When people leave the theatre, they should be different to [sic] when they arrived. In the old days, people went to church once a week in order to be spiritually cleansed. Nowadays this seldom occurs. But good theatre should fulfill a part of this function. Like a shower, it should cleanse people.
- Yoshi Oida, An Actor Adrift (162)

In December of last year, I directed John Pielmeier’s Agnes of God as part of the University of Missouri-Columbia’s academic year season. I took this opportunity to seize the moment and, through intense actor training and an auteur directorial approach, to develop a performative manifesto that sought no less than the revitalization of the live theatrical event. Considering the ever-growing popularity of reality television and the decreased public support of the arts, live theatre seems to be in a state of great disrepair. I agree with theatre scholar Herbert Blau, who laments our mediatized age, writing: “it’s hard to imagine any image on the screen that could match the close-up effect upon spectators of an actor” before them (542). Thus, it is my belief that one way to combat this denigration of theatre is to combat the desacralization of theatre. With the aesthetic choices I made in my direction of Agnes of God, I sought to place performers and spectators in daringly close proximity, in a realm where all parties leave more whole than when they arrived. My production asked, and attempted to answer the following: What is the sacred? Can it be (re)created in theatrical time and space? If so, how? And finally: What is the experience that sacred theatre can deliver to performers and spectators alike?

As “a performative movement outside the known configuration of self and world,” the sacred in theatre takes one out of ordinary space and time, transporting both performer and spectator to a liminal realm of unknowing, an in-between space where one is torn apart and put back together again (Yarrow 19). Sacredness in theatre takes one out of ordinary space and time, transporting both performer and spectator to a liminal realm of unknowing, an in-between space [page 93] where one is torn apart and put back together again. In Sacred Theatre, Ralph Yarrow writes that this idea of sacred as a void stems from the belief that “a more ‘holistic’ kind of knowing requires at a critical juncture some kind of ‘unlearning or deconditioning’, thus producing a non-ordinary state of awareness” (28-29). In this manner, the entire Agnes of God experience was a process of breaking the actresses down and building them back up again, with the goal of engendering the sensibility of this exercise – of this traversing of the sacred – in spectators as well.

Moreover, the sacred, as defined by Yarrow and his co-authors, is grounded in action, which has been long-understood as the underpinning of the performative event. He writes: “The sacred of theatre may be its capacity to activate a particular quotient of energy, a form of active and holistic knowing, qualitatively different from ‘normal’…cognition…Theatre as practice, more than text or institution…is always a doing, a setting in motion” (17). Yarrow’s notion of the sacred as a non-quotidian “setting in motion” has far-reaching implications when considering religious studies scholar Catherine Bell’s theory of ritualization, or

a way of acting that is designed and orchestrated to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other, usually more quotidian, activities…Ritualization is a matter of various culturally specific strategies for…creating and privileging a qualitative distinction between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane,’ and for ascribing such distinctions to realities thought to transcend the powers of human actors.  (74)

