Stills from my music video “Mariam Matrem Virginem”, a site-specific performance collaboration with Butoh dancer Kait Dron, released summer 2025.

‘Mariam Matrem Virginem’ is a Medieval song of pilgrimage from the 1300s, a journey to visit the Black Madonna at a sacred mountain top site, the ‘jagged mountain’.

In our music video we sought to embody themes of pilgrimage, ritual, and devotion. We chose to film a Site-Specific performance at Avebury Stone Circle, a prehistoric ancient monument and sacred site with profound atmosphere and mystery.

Classical music is normally performed in elite spaces by elite performers, so we sought to disrupt this convention and make it accessible to new audiences. Through both improvised choreography and costume, we sought to rebel against the convention in classical music of separating the music from the physical body and the individuality of the performer. And through costume and gesture, I seek to represent queer bodies in classical music performance, and outsider embodiments of gender and desire.

Me and Kait share an interest in Butoh Japanese dance theatre and felt that this dance form, with its rejection of Western dance formalities, would be a fitting choice for a piece seeking to defy mainstream conventions in classical music. We utilised Butoh as a way to uncover the dance that already exists within; to express our bodies’ own response to this mystical site, and achieve a state of hyper-presence and transformation.