• "Ashes Monroe puts together some of the most jarringly beautiful performances; they engage the audience on both a cerebral and a visceral level. See them if you can." - Paul Burry

  • "Kintsukuroi was beautiful and weird, like a surreal hyper-emotional dream" - Jordan Fickel

  • "San Franciscans, this is the BEST event you'll ever see in the city again! And I'm still talking about San Francisco... Don't miss it, or you'll regret it, I promise." - Maria Carolina Fujihara

  • "Run, don't walk! to see the amazing Joyce Lee in the final performance of amazing poetry circus "Kintsukuroi" by WitchTech in San Francisco! Blown away!" - Glynn Washington of Snap Judgement

  • "The shows were raw and emotional and eloquent in a way that really surprised me, the first time I experienced it. I'd truly never seen anything like it before. And the tickets are impossibly cheap given the level of artistry on display. If you are in town for a show, you should seriously cancel whatever plans you need to and go see it, because they don't come around very often, and it's extremely worth it." -Alice Shay Yu

  • "This art and performance group performs and invites you to engage in powerfully healing work. It's been a masterpiece every time I've seen it." -Angela Stucky

  • "What genre would you call this? Ashes Monroe" - Geoff Schmidt

  • "This is the best "Wolf" show in the trilogy. The melding of the circus acts with Jamie's stories is tight and well-integrated. I felt that the stories and the acts illuminated and reflected each other extremely well. Absolutely tour this show!" - Judy Finelli of Pickle Family Circus

  • "These shows aren’t for the faint of heart and can be cathartically moving. I believe in events like these as a necessary release or rite of passage through the chapters of our lives both personally and collectively." - Sophia Constance, performer in 'Kintsukuroi'

Events

Recent Events

Momento Vivere

June 15, 2019 - June 30, 2019

2786 Bush street, San Francisco, CA 94115

WitchTech Rituals presents an immersive art installation by director Ashes Monroe. The first in a series of explorative, immersive, and theatrical art spaces. The first weekend is a casual open house with a small collection of pieces before the official opening for the rest of June that will include another level of immersive artworks and ambient theatrical performances. If you're interested in San Francisco's underground art scene you'll want to make a stop by this transformed ephemeral popup in the Fillmore district provided graciously by the Artivism unused spaces project.

'Memento Mori' is a latin expression for 'remember that you must die' , which expresses the awareness of mortality, with an emphasis on death as a trigger to prioritizing what truly matters in life. 'Memento Vivere', latin for 'remember that you must live' is a comment on this expression, with the added sentiment that we may somehow be distracted by our lives themselves. Our lives are a collection of memories, dreams, aspirations; an entanglement of experience and reconciliation of those experiences. Our identity is a story that we tell ourselves using these experiences. Each time we see, smell, feel or hear something, a memory is created or entangled with past memories, coincidentally changing our past, future, and the ephemeral space that we call the present.

Come and be present with us.

Memento Vivere Gallery Images

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Recent Events

Down with the Ship

June 28th, 8pm-9:30pm

140 9th street, San Francisco

Down with the Ship is an off-kilter, ill-prepared, circus-filled ode to "home" and all the unpacking that the terms entails. Hear about our sentimental imaginary voyage through all types of homes. Part kindergarten play, part badly acted epic theater, part circus show, part political statement and then somewhere along the way we run out of parts and let you leave.

Come and see friends of WitchTech and Circus Automatic play together in this piece about finding where we belong. Awkward giggles and spontaneous feels guaranteed.

Cast & Crew:
  • Ashes Monroe - Storyteller, Director, Concept
  • Eka Boo Button - Rope and Character
  • Gemiah Kurzfield - Straps
  • Anastasia Sauvage - Aerial Silks
  • Maggie Powers - Dance
  • Ismael Acosta - Dance
  • Sophia Constance - Butoh Dance & Character
  • Toni Cannon - Chinese Pole & Acrobatics
  • Kevin Armour - Racket and Character
  • Fleeky Flanco - Chinese Barrel
  • Aki Hasegawa - Production Assistant
  • Orion Griffiths - Juggling and Acrobatics

Past Events

Kintsukuroi

March 15-17, 2019 at 8pm nightly

Monument, 140 9th St, San Francisco, CA 94103

This piece meditates on the beauty of repairs and what comes when you allow yourself to fall apart and be put back together. How you put yourself back together is as important as how you break.

Poet and spoken word artist Joyce Lee is back with us from Colombia on a special occasion to tell her stories as the red-thread for this exclusive three day performance. She's joined by supernatural bay area circus and Butoh talents to create an avant-garde mixture of theater, circus and personal stories to tease out an ineffable experience that you'll have to see to believe.

Soundtrack

Cast & Crew:

Kintsukuroi Trailer

Live Performance Images

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The Boy Who Died Wolf

May 11th & May 12th, 2018

Monument, 140 9th St, San Francisco, CA 94103

The show features Jamie DeWolf our storytelling monster accompanied by the physical magic of Darius Drooh, Fleeky Flanco, Rachel Strickland and Anastasia Sauvage. The production also boasts ambitious costume design from Sophia Constance and enjoys visionary Artistic Direction by Ashes Monroe.

After Raised by Wolves and Into the Mouth of the Wolf, this final experience comes full circle and connects us with who we were in the beginning. Before all of the highs and lows, before the trauma, before the transformation, raw and fragile, The Boy Who Died Wolf shows that in order to grow you must first burn the past to the ground. About the monsters inside of us, It is a hallucinogenic blend of circus, true life stories, and the whirlwind of trauma that we all must accept as who we are.

The Boy who Died Wolf is part storytelling part circus show. Storyteller Jamie DeWolf (nationally recognized slam poetry champion and acclaimed storyteller as seen on NPRs Snap Judgement) accompanies a modular collection of world class circus talent known for their genre-breaking work. Our storyteller walks us through illustrated memories that describe literally and metaphorically our youthful arrogance, transformation, and costuming into a monster all the way to the end where we meet him in his vulnerability and fumbling hopes. Each circus act exemplifies some odd facet of this complex jewel our storyteller brings to us.

Notes

This show was the third and final in a series of shows with the wolf as a totem animal. These shows started under the umbrella of Circus Automatic, another troupe founded by Tim Barsky and Fleeky Flanco, we produced two of them purely under that umbrella until the final show, that was produced by WitchTech AND Circus Automatic. Most of the reason for that was symbolic, though the organization before-hand was largely the same, this was the only one that was officially directed by Ashes Monroe.

  • - Sophia Constance, who was originally invited to do costuming, wasn't officially in the show until the last week of rehearsals. She ended up closing the show with Jamie DeWolf in a passionate butoh piece about suicide, and the decision to keep living.
  • - Anastasia Sauvage and Jamie DeWolf are both scorpios, and they both (coincidentally) have real scorpion tattoos that were referenced in one of Jamie's stories.
  • - Darius Drooh's ending piece was both about self-abuse and an hommage to the physical fight with Edward Norton's character in Fight Club. It was performed to an instrumental piano rendition of "Where is my mind" by Maxence Cyrin (a cover of the song by the Pixies)
Cast & Crew:

The Boy Who Died Wolf Trailer

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Past Events

Re:Memory

June 4th-June 7th, 2018

The Midway, San Francisco

An investigation of personal and collective memory using live performance, dance, video, glitch art and neural networks that reveals our fabricated identities in the context of nostalgia.

Produced and directed by Ashes Monroe, pictured in promotional image: Rachel Strickland

Performers:
  • Sophia Constance - Dance and Butoh
  • Yuko Hata - Dance