http://cmalliance.ca/theatre-as-worship-p3030.php

I have a whole lot of thoughts to add to it, and maybe even argue a bit with it.  These are thoughts are pretty loose, and I should do a lot more research and source-finding to back these thoughts up.  But hey, this is a blog!

The origins of theatre are in worship.  Theatre was born out of ceremony, and it arose out of community expressions of faith.  The first known “plays” were enactments of harvest legends, fertility rites, etc.  Western theatre largely extends from the Greeks, which at the time were worship experiences.  They were community proclamations/exhortations to the gods on the state of society, etc.  (forgive my very loose summation of theatre development here!)  But obviously, as theatre began to formalize, it began to take different shapes, and its artfulness began to surpass its function.  However, the CORE of theatre, in my opinion, remains rooted in spiritual experience.  That doesn’t mean it is worship, but it means that it arises out of the impulse to worship. The other thing that ties theatre to worship is that theatre is not storytelling, it is storyBEING.  It is enactment or incarnation in thought, words and action.

The bottom line for worship is expressing love and adoration for God through thoughts, words and actions.  A worship service is supposed to help us get there, I suppose. Theatrical techniques of guiding thought – soft music in the contemplative moment, loud singing in the celebratory one, visual beauty, etc. are used in a worship service even on the most basic level.  The use of “script” to guide the process – liturgy or any pre-set form.  The words we say and hear are meant to lead us to God, and in many churches, people do things as well.  Catholics and Anglicans kneel down to adore – evangelicals tend to close their eyes and raise their hands, etc.   So, in that respect, all the actions we do in a worship context  are theatrical, because theatre is humans thinking, saying and doing.

But “theatre” implies an audience.  A moment of theatre requires an action and a viewer (thank you Peter Brook).  So, I think that’s the big difference between worship and theatre in my opinion.  If church becomes theatre, then it is dead because you have some people worshipping, and some people witnessing, but not participating in it. If worship is happening, no one is outside the “performing” circle.  No one is in the audience except God.

Besides, as a theatre person, it’s very very difficult for me to adore God while I despise the hokey theatrics in a worship service.  I don’t want theatre in worship, I just want to worship. The theatricality in worship ought to be rendered beautifully and with integrity. As for the pageant – I love watching children learn to express themselves through theatre.  But, I can’t say I’ve seen a pageant that has real integrity.  I’ve seen a lot of slap-together cute kid-parades.

But, I can definitely love God in a beautiful moment of theatre.  When theatre is good, my thoughts turn to God for sure. As a theatre person, I need to do my best work in order to bring my faith and art together.  That doesn’t mean adopting a Christian pose, or having Jesus in a play, it means creating the play with integrity.  What makes that effort “Christian”? Well, it’s not just that I happen to be one.  I don’t think it’s accurate to say that because I am a Christian, all my work can be called “Christian” work.  I believe for my work to be called, “Christian”, it needs to arise out of the Christian community.  It’s not enough for me to do a decent production of Moliere and say, “this is a Christian production because I did it with integrity”.  I think that the work needs to address core spiritual experience, and be a voice of the Christian community or speak to the Christian community.

I hope that this reconciliation allows for new life in the Christian theatre community.

http://www.christianweek.org/stories.php?id=1560

There is a community that lies at the intersection of my Christian and my artist communities.  It occupies a small space.  It doesn’t fully belong to one or the other, but remains in the tension that comes from being on the edge of both. I think it’s a place that many Christian artists share, we just don’t talk about it very much.  I look one way or the other in any given project:  I either speak into the Christian community from the edge of art and culture, or I speak into the artist community from the Christian perspective.  I have a kind of intentional disconnection when I do this.  I turn my back on one community in order to speak to the other.  As a theatre person, it drives me crazy to always have my back to half the audience.

This uncomfortable space is a location all of it’s own.  And, if I can speak out of this community – this awkward, intersection position where there are no hard and fast rules, I can actually start to speak to both communities with honesty, truth and integrity at once.

People who go to church are consumers of/participants in contemporary culture.  Christians go to Hollywood movies, for example.  I can’t tell you the number of times I have been in the company of evangelical men who talk with zeal about having seen the latest shoot-em-up action film.  Yet, get these guys in a church setting, in the sanctuary or even in the auditorium in the church basement, and they are suddenly horrified at the slightest inappropriate word or idea.  In this context, they are in their church community, and the cultural rules are different than when they are hanging out with friends on Saturday night.  The usual church response is that these men should be more discerning about their cultural choices.  Because of that response, they will compartmentalize, and be “appropriate”  in church community but not real, because the fact is, they like shoot-em-up action movies.  It gives the air of hypocrisy, one of the main distasteful observations of those who criticize religion. So the questions arise – should we be fully “in” church culture?  Should we turn away from contemporary “secular” culture? Close our eyes to it?  Stop going to movies, only listen to “safe” music, etc? Or, should we bring secular culture into the church?  What about “sacred space”?