Ritualization puts its focus on activity, on practice, focusing on what the doing of ritual actually does. This has particular significance in regard to the trainings taught during the rehearsal process, which come into clear focus through Bell’s discussion of the ritual body. She writes: “The body mediates all action…A ritualized body is a body invested with a ‘sense’ of ritual…Through a series of physical movements ritual practices spatially and temporally construct an environment” (97-8). Phillip Zarrilli says that “such ‘intuitive’ abilities are only gained…through the tempering work of ‘psychophysiological’ discipline,” (44) a “training [of] [page 94] the bodymind…to become accomplished in attaining a certain specialized state of consciousness” (33-4). Yarrow appropriately reads into Zarrilli’s testimony the fact that “there is work to be done to access” this non-quotidian state of awareness, and that “the work itself is the process by which [such awareness is] reconfigured” (30). It is indeed significant that Yarrow attends to the question of why there is so great an interest in training performers in the first place, ultimately finding that this is “because it looks as though performers can access some kind of ‘heightened’ condition of sensitivity, mental and physical functioning and being-in-the-moment,” and, perhaps most significantly, “because performers trained in this way may act as a means to deliver a similar kind of access to spectator-participants” (160). By situating Suzuki/Viewpoints training and the Composition staging method as sacred praxis, our engagement with these “psychophysiological disciplines” allowed us to conjure what the infamous Antonin Artaud, also looking to the performative disciplines of the East to revitalize what he saw as a fading Western theatre, called “an active poetic mode of envisioning expression on the stage [that] leads us…to recover the religious and mystic preference of which our theatre has completely lost the sense,” (46) a “sonorous, streaming naked realization” (52) that conjures a somatic, embodied, and ultimately unsettling performative style that shows that “the sacred…[is] a step outside time…It occurs in and as performance…And it is available, though only in and as a kind of participation or active processing, to those who work in training or in production, and to those who receive the complexity and multiple layering of ‘text’ in performance” (Yarrow 201).

The Suzuki method is a physically rigorous movement-based training developed by innovative Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki out of a desire for the theatre “to approach and deal with problems or issues which cannot be solved by individuals in their daily lives” (qtd. in Allain 7). Suzuki refers to his training as a “grammar of the feet,” because “the feet are the last remaining part of the human body which has kept, literally, in touch with the earth,” the earth being, for Suzuki, “the very supporting base of all human activities” (“Culture is the Body” 160). [page 95] The crucial relationship of the foot to the floor engendered by Suzuki practice, instigating a focus on the lower body that sharpens the actress’s sense of control and concentration, is born out of the training’s founding in the traditional Japanese art forms of noh and kabuki. Although the various codified forms (kata) of his training come from the stylization of both noh and kabuki performance, Suzuki readily admits he has never formally studied either noh or kabuki, but worked from his own observations of these traditional modes in performance. “What I am striving to do,” he says, “is restore the wholeness of the human body in the theatrical context, not simply by going back to such traditional theatrical forms as noh and kabuki; but, by employing their unique virtues, to create something transcending current practice in the modern theatre” (“Culture is the Body” 157). Elsewhere he cautions, “We don’t copy the forms (kata) just as they are. We aren’t learning to perform [noh or] kabuki. It’s the feeling of the particular form that I try to teach, so the actor can revitalize that marvelous physicality that comes from noh and from kabuki” (qtd. in Brandon, “Training at the Waseda Little Theatre” 32). From noh, Suzuki finds that “virtually no energy that is not human goes into an artistic creation,” displaying an open rejection of energy that is created by “electricity, oil, even by atomic power,” and instigating a direct, unfiltered experience both with and for the audience (Way of Acting 29-30). Also, Suzuki discovers that noh “is non-realistic in its expression,” presenting a world that “consists of what cannot be seen or heard in everyday life, only what can be felt, absorbed” (Way of Acting 30). His training works towards this end in relation to what he has learned from kabuki: “the joy of the body speaking onstage. I don’t mean ‘body language,’ as you say in English, where the body unconsciously reveals inner emotion. I mean the opposite: the actor deliberately speaks through proportion, line, movement, form of his body. The body creates the picture” (qtd. in Brandon, “Training at the Waseda Little Theatre” 42). Indeed, with the intention of “a complete physicalization of acting,” (Brandon, “Contemporary Japanese Theatre” 92) in Suzuki training the body is a medium “through which the actor develops a hyperawareness and sensibility which is a total psychophysiological engagement of the bodymind/spirit in the activity” (Zarrilli, [page 96] “Introduction to Part II” 79). Suzuki’s goal of making the whole body speak, even when one is silent, answers the call of the activation of the sacred, for Suzuki training constitutes that activation, in religion scholar Robert Orsi’s words,  “as an experience in a body…so that the experiencing body itself becomes the bearer of [sacred] presence for oneself and for others” (73-74).

