Ushering In

The liturgical dance class at Wesley Seminary this semester is embracing wonderful conversations on the forms dance can take within the context of Christian worship.  We discuss, we practice, we question, we explore; the experience of being with these students is enriching my life and thought.

I am methodically taking the class through an overview of liturgical dance, drawing from my own experiences but enhanced and deepened by our wonderful, primary resource: Introducing Dance in Christian Worship.  Gagne, Kane and VerEecke lay out the forms liturgical dance can take in as clear a way as I have come across and, what I find so compelling, emphasize that any dance done as part of worship must be tied to the ritual structure of which it is a part (see especially, pp 99-111).  I have found this to be true for every piece I have danced in worship over the last 20 years.  Most of my dances have been tied to a particular service.  Some are tied to a season within the church year (Advent, Lent, Easter, Pentecost) but most have a fairly narrow application. Context!

With these teachings as a backdrop, our class recently explored dance as Procession and I found myself wanting to reflect on this form as we lean into the season of Lent.

Liturgical Danced Procession:  To take oneself and others on a journey from point A to point B.  To be a vehicle for a holy shift – helping to shift the internal landscape of the human heart or the external environment of the physical space.  To usher in.  To make ready.  To lead out into the world.  To ritualize.  A function of transformation.  And the prayer is, always, that the Holy Spirit accompanies the liturgical Procession.  It is my understanding that liturgical dancers have the anointing to usher God’s Spirit into a space.

Processions are happening all around us, all the time. Procession – through dance or walk (or any locomotor movement) – can be a powerful metaphor for how we administer the beginnings and endings in our lives.

I am drawn to the idea of Procession as a way to enter the season of Lent (lining up to receive the imposition of ashes); as a way to walk with Jesus during these 6 weeks (taking on a discipline, letting go of what holds one back); as a way to dance into new life (the promise of Easter).  Lent can be a dark time for the soul.  The yearly journey we take with Jesus is a kind of stripping away of what does not serve our relationship with God.  Though difficult, we are invited to Process with Jesus into Jerusalem, to walk beside Him on the way to Calvary and, ultimately, to let Him be lost so that we might be found.

During Holy Week this year, the Wesley community’s Tuesday chapel will include embodied prayer and also a danced Procession.  This beautiful group of students will dance Were You There? (...when they crucified my Lord) at the end of the service, propelling the community forward into the remainder of the week.  As I create and teach this dance, my prayer is for all the beginnings and endings in our lives; for the courage to move through them; for the grace to dance in Love.  May it be so and Amen.

by Kathryn Sparks, with thanks to my students in Liturgical Dance, spring 2014

Matthew Adelberg: Lineage

This afternoon, Matthew Adelberg spoke to a group of about 25 rapt listeners about his show, Lineage, currently in the Dadian Gallery. At just 21 years of age, and still a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Adelberg's works show a depth and maturity that many older artists would envy. In person, he is modest, quiet, and grateful for the attention that his work is bringing him. Nervous at first, his voice became more confident as Trudi asked him about the sources for these powerful paintings.

Nightmare

Adelberg said that many of his works are autobiographical, a way for him to process his troubled childhood. One of the smaller paintings that is exhibited in the President's office, rather than the gallery proper, depicts a woman lying on what looks like a table with a young man standing over her threateningly. When asked about it, Adelberg said is about the his own fear of becoming violent. As a child, he saw his father beat up his mother many times, and this painting is a way to externalize his fear that he will become like his hated father. For this reason, he titled the painting “Nightmare.” In painting this nightmarish vision of fear and memory, it became for him a talisman of hope for a better future.

The Letter

While many of his paintings depict disturbing stories, to my eyes they are ultimately about redemption. The artist says that the black paint with which he begins each painting is a symbol of the chaos of the broken world, out of which he carves out places of light. As each layer of paint is lighter than the one before, he believes that he is bringing in the light of God, illuminating the image of the world as it is with the divine presence.

When someone asked Adelberg how he decided that an artwork is beautiful, he answered, “When it is true.” These skillful, well-balanced, carefully composed images tell the truth about life from the perspective of someone who wants to be good, and fears the evil impulses that live inside of him. This is a reality that is at once deeply personal and completely universal. That kind of truth is so beautiful that it brings tears to my eyes.

