Jennifer Higgie reflects upon how alternative ways of understanding the world are inspiring today’s artists.

“More and more contemporary artists and curators are exploring the spiritual realm and questioning its exclusion from the art-historical canon,” writes Higgie. “The hashtag ‘witch’ has 15 million posts on Instagram, millennials are into feminist witch parties, and astrology and tarot are booming.”

This final essay takes Donna Huddleston’s 2013 Witch Dance as its focus, tracing a line back to the pioneer choreographer and dancer Mary Wigman’s 1926 work of the same name. Huddleston’s is a performance piece in which scenes unfold as if in a trance. Glamour - with its original allusions to sorcery and the occult - pervades the work, as eight female dancers move in and out of light and smoke, hands splayed “in an evocation of terror, tension or power, fingers pointing to the sky, arms raised in supplication”.

As Higgie rounds off her re-evaluation of the influence of spiritualism on the art of the past 150 years, she celebrates the revival of interest in other realms, within the art world and beyond it too.

Previously the editor of frieze magazine and a judge of the Turner Prize, Jennifer Higgie presents a podcast about women in art history, Bow Down.

Written and presented by Jennifer Higgie
Produced by Chris Elcombe
A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3 Show less