I also trained the actresses in Viewpoints, as developed by visionary director and teacher Anne Bogart. Viewpoints, or “the practice of imagination and spontaneity,” is an interactive, collaborative, and improvisational philosophy translated into a technique for training performers, building ensemble, and creating movement for the stage (Bogart and Landau 59). Discouraging premeditation and habitual physical choices, Viewpoints is a set of terms given to preexisting principles of movement that constitute a theoretical/descriptive vocabulary for the work occurring onstage (7-8). The training demands a dexterous physical condition and a focus that prepares the actress to respond to outside stimuli at any given moment, to send and receive kinetic energy, and to engage in precise physical action. It discourages premeditation and habitual physical choices, and demands an almost trance-like focus that beckons the vulnerable actress into the liminal realm. Performance studies scholar Richard Schechner reminds us that “while in a liminal state, people are freed from the demands of daily life. They feel at one with their comrades, all personal and social difference erased. People are uplifted, swept away, taken over” (70). Thus, the trainings proved essential to lifting our performance work to the higher plane of sacred existence. It should be known that it is no innovation of my own to employ Suzuki and Viewpoints within a singular training atmosphere. The trainings were first practiced in tandem at The Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITI Company), officially formed through the collaboration of Suzuki and Bogart in the summer of 1992. Suzuki and Viewpoints are not fused into one methodology but rather are taught side by side: “The two disparate approaches to actor training produced a great alchemy,” says Bogart, “Introducing these two training methods into the same body results in strength, focus, flexibility, visibility, audibility, [page 97] spontaneity and presence” (17). Suzuki and Viewpoints taught in tandem work towards placing the actress’s focus outside the self, but Suzuki features strict forms, whereas Viewpoints is improvisational and playful. “Viewpoints is very free and Suzuki is very formal,” says SITI Company member Barney O’Hanlon. “Viewpoints can bring to the Suzuki body aliveness and fullness and Suzuki training can bring to Viewpoints an incredible understanding of the body in space, a 360 degree awareness” (qtd. in Lampe, “SITI” 189). As Jerzy Grotowski notes: “It is the true lesson of the sacred theatre…this knowledge that spontaneity and discipline, far from weakening each other, mutually reinforce themselves; that what is elementary feeds what is constructed and vice versa, to become the real source of a kind of acting that glows” (121).

The performance text of Agnes of God was developed through Composition, our own active poetic mode, a bridge from training into performance encouraging a physical intelligence that situates the body as a kind of living, moving sculpture that arranges “formal theatrical elements into a cohesive whole, integrating action, gesture, architecture, character, repetition and text” (qtd. in Lampe, “From the Battle to the Gift” 21). Composition, as “a structure for working from our impulses and intuition” (Bogart and Landau 12), encourages expressive (or abstract) movement, rather than descriptive (or behavioral) movement, and asks that we “experiment with themes, characters, and situations, images, structures, pieces of text, and physical materials” (Cummings 126-7). Actresses are encouraged to work as much as possible on their feet, creating as they go rather than predetermining the work beforehand. In this way, Composition thrusts actresses into ecstatic state, a kind of “Exquisite Pressure,” in Bogart’s conception, that engenders the necessary deconditioning required to conjure and experience the sacred in that a lot of work is done in little time: “When we are not given the time to think or talk too much,” says Bogart, “wonderful work emerges; what surfaces does not come from analysis or ideas, but from our impulses, our dreams, our emotions…forces lean on the participants in a way that enables more, not less creativity,” ultimately asking “someone to unveil herself/himself as an artist, to stand behind what s/he makes, and to learn from what s/he and others see” (Bogart and [page 98] Landau 140).