A Christmas Gift of Chagall Windows in a Country Church

All Saints Tudeley 

We were visiting my daugher's inlaws in Tunbridge Wells, about an hour outside of London, and after lunch the first day the talk turned (not surprisingly) to art in churches. Did you know, said someone, that there is a little country church with a full set of Chagall windows just a few minutes from here? No, we said, much surprised, we had no idea! So, after breakfast the next morning, four of us piled into the car and soon, just as advertised, we were standing outside of a tiny, 14th century church surrounded by a graveyard with ancient headstones and soggy, wet fields for miles around.

Interior showing two of the windows

The church is called All Saints Tudeley, and is said to be the only church in the world to have all its twelve windows designed by Marc Chagall. You can read about it at http://www.tudeley.org/allsaintstudeley.htm but there is no substitute for coming in out of the cold, damp wind into this tiny, neat, church that probably seats no more than forty or fifty people. Its footings were laid before the Norman conquest, and in the nearly one thousand years since, it has been changed and restored many times. As their website says

"A list of incumbents hanging in the church begins in 1251, but most of the structure that can be seen today is from the 18th century. The brick tower dates from around 1765, as does the delicately marbled ceiling; the North aisle was added in 1871." 

The church was remodeled again in the 1960s when a prominent family commissioned the windows in memory of their daughter, who had died in a boating accident at the age of 22. 

The Chagall windows are startling in such an otherwise traditional setting. Nearly all of them are at eye level, so close that parishioners can lose themselves in the details during a long sermon or an extended period of silence. The bright blues and yellows sing, especially when contrasted with the grey, cloudy sky outdoors and the heavy stonework that surrounds them. The shapes and gestures that are familiar from Chagall's other work come alive in a new way in the living intimacy of this worship space. Unlike his windows in the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, which I saw many years ago, these windows are for a very specific congregation that worships together week after week. 

It was a privilege to see these windows, especially today, on Christmas Eve. Like Christmas itself, they proclaim that the love of God extends even beyond death. I give thanks for this unexpected gift of art, and for the chance to sing "Joy to the World" tonight at midnight, although I am thousands of miles away from my home. 

Giving Thanks for a Life in Art

Memories of Coatlaxope (Guadalupe), 1993,
acrylic and copper on wood, 24" x 24"

Twenty years ago, I was in a deep depression. I had left the school where it was clear that I would never get tenure, and had no vision of where to go or what to do next. I felt that I was in a very, very dark place. Then, one day, it seemed to me that God had shone a small spotlight in front of me, illuminating one step that I could take towards an unknown future. That next step was to remember that I was an artist.

I gathered what little energy I had, went to the hardware store, bought some 2' x 2' squares of plywood, covered them with black gesso, and began to paint. Little by little, the image of the Virgin of Guadelupe emerged from the darkness, hidden among tree branches and surrounded by the barest beginnings of flowers. Over the course of the next few days, I completed two paintings that were unlike anything I had ever made before.

As I was completing those works, God lit up another step-stone on my path: the Center for the Arts and Religion invited me to be an Artist-in-Residence at Wesley Theological Seminary. When I accepted the invitation, I had no idea that I would be the director of the Center twenty years later! All I knew then was that someone valued me as an artist when I wasn't even sure that I really was one.

She is a Tree of Life to All Who Cling to Her
(also known as Queen of the Angels of Small Portion)
1993, acrylic and copper on wood, 24" x 24"

Today, I give thanks for everyone who has encouraged me on this strange and wonderful journey, and made it possible for me to spend my life learning, teaching, talking, and writing about art as well as making images that other people value. I am especially grateful to the people who bought those first, two dark paintings that set the themes and images that continue to appear in my work all these years later.

Unfortunately, the only record I have of the paintings are fuzzy, low resolution photographs. So if anyone knows where they are now, please let me know. And, if you can, please take a good, high resolution photo, and send it to me. I will be eternally grateful!

