Hallowed Stages

Spiritual Spaces in Theater

I saw that He is to us everything that is good and comfortable for us: He is our clothing that for love wrappeth us, claspeth us, and all encloseth us for tender love, that He may never leave us. —Julian of Norwich

Looking at the bare concrete floor of an old high school orchestra room in flickering fluorescent light, perhaps the last adjective I would have expected to come to mind is “sacred.” Paint peeling from the back wall of empty instrument cages as if there had been a prison break, cellos and violins narrowly escaping a high school warden. But this former hall of adolescence has become the temporary home to our college of fine arts while we await the promised glory of a brand new building. And this less glamorous music room is now a bare rehearsal space for a university theater department. 

My colleagues Alexandra Mackenzie Johns and Julie Robinson and I have recruited students as a devising ensemble for a movement-based theater piece that remains unnamed at the start of winter semester. We know it will focus on contemporary personal experiences combined with the faithful writings of medieval women: visionary sisters like Julian of Norwich, Christine de Pizan, and St Bridget of Sweden along with devoted poets, musicians, and scribes like Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, Hildegarde von Bingen, and Margery Kempe. However, how the contemporary will mingle with the medieval, and what shape our performance will take is still rather nebulous. Alex is primarily a director and playwright, Julie a dancer, and I am a dramaturg and playwright. Our students (eight young women and one brave young man) are majoring in a variety of subjects: theater education, dance, acting, design, and archeology, so the possibilities for form are open and free. As part of my role as dramaturg, I create an archive of our efforts. At first the archive is journal-like, and I record our process and my impressions of the experience. But even before the first day of rehearsal has finished, I realize that this is an incredibly unique process, and that we’ll need a photo and video archive as well. As we are exploring on this very first day what it means to devise performance from a Christian perspective, I write in my journal, 

If we are journeying with women who are Christian mystics, we must have an experience somehow akin to theirs. It feels like there is something that we can be doing in our own lives that is beyond knowing just intellectually. 

And rapidly this room starts to feel set apart, like Julian’s cell, my keyboard like Christine’s quill. I can feel love spreading among us like St. Bridget’s tenderness for her children, and our sacred performance journey has begun. At the end of day one, I write,

Somehow we feel safe, joyful, and comfortable when we had expected to be uncomfortable. I hear laughter expressing pure joy and it feels so collaborative. We end with a long hug. If I rest in Christ, if I stay there for a full eight seconds, what could that healing do for me? I felt that I was being held a lot, by humans, and by God, today. There was a comfortable uncertainty in the process. Beautiful, tender, godly, maternal, kind, exciting, stunning; rocking and cradling one another.

The warmth that grows in that space imbues a sacred quality which transforms the tired, humble room into a place of worshipful connection. In our morning rehearsals here, we can open ourselves to the writings of these revelatory women; we feel vulnerable to God and each other, and we find strength in that vulnerability. And even as we sense the hand of the divine among us, we have no inkling of the hallowed spaces that we will soon create and inhabit as we journey together over the coming three months.

Later in the semester, we title the show City of Women: Book of Miracles. As an ensemble directing team, Alex and Julie and I want to pay homage to both the medieval and contemporary stories of faith, and “City of Women” represents the vision of Christine de Pizan, who felt called to construct the houses and buildings inside the walls of [a] City of Ladies" and fill it with inhabitants who are "valiant ladies of great renown.” Each of the writers we are studying has taken great risk and made incredible sacrifices to build a record of their own feminine experience with the divine, and we can see ourselves adding to this city of faith. In the course of our rehearsal period, the students study their own lives, search their hearts, and in so doing find echoes of the medieval discoveries in their own experiences. As we review the work of our students, we see that the power of miracles, some small, but some rather significant, are the ties connecting our own contemporary experiences to our sister mystics. And because we are writing these experiences into the production, sharing our most intimate struggles and miracles with each other before building the courage to share with an audience, we add the subtitle, “Book of Miracles.”

Throughout the process, we are continually talking about performance spaces for this piece, knowing that site-specific theater has the chance to be profoundly effective in adding layers of meaning. We eventually decide on three different performance spaces. First, we reserve the black box theater (the reformed high school choir room next door to our rehearsal space) so that all of our performing arts students can have the chance to see the piece. For our second performance, we get permission to perform at the BYU Museum of Art, where the current exhibit entitled “Of Souls and Sacraments” is on display. Alex and I visit the exhibit, and in one gallery we see the most exquisite paintings from a variety of historical periods and styles depicting Mary and the Savior. We can feel power in this space. One morning during rehearsal we visit the museum space as an ensemble. We know it will be a completely different experience, as the space is not designed for stage performance. However, the opportunity to create a palimpsest of performance, reading the layers of theater and dance and music and medieval texts through the lens of such profound artwork surrounding us is a worthy exchange. The museum isn’t yet open to the public, which gives us a unique opportunity. Later I record this:

We sing a few phrases of our plainchant for just a bit and the feeling is electric. It resonates in sacred echoes from the first floor throughout the entire museum.

This moment builds excitement among the entire ensemble as we consider the possibility of our third and final site-specific performance: the breathtaking chapel of the Cathedral of the Madeleine in downtown Salt Lake City. Alex has been working with them to determine if a performance like ours might be welcomed into the historic place of worship, and we are delighted with the open arms that receive us.