Significantly, Peter Brook recognized that for an actress “to communicate [her] invisible meanings…[she] need[s] form. It [is] not enough to feel passionately – a creative leap [is] required to mint a new form which would be a container and a reflector for [her] impulses. That is what is truly called an ‘action’” (Empty Space 51). If Suzuki is the body’s grammar, and Viewpoints its vocabulary, then Composition is the formal, sculptural language through which that embodied syntax speaks, a tangible articulation of the discoveries made during the training and rehearsal process. This is what Suzuki himself was after with his desire for a “complete physicalization of acting,” a ritualization in which the movement and positionality of the body communicates above and sometimes against oral expression. In simple terms, the artist, working intuitively and sculpturally asks, for example: “What is my left arm, in this specific position, literally saying to the audience?” Listen to SITI Company member Ellen Lauren: “In the best rehearsals, the body’s priority over the text allows a truer emotional response to surface. One is simply too busy to ‘act’…No feeling, memory or desire exists independent from the body on the stage. The form is the spirit” (64), as we try to reestablish “a world where the body is as eloquent and articulate as the text” (68).

Composition, as sacred praxis, encourages a “sensitivity” that “shifts the performance away from being an aesthetic entertainment and towards” the “transgressive interactive event” we were so desperately seeking to engender both through and within the conjuration of the sacred (Allain 5). This sense of intimacy within the act of theatre encourages the audience to read a performance on a biological and visceral level, to become somatically involved in the event as they are emotionally aroused and physically confronted. Performers create a ritualized space as their actions are symbolic but rooted to the ground with precise, concrete gestures. Schechner tells us that “rituals take place in special, often sequestered places, [and] the very act of entering the ‘sacred space’ has an impact on participants. In such spaces, special behavior is [page 99] required” (71). Thus, our “special behavior” – our Suzuki/Viewpoints-modulated Composition work – effectively resituated the traditional primary relationship in the theatre between actor and text to one between actor and spectator. Allain’s rendering of the ramifications of this process is an apt depiction of what my own work has shown, that “spectators almost actively ‘participate’ in the event through the vitality of their physical responses, which affect the performer’s impulses in a continuously interactive cycle” (5-6). We wanted our audience to be able to feel the actors’ bodies, effecting an opening in the homogeneity of time and space, which actors have the ability to do through ritualization: because of “their physical deviations from the movements of everyday life,” says Suzuki, “the actors’ bodies somehow seem equipped with some means to defy those amorphous and sterile perceptions of space that have evolved as modern culture has developed” (Way of Acting 41).

Why Agnes of God? The Tony-award winning play about a nun who mysteriously gives birth and then immediately kills the child initially opened to mixed reviews and has received little scholastic attention since. In the New York Times, theatre critic Frank Rich wrote: “[Pielmeier’s] play falls apart…because he hasn’t figured out how to meld its melodramatic and spiritual concerns. While Agnes of God aspires to be a chilling thriller and a stirring reaffirmation of the power of faith, it fails on both accounts” (23). In a subsequent issue, Walter Kerr wrote: “Having posed a daring and virtually unsolvable question…he has dodged the answer and simply returned to the question” (3). Critics were chastising Pielmeier for writing a play that could not be placed neatly into a stylistic box, for failing to provide a safe dialectical balance, and for leaving the major questions of the play unanswered. However, what critics saw as problems I saw as a wealth of aesthetic and scholastic possibility. In an interview in a March 1984 edition of the Los Angeles Times, Pielmeier made a very significant comment. “I wanted to write a play that simply asked questions,” he said, “because I don’t think the answers are as important. There is an Eastern influence in Agnes in the idea of questions being primal” (5). This comment, especially in regards to the idea of “Eastern influence,” coupled with Pielmeier’s note at the [page 100] beginning of the play script in which he reminds us that, because Agnes of God “is a play of the mind, and of miracles, it is a play of light and shadows,” further solidified my decision to employ Suzuki/Viewpoints training and the Composition method in the creation of the performance text of the show (4). It is my belief that in today’s age it is no longer good enough for the theatre to give its practitioners and its audiences what they expect. Employing these methods drastically shifted both the rehearsal process and performances necessarily away from the expectations of performers and spectators, lifting the play above the quotidian and placing it in a realm that transported all participants to the daring void of the sacred.
           
