Begbie, Jeremy. Sounding The Depths: Theology Through The Arts.
London: SCM Press, 2003. (ISBN#0334028701)
Of course it would be the Brits – Anglicans, specifically – who would lead the way in bold commissions of new works from artists who are Christians. Equally unsurprising would be their thorough and thoughtful approach to exploring the concomitant goal “to discover and to demonstrate ways in which the arts can contribute towards the renewal of Christian theology in the contemporary world” (p3) by effecting collaborative “pods” for the process, comprised of artists of the stature of composer James MacMillan, playwright Nigel Forde, sculptor Jonathan Clarke, composer Paul Spicer and theologians of renown such as Rowan Williams, N. T. Wright and Jeremy Begbie. None of this, however, makes it any less impressive.
Set up in 1997 at the Centre for Advanced Religious and Theological Studies in the Faculty of Divinity of the University of Cambridge (and who, but the Brits would have such long titles?), Theology Through The Arts (TTA) not only resulted in four substantial works – including Parthenogenesis (a musical theatre piece inspired by a WWII myth of a young woman, 9 months after an air raid injury, giving birth to a daughter whose genetic profile matches her own), Till Kingdom Come (a play exploring issues of faith, politics and war set in the historical time of Cromwell), The Way of Life (a dramatic new sculpture installed in Ely Cathedral) and Easter Oratorio (borrowing Bach’s form to pick up where the Passion leaves off, with text from John 20 and 21, intermixing solos with traditional Easter hymns) – but yielded Sounding the Depths, a chronicle in the words of the participants and audiences, which reveals the challenges and insights the process afforded.
And they are rich and numerous.
Some, such as Rowan Williams’ remark about message in his essay, “Making It Strange: Theology in Other(s’) Words,” are applicable to any art:
And this needs saying as well: art, whether Christian or not, can’t properly begin with a message and then seek for a vehicle. Its roots lie, rather, in the single story or metaphor or configuration of sound or shape which requires attention and development from the artist. In the process of that development, we find meanings we had not suspected; but if we try to begin with the meanings, they will shrink to the scale of what we already understand; whereas creative activity opens up what we did not understand and perhaps will not fully understand even when the actual work of creation is done. (p28)
Similarly, Alistair McFadyen and John Inge discuss the limitations of weight-bearing walls and proximity of other objects for the placement of sculpture as “contingencies and peculiarities” which often stymie and frustrate the artist but, upon consideration, work to free and intensify the work. Most artists have experienced this type of embracing the obstacles. But, characteristic of all the essays in the book, McFadyen and Inge open up the point into deeper theological truth.
Is this not precisely the way that God is at work in creation and salvation – working with particularities, with the integrity of creation and creatures as they are and have become through the contingencies of their histories, with what we have made of ourselves? The contingencies and particularities of creaturely integrity (what we have made of ourselves, what we actually are) are not regarded by God as limitations, to be cast aside in order to start afresh. Rather, God draws the particularities and contingencies of lived, historical existences towards their fulfillment, in an intensification of what they (and therefore we) truly are. God works with our particularities, without compromising our integrity. And this involves far more than the sort of respect for difference and distinction that we generally think of in interpersonal relationships, so fearful are we that intimate relation will compromise integrity: creaturely integrity is not only respected; it is intensified. As the theme of creation runs through the Hebrew Scriptures, it is remarkable how frequently it is intimately and intrinsically associated with the notion of blessing. Blessing is presented as the fulfilling and intensifying of creaturely particularity. (p152)
It is indeed arresting to read a theologian of N. T. Wright’s stature and depth of thought write,
If all theology, all sermons, had to be set to music, our teaching and
preaching would not only be more mellifluous; it might also
approximate more closely to God’s truth, the truth revealed in and
as the Word made flesh, crucified and risen. (p210-11)
Or note Rowan Williams’ musings on the power of collaborative re-imagining:
I wonder, incidentally, if this is not something we ought to be seeing in the process of the composition of the Gospels; not a story repeated, nor a story invented to make a point, as the more mechanically minded critics might argue, but a set of narratives constantly being retold, and altered in the retelling because of what the very process of telling opens up, shows or makes possible. (p28)
Ultimately, Sounding The Depths leaves the reader with two profound impressions. First, within the body of Christ, artistic work at this theological and creative level is much needed and the dialogue it inspires is sorely lacking, at the academic or congregational levels.
