In Development: Liturgy for Longing

 "Liturgy for Longing" will be a solo theatrical performance work of 75-120 minutes that explores longing through song, poetry, movement, performance, and audience interaction. There will be one invited preview and four performances at Beacon Performing Arts Center with 12 audience members per show.

Over the past year, I created small artworks to process my grief. When looking at them together, I realized that something of them needed to be shared; not necessarily these specific fragments, but the sense, feeling, and purpose underneath. 

The liturgy came to me as the perfect framework for this piece because it is designed to connect human beings with the sacred and each other: in longing, what we desire is connection. This framework also fits because it brings together different elements to make a whole and involves everyone present as participants. 

This performance work will be a series of movements. Each movement will invite the audience to experience one aspect of longing in isolation to more fully embrace and understand it. The movements will include: pre-show, invocation, confession, lament, baptism, transformation, hope, connection, and sending. These movements will not be announced or projected to the audience, but will be used to shape and write the work, and so, subconsciously, felt. 

My structure is an hourglass, moving from open to closed to open. In preshow, we gather as ourselves in the hall. Upon entering, the audience sets the space by removing their shoes at my direction, setting me apart as the leader and creating boundaries. From movements invocation through transformation, the audience and I will gradually be separated, and more formal roles and structures will emerge. In the center of the work, I will be cut off from the audience through light and lack of interaction as they become witnesses to my submerging myself in a pool of water as a sacrifice/death/baptism. 

In the section on hope, the hourglass will open again and the audience will become a part of finding a resolution.