Wild Art

Today at the American Academy of Religion, I attended a session on Outsider Art. Because the session was presented by the Psychology, Culture, and Religion group, and not art historians, much of what was said about the relationship between what in France had been called "art brut" and the early Modernists was very familiar to me. As they ran over the early 20th century territory in which artists like Jean Dubuffet, Paul Klee, Kandinsky, and others became fascinated with the drawings and paintings of psychiatric patients, children, and other naifs, I began to think I was wasting my time. 

 

Things got more interesting, though, when the discussion turned to the question of whether there might be a better term than outsider to describe these works. The usual words were mentioned, like naive, primitive, or visionary. But then one of the presenters said that Roger Cardinal, the art critic whose work made the term famous, never liked outsider art. Rather, it was his publisher who insisted on it as a translation for art brut, which more properly means something like raw or rough art. Or, as the presenter put it, wild art. 

It is, of course, this wildness that appealed to the early avant garde, as they sought to throw off the constraints of an academy that dictated which were acceptable subjects and exactly how to depict them. Since then, several generations of wild, rebellious, young artists have become teachers themselves. Ironically, these new arbiters of the academy have tried to institutionalize the wildness that so entranced them in the artworks of the untutored, even as they drill their students in color theory and the elements and principles of design. As the wildness becomes tamed, though, it too often degenerates into an attempt to shock, a desire to do something original, rather than the truthful exploration of the inner landscape that is the hallmark of the untutored artist. 

Like the avant garde artists of the early 20th century, and, indeed, my own teachers, I am drawn to the idea of wild art, of art that cannot be confined to academies or genres or movements, of art that flourishes outside the boundaries of galleries and museums and art-critical theories. And yet, like my own teachers, I believe in teachable skills, in the transmission of values and techniques from one generation to the next, and in the responsibility of artists to speak into and for the communities that support them. I guess what I want to believe is that art is both the thoughtful, intentional, skillful product of patience and practice; and also the incarnate imagination of the Holy Spirit, which blows wherever it wills, bringing life to whatever it touches. Wild art, indeed.

The Arts, Money, and the Future of the Church

My father with his twin brother
and my grandfather in 1931

More than 25 years ago, one of my daughters was accepted as an acting student at the then-brand-new Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. At the orientation session, a teacher waved her hand in the direction of the students gathered in front of her, and said, “Parents, you are looking at the future of the American theater!” Looking at the hopeful, young faces and hearing the passion in the voices of the faculty, I was swept away with emotion. What a grand vision we all shared in that moment!

That daughter went on to study acting at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and now is a film executive in London. My son, who attended the equally-ambitious Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, DC and the Berklee School of Music in Boston is now an Emmy-award-winning sound designer in Hollywood. I have been supporting the performing arts for a very long time.

To those who know me well, none of this is surprising. The arts run deep in my family. My father’s family were musicians for as long as anyone could remember. I, myself, was a dancer before I was a visual artist. So when I heard that teacher talk about the future, my heart sang. I wanted to help that future become real.

Tonight, I attended a benefit cabaret and auction for the Theatre Lab. I wrote about their Life Stories project a few weeks ago, and tonight’s event reminded me of the excitement I felt when I heard about the work they are doing with people in homeless shelters, prisons, assisted living facilities, and other places where people feel marginalized and hopeless. Although no one said those words, as I watched talented, hard-working young people transform themselves into Cosette from Les Miserables, Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Puck, and other familiar and unfamiliar characters, I once again felt myself to be in the presence of the future of the American theater. And when Deb Gottesman asked us to support Theatre Lab’s work financially, it felt right and natural to make a bigger donation than I had planned to when I walked into the room. 

On the way home, I thought about how the arts have the capacity to open not only hearts and minds, but wallets. Part of my job as the Director of the Center for the Arts and Religion is to raise money so that we can continue our work, but I have struggled to find the right words to explain to potential donors why they should support a program in the arts in theological education. Tonight, at last, I think that I have found those words. Let me try them out on you:

If the Word of God is more than mere words can convey, then the church needs the arts in order to help people experience and express God’s life-giving, astonishing Word. The arts bring scripture to life, make worship vibrant, and keep people awake and aware of the world around them. The arts are the future of the church, and we at the Center for the Arts and Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary are providing the skills and resources for that future. Please give.