Lou Lou Sainsbury

Membering the Night Witches

Lou Lou Sainsbury

“On June 12th 1942, the Night Witches received their first baptism by fire. They were injected with the blood of the vampire bat, to see in the dark. They flew in wooden planes. No radar or radios. They had to be magic, they must have been drugged, or witches, or magic, to see in the dark. They were aged 17 to 26, the Night Witches. They dropped 23,000 tonnes of bombs on the fascists. ‘Be proud, you are a woman.’” Weaving a gothic-fantasy of the all-female Soviet WW2 bomber pilots the ‘Night Witches’, Membering the Night Witches presents an auto-baptism and auto-fertilisation calling for urgent antifascist liberation from our toxic selves. The intense improvised live performance is a noisy hymn for impossible queer longing, evoking psychic-political spirits from the undercurrents of transness, ecstasy and Christian mysticism.