From the outset, I was particularly intrigued by Pielmeier’s focus on the special nature of presence and the miraculous, or the invisible-made-visible. Catholic doctrine dictates that miracles must first be understood as an intervention by God into the world of humanity or nature (Mullin 6). Thomas Aquinas linked the category of miracle to the distinction between nature and supernature, reminding us that “supernature is something above the plane of all effects produced by creation. It is a communication of that which naturally belongs within the divine essence, to a term which is without” (qtd. in Mullin 109). This is no more evident than in the play’s clever title: Agnes of God, in Latin Agnus Dei, or “Lamb of God.” As a symbol of Christ’s suffering, the Lamb doesn’t bear sins, he takes them away through the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus’ crucifixion. The play’s climax comes when Agnes receives the miracle of the stigmata, and the signifier (Agnes) becomes the signified (Christ) as the presence of the God the Father is physically reincarnated.
           
Furthermore, I chose to cast an unscripted character: the Virgin/Mother, who represented both the Virgin Mary and Agnes’s own terrible mother. The ease with which this additional character fit into the performance text is rather telling. As is probably obvious through my use of methods that diminish the primacy of the text, my own personal aesthetic is focused on not what a play literally says, but rather what a play is essentially saying, in square agreement with the [page 101] great Peter Brook’s contention that “if you just let a play speak, it may not make a sound. If what you want is for the play to be heard, then you must conjure its sound from it” (38). Indeed, the Virgin Mary and Agnes’s mother maintain an enduring presence in the play, and my choice to depict that presence in a more profound way than was scripted rendered the invisible visible in a direct corporealization of the sacred. The Virgin/Mother stood as a statue throughout the opening moments of the play, in the center of a scene-scape of my own design: a wide white circle surrounded on three sides by large stained-glass windows. The Virgin/Mother remained in this position until Agnes’s first appearance, upon which Agnes was literally born out of the statue through the Virgin/Mother opening her enormous, flowing robes. After Agnes’s birth, the Virgin/Mother retreated behind the central stained-glass window to be viewed only in silhouette, illuminated in white light when representing the Virgin, and red light when presenting Agnes’s mother. Adding further embodied sacred texture, she held a new statue for each scene, transitioning with the exactitude of the speaking characters in a nanosecond’s shift of light and body posture that transported us from one point in time to the next. Towards the end of the play, she emerged from behind the window and returned to the playing area to provide Agnes the blood for the stigmata of her crucifixion. This mix of ingenuity and finely-honed stagecraft, infused with the sensibilities of Suzuki/Viewpoints and created through the Composition method, transported performers and even the most skeptical spectators to a world where miracles – both spiritual and theatrical – are indeed possible.
           
We began our rehearsal process with seven days of intense Suzuki/Viewpoints and Composition training. We trained with Suzuki every night for the first week of rehearsal, once at the beginning of each week of rehearsal thereafter, and before each dress rehearsal and performance. We also spent many of our early rehearsals exploring the nine Viewpoints: Tempo, Duration, Kinesthetic Response, Repetition, Spatial Relationship, Floor Pattern (or Topography), Shape, Gesture, and Architecture. A typical exercise found the actresses taking positions in the space, striking a variety of poses, noticing their proximity to others. Then, without cue or [page 102] instruction, someone began to move. This triggered a reaction from one or more of the others. Soon, everybody was engaged in some form of motion, moving in place or across the room. Actresses changed their actions in response to the actions of their colleagues. As the work progressed, actresses moved from working with Viewpoints as themselves to working with Viewpoints in character.
           
As for Composition, I started the actresses off with a simple exercise. They paired off and told each other a story about something that happened to them over the summer. They had to come to rehearsal the next night with five simple sentences based on that story. Then, I gave them a brief period of time to create a sequence – or physical score – of five expressive gestures – or actions – so that they might tell their story through movement. Each actress performed her piece twice: once without text and once with. Then they ‘tangoed’ their pieces. This involved the actresses entering the space together and recreating their pieces, but this time responding kinesthetically to the other performers, thus altering each actress’s physical score.

