First Light: A Passion Play for Hertford

"First light. Here it comes. Tomorrow."

Yesh has come to the city to complete his mission of the last three years. But the authorities have him in their sights and one of his friends has different plans for him. There's just time for a last takeaway curry before Yesh must face what he has come to do.

First Light is a new Passion Play by Hertford playwright Kate Miller, a fresh re-imagining of the events of Easter from a modern perspective. Directed by National Theatre actor Trevor Michael Georges, it brings together a 2000-year-old story with the dreams, fears and struggles of 21st-Century Britain.

With a cast of professional actors and Hertford people, and featuring original music created by Hertford musicians, First Light offers an engaging, and at times surprising, look at the last days of Jesus' life.

First Light will be performed at St Andrew's Church during Holy Week. Performances will be on:
Good Friday (3 April) 7.30pm and Holy Saturday (4 April) 2.30pm & 7.30pm. Tickets on sale soon.

'First Light': A Passion Play for Hertford by Kate Miller. Directed by Trevor Michael Georges. Music by Harold Chaplin, Katie Seaton and Maria Henriksson-Bell. Suitable for people of all faiths or none. Age 8+.

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Peter Gabriel - The Feeling Begins.

Of beauty and affirmation (2)

I'm currently reading It was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God which returns me to my earlier reflections on the nature of beauty because the book contains a chapter on 'Beauty transfigured' by Adrienne Chaplin.

Chaplin begins with some art historical reflections by arguing that the concept of beauty has been absent from and even inimical to modern art. Beauty has been associated with the sentimental and shallow while the purpose of modern art was to subvert and to shock. She quotes Barnett Newman as saying, "The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty."

This changes, she suggests, in the early 1990s as art critics and others begin discussing the concept of beauty once again. She contrasts the Regarding Beauty and Sensation exhibitions suggesting that Sensation was "the last gasp of the modernist belief in art as agent of social confrontation and change, while Regarding Beauty heralding the beginning of a renewed focus on beauty and "aesthetic" experience."

This latter perception would seem to be disproved by subsequent events as the Sensation artists went on to become major figures within contemporary art retaining their ability, as has contemporary art generally, to shock. At the same time, beauty has not generally become a major strand of artistic creation or criticism in the way that Chaplin envisaged in 2000. In her comments on modern art, Chaplin does not seem to acknowledge the interest, attraction or beauty which modern art sees in the 'found object' or the 'ready-made' or the way in which later generations see beauty in art which was once perceived as 'ugly' or 'shocking', as is evidenced by the repeated success of exhibitions showing work from the early to mid modern period.

Chaplin then highlights the confusion which exists regarding definitions of beauty. Entering this debate means entering "a complex interdisciplinary web of theories and views". Where, she asks, "in this jungle of views and opinions should Christians position themselves?"

Firstly, she suggests we need to question aspects of our own tradition including abandoning the Platonic conception of "a two-tier world in which earthly beauty is either a mere shadow of or a pointer to another higher world of capital B beauty." Beauty, she writes, "whatever may eventually decide it means, is an integral feature of the one world created by God and deserves to be honoured exactly as such." Secondly, we need to nuance the idea that God is beautiful as this is a term very rarely used of God in the Bible and which is often seen as "frivolous, seductive or deceptive." A more accurate attribution to God, she argues, is that of glory but glory seen in relation to the self-sacrificial love of Christ which "passes through the ugliness of the cross."

Chaplin then undercuts this significant perception by stating that, "although this account of the "beauty" of Christ may help us gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of the cross, it does not help us very much with the question of beauty in art or nature." I would say exactly the opposite, that this perception helps us to see the beauty of modern art which embraces offence, pain, darkness, death, and ugliness.

Next Chaplin highlights the definition of beauty given by Aquinas as "that which pleases when seen." She nuances this definition by stating that "something may please because it is striking, or stunning or just plain intriguing"; it does not have to be ""pleasing" in a conventional or confirming way." Again, this would seem to encompass the possibility of finding beauty, as modern art has done, in pop, kitsch, the ready-made, and the found object but Chaplin's contrasts in this section - strip malls, highways, subway platforms - suggest not. These are "ugly urban scenes" where there is nothing that "calls for our more focussed attention." Modern art, I suggest, operates within Chaplin's nuanced version of Aquinas' definition but disagrees with her examples of ugliness on the basis of her own definition of beauty.

