The Witch Wound is a twenty-minute one-woman performance that moves between 1650 and now, two timelines that refuse to stay separate. Live voice and audio converse across time and space. Built from personal testimony, ancestral history and the political noise that frames certain women's lives as peripheral, as missing something, as not quite the right shape.
Fifteen bodies hanged on Newcastle Town Moor. One Margaret Maddison, my ancestor, speaks to me through a rip in time, from beyond the noose. A man with a bodkin prodded violently at women's parts and called it proof. The bodkin remains but is dressed differently now: policy, choice, body shaming, coercion, pronatalism, a political script about hardworking families.
I am given sniggers and optimism wrapped in cheap paper. My ancestor was given a rope.
This piece reclaims the truth of what gets done to a woman's body from birth to death when the world has decided it knows better. What it breeds into us, what it starves out of us, what it demands we produce and how it punishes us when we don't.
I am her. She is me. Neither of us are sorry. Neither of us will stay silent now.
Dannie-Lu Carr is a singer-songwriter, performer, director, dramaturg and executive coach based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her work across music, spoken word, coaching and theatre consistently returns to the experiences that don't fit the mainstream narrative. She has spent thirty years working at the intersection of creative form and social experience, making work that takes seriously the lives that institutions and mainstream culture tend to overlook. She is childless not by choice. Her current body of work, spanning live performance, album, spoken word and short fiction, is rooted in that experience and in the ancestral, political and personal threads that connect it to something much bigger than her own story.
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