A Visceral Nature: Reflections on creating to Britten’s A Boy Was Born
Photo: Craig van den Bosch
Christianity has moved through my life in various forms and frequencies. Although I do not define my being as a Christian, I continue to (re)TURN in the wonder and possibility of the Gospel story. What captures my heart in the mysterious love, beauty and hope in the Jesus story, is within the idea of Psalm 104, that “the face of the earth is renewed.” As it is fair to say that what most often confronts and deeply pains me throughout my life has been the overwhelming amount of destruction, injustice, disease and suffering on this earth. (As I edit this writing again in 2020 the potency of a pandemic, racial trauma, and climate change consequences are having a reckoning regarding warring, white-supremacist, western dominant, mind-over-body, disembodied from ecological health movements of our species over the last hundreds of years.) What I reject about Christianity is dualism, original sin, and separation between human-earth-nature and the divine that descends from Platonic Greek philosophy.
In 2011, my husband, three daughters and I planted a small red-branched Beni Kawa Japanese Maple amidst the unkempt tangle of our yard in our recently purchased first home. One dark, cold January 2012 day during a rare snowfall in Seattle––as I was stuck at home and feeling the weight of life I often experienced since childhood––an extraordinary insight of transcendent beauty momentarily transported me away from dark heaviness into a vast lightness and feeling of peace. I was witnessing from my kitchen window the soft covering of snow, dappling the hard winter ground, covering all the dead weeds and invasive English Ivy that seek to entangle and choke, illuminating the beauty of this small tree my family and I planted: Branches red and alive! Immediately my imagination took over and I was making connections between this tree and the Christ, this god-man story who births forth with life during the darkest barren season. Illuminated by the celebration of miracle and mystery––The Magi/King/Wise men––of light and air; these magical, wind-blown, star led snowflakes, connecting East with West! Our relationship to nature revealed as heaven on earth now. The elements of earth, air, water, fire essentially our nature.
Was it serendipity or divine intervention when the opportunity came about to work with Benjamin Britten’s A Boy Was Born?
This dance is not a literal telling of a special boy that was born, but a personal journey into what this boy might possibly mean.
The dance begins with Jesu; As Thou Art Our Savior and is inspired by the element of earth and the ideas found in the poetry of St Hildegard of Bingen. She was ahead of her time with a creation-centered theology as a poet-mystic and a sort of environmentalist who wrote about the life giving and greening-glory of ‘viriditas’: The Love that brings “Life to all life…root of all things.”
Led by light and movement of air, in The Three Kings, the three dancers journey through a triangular labyrinth toward center, bringing together the fullness of the space.
In The Bleak Mid-Winter, transformation, the element of water, and the ‘Mother’ who brings forth life and bears our destructive pain gives us a moment of reflective gravity.
Noel!, a complicated and inspiring final movement, opens with the swirl of winter-blustery, snowy air and the introduction of fire as ‘Our King’, danced by a woman––not a literal Jesus figure, but the possibility of that great burning love and Christ Kingly-Queenly magnificence in us all.
The Mother returns again making way for the preparation of celebration, but before the final glorious communal dance of life, a moment is given again to illuminate the mercy and compassion of divine life-giving-love exchanged between human and the divine within. Ever renewing and unfolding the rhythms of being Earth.
“Someday, after mastering* the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
* “Mastery” as defined by loving-wisdom in relationship with the winds, tides, and gravity for a divinely greater good. Not mastery as domination and control.