Choreographing sacred songs while ignoring their content: Cultural misappropriation in zoe | juniper's CLEAR AND SWEET

(Note: One from the vaults: a revised version of a previously unpublished review, commissioned for a 2016 research project in dance criticism at Elon University, of zoe | juniper's controversial work, CLEAR & SWEET, presented by Carolina Performing Arts.)  

CLEAR & SWEET

★ 1/2 (out of five)

zoe | juniper
Carolina Performing Arts

Memorial Hall, Chapel Hill

October 5, 2016

Review by Byron Woods

What do we ultimately make of the faiths of our ancestors, our regions, our cultures? Since none of us selects our initial religious orientations – either the ones into which we’re born or the lack thereof – such questions frequently emerge during adolescence and young adulthood, when we interrogate earlier choices others have made on our behalf and their impact on our identities. Sometimes the answers are immediate and self-evident, and we easily reject or ratify those beliefs as our own. But when there’s deep ambivalence, the questions can linger unresolved for years, if not a lifetime.

It's still fundamentally unclear what choreographer Zoe Scofield makes of Sacred Harp singing, an art form embraced by the Primitive Baptist religious tradition in the 19th century, even though she has made, with scenic designer Juniper Shuey, CLEAR & SWEET, an evening-length, multimedia dance and music work largely based on the genre.

Though Sacred Harp, also known as shaped note singing, nearly died out with the waning of its adoptive Baptist sect toward the end of the 20th Century, the art form has experienced a resurgence of sorts in popular culture in recent years after being prominently featured in films including Cold Mountain and O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Although she grew up among a family of Northern transplants in rural Georgia, Scofield has mentioned in interviews and a post-performance talkback in Chapel Hill that she recoiled from the religious small-mindedness she encountered in the Southern towns of her childhood. Yet she found herself inexplicably drawn to the music when she encountered it, several years back, at a cultural center in North Carolina.

That's wholly understandable: the beauty of Sacred Harp, sung a capella in a simple four-part harmony, largely stems from its austere economy of expression. When performed traditionally, by banks of treble, alto, tenor and bass singers facing one other across an empty center space, its songs are direct, impassioned and undeniably powerful, as seen in the documentary footage linked at left. 

But since these hymns frequently reflect the theological doubts of Primitive Baptism, a religion whose adherents reject any lasting certainty of their own spiritual salvation, their lyrics are also often quite severe. Their dire admonitions run throughout the libretto for Clear & Sweet; after the early song, “Mission,” warns that "Death eternal waits for you / Who slight the force of gospel truth," it continues:

Youth, like the Spring, will soon be gone By fleeting time, or conqu'ring death; Your morning sun may set at noon, And leave you ever in the dark.

Your sparkling eyes and blooming cheeks Must wither like the blasted rose; The coffin, earth and winding sheet Will soon your active limbs enclose.

(Further sturm und drang, after the jump.)

A later tune, “New Topia,” asserts:

Remember, you are hast’ning on

To death’s dark, gloomy shade;

Your joys on earth will soon be gone,

Your flesh in dust be laid.

while the last song, “Poland,” includes this baleful benediction in a direct address to deity:

Crush’d as a moth beneath thy hand,

We moulder to the dust;

Our feeble powers can ne’er withstand,

And all our beauty’s lost.

It is strikingly significant that such gravitas is not limited to Primitive Baptist texts in Clear & Sweet. The work also includes Jacob Kiakahi and AnnaLeigh Smith’s 2016 song, “Tibhirine,” a musical arrangement of the last statement of faith by Catholic priest Dom Christian de Chergé, shortly before his martyrdom by Islamic fundamentalists in Algiers in 1996.

In these songs, the love of deity is repeatedly framed against the direst outcomes, as the speakers in the lyrics cast themselves as wholly dependent, powerless petitioners who must perish, physically and spiritually, without the intervention of the divine. Another hymn in the collection for this performance rejoins, “All will come to desolation, / Unless Thou return again...All our help must come from Thee.”

But, given the earnestness of such extreme expressions of faith, why do we struggle to find any meaningful analogies, contrasts, criticism—or any other relationships—between Scofield’s choreography and the musical texts she's chosen?

The crispness in her blend of balletic and contemporary dance techniques could plausibly reflect the austerity of Sacred Harp, and the tension in the dynamics of collaboration and separateness that Scofield maintains throughout the work among her discrete quintet of dancers might reinforce that association.

But other thematic connections are far more tenuous, found more in fleeting moments at the margins of Scofield’s choreography than at its center. 