Aquinas' statement is not, to my mind, a definition of beauty because it depends entirely on subjective responses which will differ instread of providing objective criteria on which many can agree. Chaplin notes that beauty "always appears in particular historical and social contexts" and so is "not the same for everyone at all times" meaning that "we cannot point to an objective feature of something beautiful, which can be considered to constitute the kernel of its beauty." So, if Aquinas' statement is useful to us but not as a definition, how is it to be understood? I would suggest that it can be understood as a way of seeing; an affirmative approach to life which is looking for what we perceive as pleasing, attractive, intriguing, striking or stunning (to use Chaplin's phrases). 

So, we have two perceptions of beauty drawn from the Christian tradition which Chaplin articulates but does not clearly link within the argument made in this chapter. I, however, want to say that they are synergous; that an affirmative way of seeing is analogous to Christ's embrace of human pain and suffering in order to redeem it.

Chaplin ends her chapter on a similar note by highlighting a third exhibition, A Broken Beauty, in which was exhibited works which invite the viewer "to consider the body's capacity for beauty despite its brokenness, in the midst of its brokenness, and, ironically, because of its brokenness." I agree with this perception of beauty, which I think accords with what I have outlined above, but am unclear as to how Chaplin reaches this point through her use of the materials and ideas which she considers in this chapter.

Finally, I think that the picture she paints of modern and contemporary art in this chapter confuses the issue as, in my view, many of the perceptions of beauty which she wishes to commend to us are exemplified by the very examples of modern and contemporary art which she seeks to critique.

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Nickel Creek - Seven Wonders.

Greenbelt diary (5)

Adrienne Chaplin had a go at defining art in her session exploring why we should bother with art. She did acknowledge the difficulties of definitions but suggested that what artists do is to make sense of the world as it appears and feels to us. So that good art teaches us to see, hear, sense and feel better; articulates the way we experience life as felt. Or, perhaps, as Richard Harries puts it in his introduction to Forms of Transcendence: The Art of Roger Wagner (a book I bought at the Festival and read in the queue for The Rising) "every work of art is a deeply felt response to life seen in a particular way."

The most interesting idea which Chaplin posited was that of the importance of touch. Touch, she suggested, is the foundation of the senses. Touch is the first and last sense for us in birth and death, sensations via our skin cannot be avoided or eradicated, and touch is the basis of many lingual metaphors such as tough, smooth, prickly, warm etc.

I saw the Cloud of Witness installation and Gethsemene data projection but wasn't impressed or moved by either. I enjoyed Meryl Doney's guided tour of the Visionaries exhibition where I caught up with Martin Wilson and heard a little about the photographic project he had worked on at this year's Festival to be shown at next years.

Martyn Joseph conversed and performed with three emerging and engaging artists in The Rising and then with poet and lyricist Stewart Henderson. Humourous and profound by turn and in tandem, this was a performance littered with lingual brilliance. At the end they took questions from the audience which led both to state why Greenbelt is so important to them. As for many who go, the combination of friendships, art, questions, and challenge make it 'church' for them (for a similar statement from a punter, click here for a post by Steve Lawson).

While waiting for Athlete I made what for me this year was a rare foray over to the Performance Cafe but was rewarded by a short but sweet set from Sister Jones. Their folk/r&b style was fused with gospel lyricism to great effect and in a seemingly effortless fashion.

Athlete played a great gig but are in need of some U2-style reinvention. The new album, Black Swan, has more light and shade than Beyond the Neighbourhood but both are locked into the anthemic template of the excellent Tourist without tapping into the originality of Vehicles and Animals. Maybe they need to take their own advice and make some magical mistakes. Despite this, they sent me home on a high with the sense that it will be alright and that hope is never light years away.

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Athlete - Black Swan Song.

Greenbelt diary (3)

Alistair McGrath

Pete Rollins

I queued to hear Rob Bell first thing and didn't get in but did see Sam Norton who was also in the queue. From there I went to hear Chris Dingle speak on music and faith. He argued that all music is inherently sacred and provides a glimpse of eternity as we lose our sense of time while listening to exist for a time in the eternal now. Clearly this depends on the extent to which we lose ourselves in the music but I've certainly had that experience and once read an interesting interview with Van Morrison who, at that time, viewed his music and concerts as inducing that experience and taking the listener into the heart of silence.

The next item on my schedule was the Simone Weil celebration with Grahame Davies and Michael Symmons Roberts. This rapidly became less of a celebration and more of a critique as, while the contributors were challenged by Weil's attempts to eliminate the gap between how she lived and what she believed, they were also disturbed her martyr complex, jewish self-hate, and egotistical impersonality. She had a brilliant mind and it is fascinating to see someone so intellectually rigorous come to faith in Christ. She also wrote beautifully and this is perhaps the clue to the loss of celebration from the debate as, while we heard about Weil from the two contributors and from their writings about her, we never actually heard from Weil herself. Her writings were not read or quoted at any length, so we never heard her beautiful writing or the reasoning of her brilliant mind and, therefore, it was possible for us to focus on the issues that we have with her death at the expense of celebrating her work.

