Abstract
Baroque religious music was composed and performed to stimulate devotion as well as the inspire passion through the theatricality of the religious ritual including the processional arrangements which worked in tandem with the performance practices based on strong emotional delivery. The current project aimed to re-imagine historical emotional affect through a pasticcio performance of Baroque works focused on the Easter Passion and Resurrection delivering the narrative with enactment. The project was also conceived to deliver broader social justice messages allied to displaced and misunderstood peoples of different religious and cultural backgrounds. In this paper, the audience is invited to spectate a performance of Passion, Lament, Glory, staged at St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne just before Easter 2017. They are invited to share in the background to the work and read about audience responses to the live performance. These responses are reflected upon in terms of the empathic, cathartic and applied outcomes of the performance on the audience.
Highlights
In the twenty-first century, spoken/acted theatre has consistently confronted its audiences with questions of political apathy and complicity in relation to wars, poverty, migration, identity politics and loss – e.g., Theatre of Cruelty or the Theatre of Excess
In Passion, Lament, Glory I believed that I was already working provocatively, underscoring the narrative and sub-narratives relating to cultural and religious hatred and cruelty, as well as love and compassion, especially given that musicians and student singers were working in a religious setting
Perhaps there are more appropriate or different kinds of immersive audience experience that could have been undertaken to challenge the audience beyond the bounds of the Passion of Christ narrative to underscore those concerns of interfaith and interpersonal cruelty across time?
Summary
The performance explored in this paper aimed to impact its audiences by stimulating a deep emotional response and critical reflection on some specific aspects of the inequities in society. In developing a project around Easter, I aimed to engage audiences into both thinking about its narrative and feeling its affect in the context of ongoing human suffering in the modern world.
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