VIGIL: FIELD OF CRONES 

Roles for women, dictated or chosen, are a constant thread through Vida’s work – along with the freeing choice to take on different personas. Invitation as an “Eminence Grise” at the performance festival offered another chance to experiment with identity. She took the role seriously (as well as playfully), embracing her “crone” status (an honorable title in Celtic tradition) focused in a performance titled Vigil: Field Of Crones. Vida worked with “fellow crones”  Lillian Allen, Cat Cayuga, and Anne Marie Bénéteau, women who worked singly and together on equity and diversity issues in Toronto in the mid-90s; anger and sadness inevitably arose. Those working for change gathered for mutual support, forging connections and delicate spidery networks, and developing healing rituals. Growing out of that experience, a series of recuperative actions were developed for the festival, enacting in the present the notion of the “morphic field,” a collective, unifying memory or identity that is a powerful agent for patterning new modes of behaviour. Vida again used live performance including actions from her performative “toolbox” with the addition of large-scale video projection, candles and a smoking cauldron.

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2019