Once we began rehearsing Agnes of God itself, each rehearsal followed the same basic process. Continuing to work under exquisite pressure, the actresses had to come to each rehearsal with their lines memorized, their objectives marked, and their text divided into smaller units – or movements – that they then had to label with a metaphorically descriptive phrase that captured the essence of that particular movement. After warming up with the Suzuki/Viewpoints exercises, I gave the actresses ten to twenty minutes of time to work individually to create a physical score for each movement based on their labels. Each movement required at least five expressive actions, and the overall score had to include a series of compositional ingredients interpreted at the actresses’ individual discretion: fifteen seconds of stillness, three uses of sound, three expressive gestures, three changes of level, two manifestations of odd habits, a sequence of extreme contrast, a sustained moment of looking at the Virgin/Mother, a single gesture repeated five times, sound from an unexpected source, a revelation of object, three changes of direction, [page 103] one miracle, and one transformation. The actresses then performed their scores together, first silently and then adding text later, allowing their privately-conceived work to continue to develop and change in deep kinesthetic response with each other. From there, I shaped the piece into its final product, a highly stylized performance text that read like a choreographed dance of ritualistic movement.

Evocative and significant movement patterns developed almost immediately. For example, in embodying the sensuous, constantly smoking Dr. Martha Livingstone, Katherine Hamlett tended towards a serpentine Topography (the Viewpoint that highlights the trajectory of the body’s movement through space), and, consistently using the entirety of her corporeal frame to communicate her most innate essence, most obviously inhabited Shape (the Viewpoint that highlights the form of the body in space). Hamlett conceived her own score – albeit intuitively – in directed opposition to that of Mallory Raven-Ellen Backstrom, who, in the role of the exacting Mother Superior, adopted a rigid Topography and inhabited the more restrictive Viewpoint of Gesture, which highlights the movement of one or more parts of an actress’s body. Walking in a grid-like pattern, moving only forward and turning only at right angles, Backstrom used her hands, usually held in front of her, as her particular means of embodied poetic expression. Agnes of God provided us a fortunate sense of structure: the play unravels, for the most part, as one duet scene after another, between Doctor and Mother, Doctor and Agnes, and Mother and Agnes. This afforded us the ability to be very specific about the embodiment of the relationships of the characters. Thus, each scene between the Doctor and Mother featured a section of extreme Topography, in which Hamlett would circle as Backstrom would grid, either alternating around each other, simultaneously around the entire performance space, or within their own isolated quadrants. This work exploded at the end of the play into a street fight of sorts, during which each actress attempted to set the other off her course, culminating in the Mother Superior’s shouted and startlingly uncharacteristic taking of the Lord’s name in vain that brought the performance to a staggering halt. [page 104]

If the seductive fluidity of Hamlett’s score and the strict rigidity of Backstrom’s score were conceived always in relation to each other, then, in the role of Agnes, Ashley Hicks’ score was conceived, rather unexpectedly, in relation to her own body. Working from an immense palate of movement choices that displayed a great range of physical expression, Hicks embodied an active poeticism that was overtly playful and very much in touch with its creator and, thus, the Creator as her hands kept in near constant contact with the rest of her body. Hicks’ Agnes, as an innocent, displayed a deep connection to the otherworldliness characteristic of sacred existence, a connection not as strongly felt in physicalizations of the more societally-restricted and world-worn Doctor Livingstone and Mother Superior. As an albino African-American, Hicks’ uniqueness very clearly set her apart from the others, a constant reminder of Agnes’ special nature: that she has indeed been touched by God, now not only sensed through the virtuosity of her singing, but, in an infinitely more effective way, through the ability literally to read meaning into her non-quotidian gestural life.