Second, the loss is substantial. Playwright Nigel Forde summarizes it this way:
Perhaps the most important thing that Theology Through the Arts has done – and is doing – is to give authority and credence to what artists have understood for a long time and what the Church itself seems to have forgotten: that the imagination is capable. It can reveal truths that no other discipline has found a way to countenance. It is not a vestigial organ like the tonsils or the appendix that may be removed without harm. True understanding, as opposed to mere knowledge, is a work of the imagination and we neglect it at our peril. (p69)
Beholding The Glory: Incarnation Through The Arts. Grand Rapids,
MI: Baker Academic, 2000. (ISBN#0801022444)
An earlier project of Theology Through The Arts (see above), Beholding The Glory opens with an essay by Trevor Hart laying a general foundation for the themes of imagination and incarnation explored in all those which follow, noting first the frequent suspicion with which Christians approach the arts, drawing parallels with the Prometheus story.
The aspiration to participate in some sense in a creativity akin to God’s
original act is, in other words, inherently rebellious. Its illicit products
are not what they appear to be and should be handled with caution. (p6)
But he goes on to underscore that the biblical image of Word is inherently “dialogical,” intended for human respondent. He argues forcefully for the inseparability of flesh and spirit, manifested in the incarnation, and that the very physicality of Christ’s coming is our gateway to God – as well as imagination.
That God has graciously placed himself in our midst for touching, hearing
and seeing means that this same “physical” and historical manifestation
must always be the place where we put ourselves in our repeated efforts
to know him again and ever more fully. (p24)
From here follows a series of essays on literature, poetry, dance, icons, sculpture and music in light of the incarnation, written by a mixture of artists, academics and clergy. While exploring his or her particular discipline, each offers shimmering insights into both the artistic process and the way it reveals truth. Malcolm Guite, discussing literature, notes:
The movement from initial vision to the creation of story, poem and play
is a movement form the abstract to the concrete, from the timeless to
time, from spirit to flesh…Of course, once we are engaged in this
struggle to discover that, miraculously, the movement is also the other
way – that the particularity, the “thisness” of the medium with which we
struggle, has something new to teach us about the “abstract truth” we
were in the first instance trying to embody. (p32)
Another compelling example is Lynn Aldrich’s description of how sculpture “testifies to an extravagant ‘purposefulness’ beyond its particular limitations” (p102). This dissection of the visceral experience of “volumetric material” is at once a revelation of human limitation and a celebration of incarnational resonance.
While the “icon controversy” offers some insight into the difficulty Christians have had with the portrayal of Christ onstage over the years, no essay attempts to address the live dramatic performance – rather ironic since theatre is, arguably, the most incarnational of all the arts in terms of real presence, of actually making word flesh.
Sounding The Depths, nevertheless, delivers exactly the kind of challenging and provocative reflection more Christians should be bringing to their art – even if it tends to leave a goodly number of those in the church pews behind.
Bogart, Anne. And Then You Act: Making Art In An Unpredictable World. NY:
Routledge Press, 2007. (ISBN#9780415411424)
Few contemporary theatre directors create work today as compelling as Anne Bogart; even fewer write about their process as inspiringly. The worst that can be said about her new book, And Then You Act, is that it repeats some concepts developed in her earlier work, A Director Prepares. Trust me, it bears repeating. The best – and I do not fear it is over-reaching to say so – is that it confirms Bogart as among the top artist/thinkers of our time.
No one seems to be saying what Bogart asserts with a good degree of urgency:
“In a culture where daily human hopes have shrunk to the myriad opiates of self-centered satisfaction, art is more necessary and powerful than ever.” (4) Why?
Art, and especially live, human-centered theatre, asks the tough questions but rather than fracture, it offers the potential to unite and connect. And this, according to Bogart, demands the highest standards, tremendous rigor and top quality so much of theatre is missing.
The overall theme of the book is summarized in Bogart’s subtitle, “Making Art In An Unpredictable World.” It is organized in eight short essays that Bogart calls “tools for action,” including context, articulation, intention, attention, magnetism, attitude, content and time. But even through Bogart’s insightful analysis and often very personal reflection on these critical concepts, a fierce passion for serious and careful work, taking risks, failing and trying again emerges and calls out to the committed theatre artist.
Frequently, Bogart returns to some bedrock ideas that strongly echo foundational Christian principles. She is a staunch believer in the mutuality of collaboration and the power of words.
A rehearsal can be a mutual attempt to find something for which
neither party has any easy answer. The actor’s job in the rehearsal
room can be to articulate rather than to please. Let us examine the
way we speak in the creative process. What are the words that will
engender a collaborative, nonhierarchical, creative environment? (24-5)
Bogart understands the value of discomfort and pain for the artist and refuses to back away from it but encourages artists to turn it to good rather than allow it to drain their spirits and ultimately kill their creativity.
