who lives alone in the woods after the death of her lover. Through repetitive, ritualized actions—tending a grave, preparing food, cleaning, digging—her daily life unfolds as a choreography of care and survival.
While working in her garden, she unearths a root vegetable disturbingly human in scale and shape. In desperate grief, she begins to tend to it as if it was her lost love, she cleans it, feeds it, and begins to live with it. From this strange intimacy, memory and fantasy overtake: the crone transforms into her younger self—sensual, feral, and uncontained. She is free and celebrating her youthful beauty and sovereignty.
This rewilding of the body gives way to excess fertility. She gives birth not to one child but many, flooding the space with buoyant forms that invite audience participation and play. What begins as joy becomes overwhelm. Care turns into obligation. The demand to nurture endlessly becomes unbearable.
In a final act of refusal, she destroys what she has created and is unto herself again. When the ritual ends, she is old again. Alone again. And free.
Dirt Crone is a rewilding of femininity, aging, and reproduction. It resists domestication, compulsory care, and narratives of “successful” womanhood, reclaiming wildness, grief, and autonomy as acts of survival and joy.