It cannot be stressed enough that actresses’ work was not predetermined but rather was born of bodies very much in connection with their deepest psychophysical inclinations, bodies tempered by Suzuki/ Viewpoints training to communicate and operate somatically and outside of the normative influence of the intellect. The trainings instill rules in the body that then become manifest through the Composition work, such as the clear, committed articulation of movement, an intensity of concentration and focus, and an awareness of the infinite possibilities of the expressive capabilities of the body itself. This is no more evident than in the work of our Virgin/Mother, enacted with incredible precision and focus by seasoned physical performer and Grammy-nominated storyteller Milbre Burch. Burch created her silhouetted poses by observing the physical work of the other actresses in a particular scene and by literally playing with various statues at the side of the rehearsal space in an attempt to capture the essence of that work and to see, physically, what felt ‘right.’ In performance, Burch operated with great restraint and maintained complete stillness in difficult-to-hold positions over the course of whole scenes, her [page 105] work proof of Peter Brook’s theory that an actress should work to find “a certain stillness within [herself]. What one could call ‘sacred theatre’, the theatre in which the invisible appears, takes root in this silence, from which all sorts of known and unknown gestures can arise” (There Are No Secrets 76). Indeed, all this talk of movement and physicality should not cause one to imagine a group of actors bouncing around as so many children in a McDonald’s Playland. Suppression is at work here, as stillness is a key element: an outward serenity harboring an inward throbbing. Suzuki scholar Ian Carruthers likens this process to what occurs in noh drama: “The actor’s ability to fascinate is created by the amount and quality of energy radiated by the body in all directions. This energy is built through a coherent system of restraint…[T]he actor builds presence by creating the will to move but deliberately holds back on doing so until the inner tension becomes unbearably high” (95). What is fascinating is the metaphysical tension within the actor: that palpable sense that anything could happen, that one minute the actor might be across the room and appear to be sleeping, yet in a split second be barreling towards you with all the ferocity of a hungry lion. In our production, before she adjourned to her position behind the stained glass window, Burch stood in absolute stillness for thirty minutes as the audience entered the performance space, and then for another fifteen minutes after the performance itself began. The audience gasped audibly when Burch first moved her arms to reveal our childlike heroine. It was a gasp well-earned: a gasp that expressed every bit of the active participation we were seeking to engender in our audience.

It is also important to know that within this way of working, movement and text are not mapped onto one another. Rather, the physical score and the spoken text exist as separate layers in which the actresses’ instinctual movement communicates the essence of the written text. This privileging of movement is fortified with the conviction that the actresses could enact the physical score silently and the audience would receive the same, if not, perhaps, a more vital experience; were the actresses to speak the text without the movement, the work would fall flat. In our practice, the physical score for each particular scene was first worked silently and then, [page 106] without much fanfare, the text was added, and, honestly, not much more was, dare I say, said about it. The aural interpretation of the text was inherently managed by the actresses’ physicalizations, with the voice itself conceived as a site of energy, rather than as an organ of speech. This develops directly out of Suzuki training, which denies the traditional Western mode of the relaxed voice. In training, when actresses are fighting to maintain their sense of centeredness in a position of extreme tension, text is called for, and the actresses must recite powerfully, in our case, whichever piece of their Agnes of God text comes to them. What is important is not necessarily the meaning of what is being said, but what that verbalization actually sounds like. In this conception, the text operates musically and in support of an already vibrantly communicative movement score.