Participation is the deliberate act of undergoing. When you are
willing to go through something difficult, the experience will
shape your life and form a basis for real understanding and
empathy. The general and cultural lack of willingness to go
through anything difficult is why American is missing out on
most of what life has to offer at the moment. (79)
Bogart’s concepts are both visionary and practical. Her love for creating theatre is palpable on each page. Her call to excellence for artist and audience sake is both uncompromising and filled with grace. And though those of us who have experienced her theatre know that Anne Bogart’s work only serves to confirm her words, one finishes the book with a firm sense that whether we agree with her or not ultimately does not matter. As the words she quotes of T. S. Eliot affirm, the high calling of the goal is what does:
And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate – but there is no competition –
There is only the flight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again; and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. (29)
Ford, David. Self And Salvation: Being Transformed. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press, 1999. (ISBN#0521426162)
Hare, David. Obedience, Struggle & Revolt: Lectures On Theatre. London:
Faber and Faber, 2005.
With the recently published revelation that Arthur Miller had a son he institutionalized, rarely spoke of and never visited, all manner of speculation is being raised about the impact this had on his plays, their strong sense of guilt and uneasy morality. This simplistic and often revisionistic critical urge may explain why some playwrights say so little about their work – Samuel Beckett, for example. (Others, admittedly, write far too much; G. B. Shaw comes to mind.) In his collection of lectures, Obedience, Struggle & Revolt, David Hare approaches a wide array of topics through the lens of theatre, the world he knows best. Hare, writer of the recent and widely produced Stuff Happens (imagining the events leading to the Iraq War based on public transcripts, speeches and papers), reveals no new information that offers insight into the reading or production of his plays. But his keen intelligence and articulate style make for an entertaining read and enrich one’s appreciation for Hare’s passion, precision and political sensibilities.
Understandably, Hare begins by attacking right at the crossroads of politics and theatre, the media, and decries its flaccid intellect, its massive equalizing and its “rareness of uninterrupted speech.” Instead, he argues for the lecture format. This may sound elitist, initially, but at its core is a confirmed civility.
You might even say, then, that the lecture is attractive as a form precisely because a lecture so resembles a play. Critics love to reiterate the uninteresting idea that theatre depends on conflict. But actually it doesn’t. It depends on engagement – engagement between the action on stage and the audience which attends. Screaming and shouting don’t make a play. Nor do swordfights. Lectures and plays are alike in relying for their true vitality on the richness of the interaction between the performance itself and the thoughts and feelings created by the unspoken reaction in the room . . . There is a contract. In return for the audience’s presence, the guest is expected to have done a certain amount of work. The effort put into thinking, is, in some wonderfully proportionate transaction of courtesy, rewarded for the concentration with which it is received. (p5)
While Hare is unabashedly political – indeed, sees it as the mandatory artistic response of an engaged playwright, his politics are rooted in a deep and insightful understanding of human nature. As he writes from his own experience, he offers some surprising insight to others.
The drawback of all intellectual and social migration – of journeys so many of us now make across class, across country and across culture – is that they engender contempt. Contempt becomes the poisonous carbon monoxide manufactured by the speed of your own progress. In some cases, it may be directed at those you left behind or at the environment that produced you. It may be towards yourself: you may hate yourself for the fact that you want to advance. You may even direct your contempt at the ease with which talking any old rubbish will allow you a passport to a society in which ideas are not examined too closely. And contempt, above all, may become the most convenient way of disposing of old experience, so that you may once again press on to new. (p18-19)
Among Hare’s most inspired lectures is one titled, “Why Fabulate?” In it he argues for the urgent need for good stories well told precisely because we have grown weary of the pablum we are served every day or our 21st century, Western lives.
The careless reiterations of reality with which we are hourly bombarded, far from threatening the artist, to my mind offer him or her an increased and special opportunity. It is precisely because there are so very many stories being told that audiences need to be refreshed. Why fabulate? Because if we do not, everyone else will. We must fabulate because we all, as spectators, need to be brought up short and reminded that the lowest levels of fabulation, the formulaic levels which prevail everywhere, as much in half-baked novels as on half-baked television, do not, in fact, tell us very much about reality, or about ourselves. Bad storytelling, conventional storytelling, storytelling propelled by the doctrinal rules of UCLA screenwriting classes – Reel 10: hero confronts apparently insuperable problem; Reel 11: hero overcomes apparently insuperable problem – serves only to dull us. Such storytelling reduces the world and makes it less than it is. How much more desperately, then, we need our sense of wonder restored, given that so much in modern fabulation conspires to steal it away. Science, which effortlessly opens minds and exposes them to new ideas, will rob the arts of their audience if we are content to leave fiction clattering mindlessly along tracks it has traversed a thousand times before. (p81-2)
For an invited lecture at Westminster, Hare includes some strong criticism of the church. He gets caught up, like so many other liberals, on the notion of God allowing evil for the ultimate sake of good. Yet even here, Hare is even-handed about people of faith. When researching his play on the modern Church of England, Hare met many remarkable people giving their lives in service to others. What surprisingly troubles him with some is their timidity about overt discussion of Christ.
