SANCTUM; FRIDAY 13TH AND SATURDAY 14TH

It's a different world today than it was on Friday.  Things have shifted.  We are viewing life through altered lenses, and figuring out how to move ahead.  Something happened yesterday that brought this home to me.  Friends of ours took us to see a performance piece in Bristol by Chicago installation artist Theaster Gates. 

The piece was performed in the Temple Church, or rather the husk of the Temple Church, since it was bombed in WWII during the Bristol blitz.  Theaster Gates constructed a performance space called Sanctum in the beautiful wreckage of the church.  

In that space, from October 29th until November 21st, performances take place every hour, twenty-four hours a day, for twenty-four days.  The programme is unlisted so you go with no clue what you're going to see.  You get what you get. 

When we arrived a concert was underway.  A group of young musicians performed experimental pieces.  
There was an organizer/drummer, and a bassist.  The rest of the musicians were disabled with varying degrees of disability.  The singer had Down's syndrome, and a percussionist and keyboard player were confined to wheelchairs, with obvious physical and mental disabilities.  The music was cacophonous and wonderful, the sounds cleverly linked together by the bassist.  The musicians were having a great time, and so was the audience.  People smiled, moved by the sheer joy of the young performers.  There was a feeling of relief in the air.

The second performer took the stage.  She was a pretty dark haired young woman with a flowing dress and a headscarf.  She announced that her performance would be a chant, in Arabic, of a prayer... a prayer to the 'Oneness'.  It felt like the room was holding its breath.

She was visibly nervous.  The chant would be a repetition of the same sequence of sentences for an hour.  She pointed to a blackboard nearby on which she had written the meaning of the chant's words.  She explained that she normally doesn't explain, but in the light of Friday's events in Paris she felt she should.  She fiddled with her white headscarf.  She told us that she was born and raised in Reading and that her father was Iranian, as was she, but then she added that she'd gone to Catholic school.  It felt like she was apologizing for who she was, and trying to distance herself from it.  

She had performed this chant every day of the installation, but one hour later each day, facing east while she sang.  She nervously adjusted her headscarf, and said that we could join in if we wanted, that we didn't have to look east, that we could look wherever we wanted.  At this point a man got up, his face hard, he looked angry.  He crossed the little aisle to his wife, just in front of us, and bent down, and said to her, loud enough that we could hear, "I'll see you outside," and he left the venue abruptly before the singer sang a note.  

The young woman took her position, and faced east, and began her chant.  You sensed complicated, disturbed thoughts flying around the room... you couldn't help it.  You had those thoughts yourself.

I felt badly for her.  For the previous weeks she had performed this same chant.  But I would bet her performance this Saturday was received very differently from the one she had performed Friday afternoon.  You could practically feel everyone silently, earnestly, paying too much attention, trying to prove that they could be normal, even though images of the news coverage of the Paris attacks were branded in our brains.  The fact that the piece was being performed in a bombed out Christian church only added heft to unspoken thoughts.  I would like to think that we were the same as we were the day before the attacks, but it felt obvious she was in front of a room full of people trying to come to terms with what had happened in Paris the day before. 

Yet there we all were, a group of people gathered together to watch a performance in a public space, in a large ethnically diverse city.  There were no armed guards.  Nobody seemed to be frightened or nervous, except for the girl.  So, as different as things may be, we were still essentially the same; trying hard to live normal lives, trying to accept people as individuals, and trying not to let a lunatic fringe dictate how we are.