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A new work on the New York stage by the sublimely gifted composer, performer, and high priestess of modern-day ritual Heather Christian is always a cause for celebration. But in the midst of this winter of our discontent, her latest piece, the ravishing Terce: A Practical Breviary, now playing at the Space at Irondale in Fort Greene in Brooklyn, feels almost like a benediction. Described by Christian as a “wild riff” on a 9 a.m. Catholic mass that addresses the Holy Spirit through “the lens of the Divine Feminine,” it is the second of a planned eight such flights of liturgical fancy based on what are known as Breviaries, masses that have been sung at specific times of day by cloistered nuns and monks since the 11th Century.
The first, Prime, tied to the 6 a.m. service, was performed as a podcast under the auspices of Playwrights Horizons at the height of lockdown in 2020. Still to come, Christian says, are a film with a live score, either a virtual reality production or an extravagant performance for an audience of one, a rock concert, a concerto, a dance piece, and a pop-up concert at a train station. “Since the pandemic, there seems to be an appetite for this kind of material,” she told me from her house in Beacon, NY. “We ve all gone a little more introspective, become more comfortable with being uncomfortable, with stewing in existential feelings, and with questioning how we re living.”
Idiosyncratic takes on Catholic rituals and gorgeously eclectic reinventions of liturgical music, fueled by a deeply personal gnostic vision, are Christian’s bread and butter. In 2017’s Animal Wisdom, at the Bushwick Starr, she gave us an intimate portrait of the (literal) ghosts of her Mississippi childhood, culminating in a 20-minute Requiem Mass in pitch blackness, inviting us to both connect with and let go of the spirits haunting our lives. In her 2022 Oratorio For Living Things, she used the voices of twelve singers to turn an Off-Broadway theater into a sacred space for contemplating our collective fate on earth and place in the universe, with music so ethereally beautiful that it brought many in the audience to tears (reader, I was one of them).
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In Terce, produced by HERE as part of the annual Prototype Festival, Christian leads what she calls “a community choir of 30-plus caregivers and makers” (plus instrumentalists) in song, dance, and stylized movement, freely mashing up her interpretations of the original Latin texts and the words of the 11th century Benedictine abbess Hildegard von Bingen, Julian of Norwich, and Robin Wall Kimmerer with her own gnomic prayers, set to music that ranges from the simple polyphony of Medieval organum to the lush harmonies of gospel and ecstatic rhythms of soul and funk. “I m a musical omnivore,” Christian told me. “I wasn’t consciously drawing on any influences. I was sort of tipping my hat, intuitively, to different genre containers because they felt like the right round and feminine expressions at that moment.”
Though Christian’s conception of the divine, which incorporates Buddhist psychology, Sufi mysticism, and indigenous creation myths, for a start, may be more catholic than Catholic, she nevertheless continues to return to the rituals of the Church in her work. “It s my first spiritual language, and even though I m not a practicing Catholic, I do feel more at liberty to play inside those structures and reimagine them,” she said. “And I m trying to fill a void. Living a life in good conscience means something completely different than it did when all of these texts were written, and I don t feel that the church is doing a good job of evolving with us as a society. So, as a human just knocking around trying to be alive, I feel a deep need to do my own solo investigation into those things. And it’s an open question, right? Like, how do I convince myself that there is a purpose to my being here? And how do I convince myself that the smallness of my life has any impact at all? I cannot be the only person who asks these questions. I m just verbalizing them and trying to make them more palatable with music.”
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From the opening moments of the evening, when Christian–elfin and blond, with an electric presence and an almost other-worldly voice–sings, “You and me and both our mothers opened up the bottle, when we opened up our stories carrying blood to somewhere else,” it’s clear that this is not Our Father’s worship service. It offers a vision of a feminine divine that is both transcendent and mundane, intimately connected to nature and obliged to clean the house. Under the inventive direction of Keenan Tyler Oliphant, Christian and Co. move in fluid and shifting circles beneath a crisscrossing net of ropes (designed by Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin) that evokes both the interconnectedness of all things and the snares of living in the world. They supplicate themselves, they do the Boogaloo and the Monkey to a funky rendition of Psalm 39 (Christian brought her mother Darlene, a former go-go dancer, to Brooklyn to teach the ensemble her moves), they break out dust cloths and vacuum cleaners and get to work. “If I could point at people who I would say are divinely feminine,” Christian said, “it would be my caretaker friends who teach Special Ed. and stay late after work to make sure that that one kid gets it right, and are also raising their own families and remembering to pick up the groceries that night for dinner, and keeping the house as tidy as they possibly can, while also being the listening ear for their friends and really being present with every single thing that they have to do that is disparate, every day. I think that is divinely feminine. I think that is a holy thing. And that s a skill set and a use of labor and attention that is worth uplifting–and worth reminding ourselves that the fallout from that is real.”
Though Christian’s work, as a rule, tends to defy easy categorization, she does have in the works a musical based on Madeline L’Engle’s beloved and subversive young person’s fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time. With its story of a thirteen-year-old girl’s traveling through space and time in a cosmic battle between good and evil and its universal conception of the divine (Jesus, Gandhi, and the Buddha all get shout-outs), it would seem to be squarely in Christian’s wheelhouse. “I read the book maybe seventeen times when I was in fourth grade, and I very much saw myself in Meg Murray,” she said. “I mean, Meg is too much, right? She feels too much, she s too angry, she’s too sad—just too, too, too. Everybody thinks so. She doesn t know how to blend in. She doesn t know how to, like, be cool, or be calm, or do any of that. And subsequently, her being too much and feeling too much—the strength of her anger—is what ends up saving the planet.” Christian laughed, adding, “Wow, I resonated with that.”