True, during the initial moments of Clear & Sweet, Troy Ogilvie’s glacial backward crawl, face down, embodies the self-abasement found in the libretto as her long dark hair literally sweeps the stage. And early use of blindfolds might briefly signify religious metaphor, before an intricate, interlocking feet and arm sequence, performed as the group lies in a row on their backs at center stage, evokes a calmer take on Gaga choreographer Ohad Naharin or Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker in the clip linked below. 

And in a subsequent solo where Dominic Santia appears to navigate toward colleagues at the borders of the stage by echolocation, and later, at the start of his duet with Navarra Novy-Williams, Santia’s movements momentarily intimate a human straining beyond available senses toward contact and communion outside himself.

Still, it is never clear that reach extends toward anyone or anything beyond his partners on stage. And after them, the dancemaker sends up the blindfold device when her cavalier, unseeing character disrupts a faux-rehearsal, in what seems a near-burlesque of Authentic Movement. That choice ultimately turns the section into a thin non-sequitur, not only to all that came before, but its grim musical base as well: “Mission,” the dour hymn quoted above. 

Scofield scatters possible allusions and hints at other spiritual traditions in various places. One passage’s percussive foot strikes briefly pattern the insistent rhythms in the pagan “Augurs of Spring” motif of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. The intensity of a later Santia solo segues from a graceful, helical exploration of liminal space, along the edge of the jagged, off-white corona at the center of Shuey’s painted marley dance surface, into something approaching the realm of seizure or the corporeal possessions documented in Santería and Vodun practice. As Evan Anderson’s shredding, feedback-drenched guitar intensifies, Santia’s hand dramatically claws outward from the surface of his body, extending the kinetic field surrounding his form. When his palm returns to his chest, Santia’s upper torso forcefully pushes back, and his arms and legs fire out in multiple directions in an apparent effort toward projection or escape that exhausts his character.

In an imaginative but disquieting later duet reminiscent of Trisha Brown, Ogilvie effectively manipulates and limits a standing Novy-Williams’ available range of motion through the minimal use of one extended foot while she reclines on the floor. This could be interpreted—at least in a stretch—as a critique of religious coercion, although nothing overtly denotes that metaphor. The herky upper body gestures in another short ensemble progression at mid-show just as easily imply the crude puppetry of some boorish dancemaker caricature as any reproof of organized cultural or spiritual duress.

Such a disjunctive set of sequences ultimately make Clear & Sweet something of a sketchpad work: at best, a discursive patchwork of approaches and influences.

Granted, a number of these passages are compelling. A sharply focused, early cascade of brisk tableaux, set close to the ground and seemingly based on contact improvisation, recalls the haunting news photography montages of Doug Varone’s Boats Leaving. A pristine poignancy manifests in Ana Maria Lucaciu’s cool, balletic solo, as Ogilvie narrates a biographical anecdote from her early experiences as a dancer, in the clip linked below.

And, after the intriguing homage to Brown above, a fascinating late duet between Novy-Williams and Santia probes contradictory roles in a dyadic relationship. As Santia’s character manipulates specific joints and balance points on Novy-Williams’ form (which repeatedly returns to all fours, facing away from him), impulses between a woman and man in intimate contact oscillate back and forth between support and coercion, and between conciliation and resistance.

For all that, however, we find no connection whatever between this interpersonal interrogative and the spiritual last will and testament recorded in the accompanying song, “Tibhirine.”

In Shuey’s vivid—and occasionally distracting—in-the-round set design, a large circular ring fashioned from white dangling polyester threads descends from the lighting grid, above a painted corona edged in black on the floor, with fading blue, tan and orange rays extending out from center stage into the surrounding darkness. Though the suspended ring suggests the beaded curtains popular in the counterculture of the 1960s, it forms a curved surface for abstract and concrete video projections, including skyscapes, jagged color fields and footage of the dancers themselves. These take place before the structure temporarily isolates Ogilvie and Novy-Williams when it is lowered during the mid-show duet described above.

In an earlier interview Scofield likened professional balletic training to the rigors of other challenging spiritual practices. In this production’s post-performance discussion she termed Clear & Sweet an attempt to create a sacred space strictly specific to her company and herself. “We didn’t want somebody else’s idea of the sacred,” she observed.

But, alarmingly, Scofield has applied that exclusionary rubric to the music she has chosen here. As noted above, their texts aren’t merely riddled with overt and daunting views on what is sacred: they constitute their art form’s raison d’être. 

That exclusion was underlined, indeed to a boorish extent, when a quartet of Sacred Harp singers who performed Clear & Sweet's libretto live were excluded from the post-performance discussion in Chapel Hill.

When Scofield reaches beyond Sacred Harp to incorporate the Catholic credo in extremis found in "Tibhirine" into her work—and then studiously ignores their textual content to the extent found here—the ethics of such selective cultural appropriations must be closely questioned. Unfortunately for all, the answers to those questions seem neither clear nor sweet.