The experience of meeting these good souls left me confused, because although I liked them so much personally – liked them, I suspect, far more than I would ever like their fundamentalist brethren – it did seem to me, as an outsider, that they were perhaps overlooking some essential point about the Christian religion. If Christ did rise from the dead then, call me a fanatic, but I think you probably do have to tell people about it. The inner-city priest’s conviction that the poor, for some reason, don’t need to be brought up to speed on the news does seem to be vaguely insulting. The Christian faith, after all, is based on the idea of intervention. Mankind is bowling along, following his own sinful ways, and then once and for all – for reasons which his Son then seeks to explain to us, but essentially because God has begun to despair of us – the physical rules of the universe are suspended and God intervenes. I cannot see how if the facts of Christ’s life are true, they do not change everything. (p226)
After a career trying to shake up the English-speaking public’s sensibilities to inequality, injustice, poverty, crime and war as well as the be-numbing infection of our contemporary media, David Hare might be expected to be irreversibly cynical, appallingly despairing or just plain exhausted from the struggle – particularly since getting plays produced on these topics is difficult at best, even for a recognized writer. But one leaves this book, instead, with the unmistakable impression that, though much remains to be done, the value of the goal makes this playwright, at least, all the more passionate about the pursuit.
The day when art is felt to be needed is as far away as ever, not because we all produce too much, but because we all produce too much which is reductive…The world is not tired. Our reactions to the world are not tired. What becomes tired is the deadly habitude of our descriptions of the world. The artist exists only to externalise what we all do internally anyway. By making the descriptions new, we do not create alternative worlds. We remind people of the breathtaking beauty of the original. (p86)
Noll, Mark. The Scandal Of The Evangelical Mind. Grand Rapids: Wm. B.
Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 1955. (ISBN#0802841805)
Steiner, George. Real Presences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
(ISBN#0226772349 )
Turner, Steve. Imagine: A Vision For Christians In The Arts. Colorado Springs,
CO: InterVarsity Press, 2001. (ISBN#0830822917)
This is the book that would have helped me tremendously as a college student trying to find a way to balance what seemed like the competing calls of faith and theatre. Though Turner’s later image of five concentric circles for Christians in the arts is neither fully developed nor memorable, his addressing of every major controversial issue raised by the arts is spot-on. For instance, citing Philippians 4:8, Turner tellingly notes:
This verse, probably more than any other, has been used to deter
Christians from the arts. It has been interpreted as meaning only
look at, listen to or read things which are noble, right, pure, lovely,
admirable, excellent or praiseworthy. Yet this would preclude us
from passing our eyes over much of the descriptions of impurity
and awfulness in the Bible. (40)
Turner gives solid and succinct historical background for the separation of the church and the arts, clearly elucidating why Catholics have been so much more successful at cultivating great artists than Protestants. He laments the unnecessary destruction caused by the sharp division of secular and sacred. And while he touches on all the arts, Turner is strongest when addressing music. Turner’s longing for the powerful voice of strong and innovative artists working from a Christian perspective is palpable.
Perhaps his most insightful analysis comes toward the end of the book when Turner discusses the tensions of artists and community.
When it comes to church there is an obvious conflict for the
constitutional outsider who doesn’t like belonging to organiza-
tions, hates the routine of having to be in the same place at the
same time every week and finds it hard to fraternize with
people who “don’t understand.” Yet lack of fellowship with a
recognized body of Christians is the most common cause of
artists loosening the moorings of their faith and then
eventually becoming ineffective. (121)
He rightfully calls the artist who is a Christian to humble himself or herself in church community to avoid the danger of falling into an individualized religion, a very real and present danger for any committed artist.
Wells, Samuel. Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics. Grand Rapids,
MI: Brazos Press, 2006. (ISBN#9781587430718)
It is important to note that I come to this book as a theatre artist, not as a philosopher or theologian. And Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics, is first and foremost – as it indicates – a book on Christian ethics in which the dynamics and practice of theatrical improvisation become a compelling and cogent illustration of critical principles. As Wells emphatically underscores, noting the Duke of Wellington’s famous reflection, “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton,” daily habits are the practical ground on which ethical character is built. And those habits, for the Christian, can be greatly informed by practices regularly incorporated by the theatrical form of improvisation – for instance, assessing (and often reversing) status, accepting rather than blocking and incorporating gifts. Utterly refreshing in particular is the notion of play Wells argues for in Christian community – the complete commitment that accommodates all the wildest circumstances of life with an absolute joy that recognizes the end is ultimately a happy one.
