The Sacred in the Secular
Contemporary dance thrives in Manhattan’s religious spaces
By Ally Gravina
Nacera Belaza, the Algerian dancer and choreographer who performed as part of the Crossing the Line Festival in October, twirled across the floor at Danspace Project, circling around a dimly lit floor with two other performers. The three dancers orbited each other hypnotically, evoking a distinct spiritual feeling. The Danspace location only underlined that feeling: it is a fully functioning church.
Religious spaces have played a critical role in the history of contemporary dance and performance in New York. Thanks to progressive clergy, the stereotypically secular performance world has been able to thrive in sacred New York churches for more than half-a-century. Most famously, the Judson Dance Theatre, established in the early 1960s — one of the pioneering spaces for postmodern dance — made its home in the Judson Memorial Church at Washington Square. Today, according to its website, the church practices an expansive Christianity and upholds artists as having the potential to serve as modern-day prophets. While the Judson Dance Theatre ran its course in a few short years, the church has long remained hospitable to artists. These days it hosts Movement Research projects and a weekly free program for emerging artists.
A little more than half-a-mile from Judson, in the East Village, the second oldest church in Manhattan — St. Marks in the Bowery — established in 1799, moonlights as a performance venue for ballet, contemporary dance, poetry, and theater. It’s under this church’s high, arched ceiling that Danspace Project has operated for 40 years. To cite only two more examples, in midtown, Saint Peter’s Church hosts the York Theatre Company and on the Upper West Side, the Riverside Theatre at Riverside Church presents drama and dance performances, among other offerings.
“Artists can show us where we’ve been, who we are, and what we can become,” Judson’s web copy reads. Though some wings of religious traditions regard the arts as hostile to their holy aims —for instance, the Taliban in Afghanistan infamously practice an extreme form of music censorship and some Christian and Jewish leaders forbid figurative art as a violation of the prohibition on “graven images” — progressive churches in New York see the two spheres as powerfully interconnected. They regard religion and art as two mutually supportive responses to the human desire for meaning and direction.
The hunt for meaning and the ways religion and contemporary dance respond to it, was the theme of a day-long symposium on October 13, put on by The Museum of Modern Art and Judson Memorial Church in conjunction with the MoMA’s exhibition, “Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done,” running through February 3.
“We seek meaning in every activity of the human species or human spirit,” John J. Thatamanil, an associate professor of theology and world religions at Union Theological Seminary, said at the symposium. “And the quest for meaning and depth cannot possibly be confined to something called religion.”
“Could medieval Europeans have made the distinction between religion and art? What would count as religion and what would count as art?” Thatamanil asked. Art was funded by the church, he noted, citing works like The Book of Kells and the Apocalypse Tapestry. “We realize that for most of human history, east and west, the neatness and the impermeability of our distinction between art and religion would have been for most human beings incomprehensible.” But today, when the division is at a peak in the popular view, churches like Judson and St. Mark’s invite artists to erase, or at least blur, the distinction for modern times.
That process began for Danspace in 1911 when Norman Guthrie became rector at St. Mark’s and, according to a catalogue published by Danspace, Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches, and Downtown Dance, he “choreographed dance services modeled on Zuni corn rituals and Egyptian sun god worship and employed theatrical lighting effects to illuminate his sermons.” Guthrie created the St. Mark’s Arts Committee, which first opened the church to dance, music, and poetry. Isadora Duncan danced there in 1922 and Martha Graham in 1930. With the emergence of the counterculture in the early 1960s, Michael Allen, who became rector there in 1963, expanded the arts programming, reaching out to make artists and other residents of the East Village feel fully integrated into the church. Soon, he hired an artistic director, and the arts grew deeper roots and wider branches.
In 1976 St. Mark’s removed the remaining pews from its main space, refurbished the floor, and rewired the building to accommodate theatrical lighting and sound systems. Today the church is home to Danspace Project, The Poetry Project, Loco Motion, and The New York Theatre Ballet.
To Belaza, performing there “is like being in a mosque, inside a church. But it doesn’t look like a church. It looks like an empty space.” In a post-performance Q&A, Belaza said that she doesn’t seek inspiration from any particular religion. But audience members described being transported into a spiritual realm by her work — and by the environment.
“The parts of life that we see as purely secular, devoid of the sacred, might just be the place the human body can dance,” Thatamanil said at the symposium, “where the sacred and the power and the depth of meaning can erupt in spaces that we normally think of as religious.”