As one might imagine, the rehearsal process was arduous, as was necessary to engender the sacred task of unlearning. The actresses were working in a performative mode completely outside their usual theatrical and personal comfort levels, and, initially, they found this profoundly unsettling. Hamlett remarked early on that she had no idea what the show looked like or how she fit into it, and that her acting wasn’t where it would be were she going through a more realistic process of theatre-making. Backstrom said rather often: “This show has broken me down,” yet towards the end of the process she would add: “but it’s saving me.” Interestingly, Hicks became comfortable with the work almost immediately. Regardless, after the opening night performance she spoke about how she felt significantly older, and how her uncommon skin condition no longer felt like “a scar.” Eventually, the other actresses echoed this sentiment. “I needed to be inspired,” said Hamlett, “and I was.” Backstrom was grateful to receive training she couldn’t have gotten many other places, and felt a sense of artistic empowerment in the fact that she actually learned something about herself as a person, a student, and an artist. For her part, Burch, who also served as Assistant Director, had fulfilled a long-desired wish to return to the legitimate theatre after working for thirty years as a solo performer, as was proud to have been part of such a “pretty and powerful” vision of what the theatre could be. All the actresses agree [page 107] that, thanks to the trainings, none of them felt like the same people they were when the process began.

A talk-back session and audience surveys show that although a large percentage of the initially skeptical spectators found the piece surprisingly powerful, many had the same reaction the actresses did: at first they were put-off by the stylized movement, but eventually gave themselves over to it through the virtuosity of the performances and the honesty of the story being told. One theatrically inexperienced Acting for Non-Majors student stayed after the show to speak with us because he was so moved and engrossed by the production. Several spectators had extremely visceral reactions. One audience member’s knees ached after the performance because she had become so involved in the action of the play that she, quite subconsciously, engaged her body in the creation of the performance text. In an e-mail following the production, Dr. M. Heather Carver said: “It truly felt like a gift of grace to be present in the audience...right from entering the sacred space you created...[The] voices, gestures, movement, commitment, and intensity were mesmerizing...Know that you have touched people at a very deep level: my insides were so charged that I got an actual stomach ache from my aching for Agnes...[This was] a truly collaborative experience...each body sharing the power with one another and truly giving in its generosity to the audience.” In the talk-back session following the opening night performance, Professor Clyde Ruffin said: “It’s so rare that we get the opportunity to experience live theatre doing something that is unique...that cannot be compared to anything you see in the movies...that special world that live theatre inhabits. It’s rare for me to see a production that moves me visually, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually – and this work has done that, and its very, very special. I have no questions. My questions are answered.” These spectators were transported to the realm of the sacred, and left the performance decidedly more whole than when they arrived.

In the end, we believe that our work on Agnes of God showed us that this method of [page 108] working from the body allowed us to explore something deeper and truer in the work than we’d otherwise be able to find with the more normative, psychologically-driven methods we have experienced elsewhere. At its core, this work is built upon the principle that the truest impulse is that of the body, thus I believe that this body-first approach to the text of Agnes of God is where the actresses found their most honest delivery of it. I believe that the actresses’ physical deviations from the movements of everyday life – their development of a concrete language for the stage that ‘spoke’ beyond the limits of verbal language – forged a physically poetic mode that led them to abandon realistic, psychological meaning, in order to recover the theatre’s sacred roots in metaphysical truth. As theatre historian Margot Berthold reminds us: “theatre is as old as mankind…The transformation into another self is one of the archetypal forms of human expression…The shaman who is the god’s mouthpiece, the masked dancer who averts the demons, the actress who brings the poet’s work to life – they all obey the same command which is the conjuration of another, truer reality” (1). Facing as we are now a theatre that is struggling in its expectation to keep up with the safe, immediate gratification of movie and television viewing and an ever-advancing slew of information technologies, we found that making theatre in this manner was one way for artists to uncover a way to ignite the sacred in theatre and enable the theatre to thrive in our troubling times. Anne Bogart says, “A media-drenched culture aims aggressively at our psyches with a constancy that breaks and numbs the spirit. This dangerous environment offers us an opportunity: the chance to think and act” (147). For my Agnes of God collaborators and I, this thinking and acting necessitated the full-scale conjuration of the sacred, a return to the ancient inspiring forces of the theatre that tempts, through equal parts tenacity, diligence, and a belief in the miraculous, to resituate the live theatrical event in a place of prominence within the cultural economy. [page 109]

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