It’s good to talk. And the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) did some good talking together late last month during our 800th Jubilee Mission Congress at the Angelicum University in Rome. Friars, Sisters, contemplative nuns and lay Dominicans discussed such difficult issues for today’s preaching as Islam, refugees, and the use and abuse of social media. We heard from theologians, web experts, seasoned pastors and missionaries in dangerous places. We forged new friendships and international collaborations over Italian food and wine, in a city which has baptised the very best of classical culture, and where the Divine Light himself seems to radiate through the Mediterranean sun.
In his closing speech, Fr Bruno Cadoré, master of the order, reminded us that we are on a journey, with people often very different from us, to whom we must speak of Christ prayerfully, studiously and receptively: with gesture, not just words. Then he took us into silence. A young dancer made her way down the steps of the lecture theatre as I introduced the final item of the congress: Spirit of Fire, by Eliot Smith Company.
Forget “liturgical dance” and Mexican waves behind the altar. Here, we saw the Word made flesh. You see, St Dominic’s life story is frankly not that exciting. It has none of the drama of the martyrs, the romance of St Francis or the heroic labours of St Teresa of Calcutta.
St Dominic (1170-1221) was an Augustinian canon of Caleruega Cathedral in Spain. He prayed, studied and cared for the poor. On his way to Denmark to secure a bride for Prince Ferdinand, he encountered the Cathar heretics in southern France. He converted many of them. Seeing a need for wandering preachers, he formed a band of brethren and eventually got papal approval for the Order of Preachers. As Private Eye would say, “Ermm, that’s it.”
But in dance we saw why this quiet saint’s mother dreamt that he would set the world ablaze. The Cathar heretics, a mainly poor and oppressed people, had easily and understandably succumbed to the Gnostic belief that the physical world, including their own sick, undernourished bodies, was evil. For them the spiritual life was about escaping from the body. But is our own world so different, where we struggle with body image, where oppression and starvation continue and the humanity of the unborn, the elderly and the poor is denied?
Eliot Smith Company, in its grace and honesty of movement, reminded us that we are each made, wonderfully and uniquely, in the image and likeness of God. Eliot, the choreographer and lead dancer, was especially inspired by St Dominic’s words: “Would you have me study off dead skins when people are dying of hunger?” We felt his gut-wrenching compassion.
The structure of a church building, where Dominicans pray in word, music, procession and silence, was brought alive: the theatre itself seemed to dance. And Dominic’s journey to the pope was revealed as a burning dynamic of preaching that would take Dominicans into the furthest reaches of the mind with Thomas Aquinas, the conversion of hardened sinners with Catherine of Siena, contemplative art with Fra Angelico and human rights with Bartolomé de la Casas.
This dance performance was, I believe, a blessed convergence of our Catholic faith and the very best in contemporary culture.
Eliot Smith Company, based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, is a fast-emerging contemporary dance group. Eliot’s MISSA, inspired by the Mass, was a student fundraiser for Westminster Cathedral in 2011. After graduating, he set up in his native Newcastle. Many of his performances (three supported by the Arts Council) have been in Newcastle’s Dominican church, which is deeply involved in the thriving artistic life of the city. While not all of Eliot’s dancers share his deep Catholic faith, they are generous, thoughtful young artists, spiritual searchers touched by the “beautiful warm energy” of their Dominican audience, who made sure they were welcomed as friends and well fed. It was good to see the artists feeling at home, being their fun and versatile selves.
The Church in St Dominic’s time was not shy about using all the arts to preach the Gospel to people’s imaginations. Pray God gives us that confidence back. Works like Eliot’s need to travel, so that, in the words of principal dancer Gemma Paganelli, “beyond the movement and the body” we “will look for that which cannot be spoken”.
Fr Dominic White OP is a chaplain of Newcastle and Northumbria Universities, and arts officer at St Dominic’s, Newcastle. He is the author of The Lost Knowledge of Christ: Contemporary Spiritualities, Christian Cosmology and the Arts (Liturgical Press, 2015). You can view Spirit of Fire at http://bit.ly/2jlFDLe (from 2.02 approx)
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