SORCIÈRE
X
CARMILLA
A Gothic Double Bill
Selah Dance Collective and Novus Contemporary Ballet present an evening of witches, vampires, forbidden desire, and dangerous women.
This Halloween, Sorcière / Carmilla brings together two works exploring the monstrous feminine and the women who refuse to remain contained by the worlds around them.
Featuring Chloé Roberts’ Sorcière alongside Meredith Ventura’s new one-act ballet Carmilla, the evening moves between contemporary dance and ballet, witchcraft and vampirism, history and mythology. Together, the works examine the fear, fascination, and desire that have surrounded women whose bodies, sexuality, knowledge, and power exist beyond the boundaries of acceptable femininity.
Choreographed by Dr. Chloé Roberts
Sorcière – French for “witch” – turns toward one of the most enduring figures of feminine transgression.
Through visceral contemporary movement and a haunting theatrical world, Roberts explores the witch as both a figure of persecution and a symbol of transformation, knowledge, rebellion, and power.
Who becomes a witch? Who gets to decide which women are dangerous?
Moving between ritual, history, and the contemporary body, Sorcière considers what happens when the qualities once used to condemn women become sources of agency instead.
SORCIÈRE
CARMILLA
Choreographed by Meredith Ventura with Angelia Lane
Performed by Novus Contemporary Ballet
Before Dracula, there was Carmilla.
Inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu’s groundbreaking 1872 Gothic novella, Carmilla is a new one-act contemporary ballet centered on the mysterious female vampire Carmilla and her increasingly intimate relationship with a young woman named Laura.
Published more than two decades before Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Le Fanu’s story established many of the conventions of vampire fiction while creating a character whose sexuality, appetite, and refusal of social boundaries remain provocative more than 150 years later.
Ventura’s adaptation draws out the novella’s queer Gothicism, sensuality, horror, and ambiguity, asking where intimacy becomes possession, where attraction becomes danger, and who is permitted to desire without becoming monstrous.
TWO WORKS.
TWO MONSTERS.
ONE NIGHT.
The witch and the vampire have long served as vessels for cultural anxieties surrounding female power.
SORCIÈRE X CARMILLA places them side by side.
One is feared for what she knows.
One is feared for what she desires.
Both refuse to behave.
October 30–November 1, 2026
Center Stage Theater
Santa Barbara, California
Presented by Selah Dance Collective and Novus Contemporary Ballet.