As a culture-maker, it becomes doubly hard, especially if  I produce work for a church audience.  That’s because if I speak to a church audience,  I’m not actually talking to real people.  I’m talking to their church personae.  I have to be appropriate, but not necessarily real.  In this context, it’s actually more desirable to be false as long as it’s not inappropriate.  That’s a crushing blow to art that has any meaning at all.

That’s what it often feels like in the church context as an artist.  It’s painful.  It rubs against all my instincts.  It makes me want to run from the church, vowing never to sing another trashy worship song that doesn’t dig in to where I really am, but skips along with platitudes.

On the other side of the road is the artist community.  So many artists I speak to long for work that is real, engaging, and deep.  They want a forum, an audience, that will go deep with them, that will allow artistic work to change them. To be open to truth, to be open to discovery.  But, there are conditions to that discovery, and there are cultural norms there too.  Spirituality is OK as long as it is formless.  Yet, many artists I know are tired of doing “gigs” and jobs that scratch the surface of their talent and their intellect.  They are looking for something more, something that matters. The Christian faith has gifts to offer them.  Gifts of hope, redemption, forgiveness, unconditional love.

At this intersection, this uncomfortable crossroads, is where we’re pitching our tent at The Arts Engine.  We’re going to hang around here, speak from here, and see what happens.

It’s going to mean that we will be asking the church to dare to open up, and allow us to create from a place of honesty and truth and integrity.  That might mean speaking to real people instead of their church personae.

It’s going to mean that we will be asking artists to dare to go deep with the church.  To reach in, and stop being pedantic and regular.  And, it’s also going to mean that we will be daring artists to actually work through  and with  the church, so that this community can grow.

My instincts tell me that if we stick to the challenge the edges will blur, and we may actually  exist in an artistic faith community that celebrates both spirit and fully realized art. The hope is that this work will transcend the boundaries that being a community creates.

It’s our own fault.

As artists, we find ourselves second-guessing our instincts.  We pull back from letting the work be truly itself, presupposing that the church won’t approve.  I think we need to be bold.  Of course, some individuals in the church won’t like it.  It wouldn’t be worthwhile art if everybody liked it all the time.  But, we need to make honest work.  So that we can say, regardless of the reaction, that we are being true to our call and that our work has integrity.

Here are some quotes from Dorothy Sayers’ essay “Why Work?”, from her collection,  ”Letters to a Diminished Church”:

“The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly–but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth. No piety in the worker will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its own technique is a living lie.
Yet in Her own buildings, in Her own ecclesiastical art and music, in Her hymns and prayers, in Her sermons and in Her little books of devotion, the Church will tolerate, or permit a pious intention to excuse work so ugly, so pretentious, so tawdry and twaddling, so insincere and insipid, so bad as to shock and horrify any decent draftsman.
And why? Simply because She has lost all sense of the fact that the living and eternal truth is expressed in work only so far as that work is true in itself, to itself, to the standards of its own technique. She has forgotten that the secular vocation is sacred. Forgotten that a building must be good architecture before it can be a good church; that a painting must be well painted before it can be a good sacred picture; that work must be good work before it can call itself God’s work. (139-140)”

As artists who are Christian, we need to “make good tables”.  And that means we need to do a better job of making bold work that is honest and fully realized.

The creative team is always amazed at how this show keeps growing,  both in it’s execution and in the way that the script presents itself anew each time we do it.

We have a new trailer for the show:

Touring into different spaces means that we create the performance environment each time we do it.  We can’t predict all the challenges the each venue presents.  We’re always adapting to the situation to make the show the best it can be in a particular environment.

We love touring!!

I am hoping to use this blog space to provide information on the developments of The Arts Engine as we work to build this exciting company that powers professional Christian artists and arts projects into action. Officially speaking,  we connect artists with communities to inspire, challenge and encourage the world around them through meaningful arts experiences.

But this blog is going to be a lot more than the official word.

We have a lot of projects in the planning stages, and are just about ready to start getting the word out about them.  Along the way, I am going to need a lot of help and support from artists, audiences, churches and organizations to make the dream of an international, thriving, diverse, Christian artist movement a reality.

I hope you will join me, and the core of participating artists and communities in the journey!