And so we perform three times, once in a theater, once after a short journey to the museum, and once under the vaulted ceilings and stained glass of a cathedral. Each time, the opening musical plea echoes, “Salve regina, mater misericordiae…” Our prayer dance medley feels just as worshipful in each of the spaces. But there are remarkable differences about each of the performances as well. Reflecting on these three site-specific, devised theater experiences, I find that three different but related Greek words illustrate the differences between them.

Theatron

The modern English word, theater, is derived from the Greek theatron, which means “seeing place” or “place to behold.” Our first performance in the small black box theater is the place where we can see, and best be seen by, our peers in the college fine arts community. Thinking of the visions of women like Julian of Norwich, Christine de Pizan, and others, we hope this performance offers a place for audiences to behold these sacred visions, and ours. Because we have standard raked theater seating, the space is true to its name, and though we have a completely full house, we are able to connect with our audience members in what feels like a very intimate way. It’s a house full of tears by the end of the performance—we behold one another, cast and audience members, in a brief and vulnerable silence before the lights on stage fade.

Theoria

Our performance a few days later at the BYU Museum of Art is a much smaller audience, only one row deep, seated at the perimeter of the gallery room, almost a complete square of audience surrounding the performers. The Greek word theoria means “contemplation or speculation” and it also refers to civic or personal practice of traveling on a journey to contemplate truth. One contemporary classical historian refers to theoria as 

visits to oracular centers, pilgrimages to religious festivals, and journeys abroad for the sake of learning. In all journeys of theoria, the pilgrim or theoros traveled away from home to see some sort of spectacle or to learn something about the outside world.

Surrounded by deeply moving and stylistically diverse artwork on all four walls, no matter where an audience member sits in this space they are seeing both the art and the performance simultaneously. There is an implied reverence as the audience waits for the show to begin, in part due to the cultural expectation that we whisper our conversations in museums, but also because we have angelic plainchant as the pre-show music, and our audience members listen as they contemplate the gallery offerings. The entire performance is more subtle and subdued. In our brief conversation with the audience after the show, one member observes that she appreciates the staging of one of the contemporary stories about the death of a performer’s father. She sees how that moment visually paralleled the moment when Christ was taken from the cross following his death, and as an ensemble we are struck by the power of this observation. Drawing that parallel was not intentional, and had never even been mentioned in our rehearsals; yet it illustrates the power of theoria. Layered interpretations such as that one would not have been possible had we not traveled outside our comfortable theater space to perform, nor would they have been possible without the contemplative moments that the art museum provides.

Theologia

From the Greek meaning “utterances of God,” theologia describes our approach to our final performance. As an ensemble we attended several worship services at The Cathedral of the Madeleine in preparation for our performance in the exquisite space. And early in the afternoon of our Sunday performance, we step into the cathedral and are overwhelmed at the grandeur of the stained glass, the gilt vaulted ceilings, and the artwork that surrounds us, an essential part of the Catholic worship services that take place here. To perform this piece built from the writings of these medieval Christian women, many of whom have been sainted by the Catholic church, is a gift.

In The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine de Pizan records that she was given a vision: 

I suddenly saw a ray of light fall on my lap, as though it were the sun. And I looked up, and saw three crowned ladies standing before me, and the splendor of their bright faces shone on me and throughout the entire room. And they, with great tenderness, told me, “Do not get lost in foolish thoughts, sister. Look. A city of women—filled with ladies of great intelligence. Women of virtue. Women of Love.”

The acoustics aren’t perfect and many in the audience miss our dialogue, but the visions of these women are punctuated by our surroundings. Afterward, one of the student performers says, 

It's really interesting to perform in the cathedral because of the artwork that is in there. . . . On the ceiling of the cathedral there is a painting of angels and women wearing crowns. In the show there is a scene inspired by one of the texts we studied where [Christine de Pizan] talks about crowned women in heaven. It was really interesting to perform in such a sacred setting.

This final performance in the cathedral feels sublime. But to our amazement, the feeling we hold between us is the same one we felt at the very beginning, in a bare, deserted orchestra-room-turned-rehearsal-space. It’s a feeling cultivated by divine vulnerability and radical love. It’s a gratitude to the prophetic, visionary women who shared that space with us, those receivers of revelation who were women of the church, poets, musicians, and mothers. It’s a sanctity that we accessed by engaging with these women and their experiences in private, personal, and public spheres. And it was through that spirit of miracles that every space open to our performance—a cathedral, a museum, a repurposed high school, our own hearts, the hearts of our audience members—was blessed.

Special thanks to BYU College of Fine Arts and Communications and BYU Religious Studies Center for funding this project.

Shelley Graham is a mother, professor, and dramaturg with degrees in theatre education, pedagogy, and dramatic writing. As Dramaturgy Supervisor and adjunct faculty at Brigham Young University, her artistic and scholarly practice focuses on musical theatre script development and dramaturgy for devised theatre. Her creative work often explores women’s experiences in the complicated intersections of faith and performance in Western history. Recent projects include script development for the world premiere of 1820: The Musical; dramaturgy and direction for the devised dance theatre piece, Bind, Burn, Whisper, Press; and dramaturgy for the devised theatre project, City of Women: Book of Miracles.