I hadn't intended to hear Alistair McGrath but, on arriving at the wrong venue, decided to stick around and appreciated his debunking of Richard Dawkins (although much of it I had already read in The Dawkins Delusion). A very structured speaker, he neatly summed up his argument in this talk as being that the New Atheism represents a sense of anger that religion is very much still here when, by the reckoning of secularists, it should have died out years ago. The arguments of Dawkins et al have actually made it easier to talk about God now than was the case ten years ago and we should have confidence to engage in the debate because of our understanding that Christianity was gifted to us by God and of the interest that there is i our culture to talk about God.

Mark Vernon would have been unlikely to agree with McGrath's sense of confidence. He is both a former priest and former atheist who as an agnostic is a tutor at 'The School of Life', a new organisation offering short courses on life, love, work, play, and politics. Vernon argued that agnosticism has always been a part of Christianity and offered seven tips for being a religious agnostic; the practices of questioning, love, knowledge, writing, negation, suspension, and wonder. However, if we accept that these practices (which acknowledge the existence of doubt in faith and of limits to our human knowing) have consistently been a part of Christianity, where is the need to practice them outside of Christianity itself. It seemed to me that in this session Vernon was essentially describing his return to a nuanced faith as opposed to any sort of journey away from it.

Vernon's session was followed by a fairly uproarious panel session on the theme of art, propaganda and evangelism. Uproarious, primarily because Billy Childish was playing the lovable anarchist to the hilt ably assisted by Angie Fadel. One felt for Adrienne Chaplin and Rita Brock gamely trying to make their serious academicly rigorous contributions in the face of Childish's faux 'I no nothing' stance coupled with occasional shafts of wit and profundity. There are times when the dryness of logic, reason and catagorisation are revealed and this seemed like it might be one of those occasions. A concensus of sorts was cobbled together around the notion that communicating a pre-conceived message or idea through art doesn't do justice to art and that, currently, conceptual artists are those most inclined to deliberately and cheerfully throw themselves into this faultline.

There was more iconclasm to be had as Pete Rollins took to the stage to argue that identification with Christ is dereliction, as we identify with one who, at the cross, is stripped of identity and meaning. 'Religionless Christianity' sees Christ resurrected in the community which bears his name as our identification with him enables us to escape the system that defines us and take responsibility for the dreaming of new possibilities. Rollins uses Slavoj Žižek and 'Death of God' theology to flesh out what Dietrich Bonhoeffer may have meant by 'religionless Christianity'. In doing so, he argued for a closing of the gap between how we live and what we believe that was at least as radical as that of Simone Weil.

Rollins argues that we often treat Church as a sop to the lack of radicality in our lives i.e. that hearing about the need for loving sacrifice becomes a subsitute for actually living sacrifical and loving lives. It is, of course, entirely possible that, for those of us present, listening to Rollins is a part of the same game giving us the frisson of radicality without the need to follow through but the challenge was to the real transformation of rebirth.

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Sex Pistols - Anarchy In The UK.

c4m webpage update (19)

There are three new stories on the commission4mission webpage this week. First off, a round up of some recent press coverage; an interview with Henry Shelton about his commission at Queen's Hospital (to be dedicated by the Bishop of Barking on Tuesday 1st September) and an exhibition review that I wrote for Art & Christianity.

This was followed by updated information about the first two events in our autumn programme. Henry's Stations of the Cross are being exhibited at St Barnabas Walthamstow as part of the E17 Art Trail in September. Then in October our artists will be exhibiting at All Saints Goodmayes as part of their Festival weekend which also features a concert organised by c4m member, Alexander Chaplin.

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Tom Waits - Hang On St. Christopher.

This week at the C4M webpage

This week on the commission4mission webpage we have featured the following stories:

• profiles of commission4mission members, Harvey Bradley and Alexander Chaplin;


• the award to commission4mission of a grant to produce a catalogue of commission4mission artists and activities;


• an article featuring the launch of commission4mission in 'The Month'; and


• a post introducing commission4mission.

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The Innocence Mission - O Lord Of Light.

commission4mission members & news

Peter Shorer

Harvey Bradley

Rosalind Hore

Joy Rousell Stone

Michael Creasey

commission4mission is growing following our launch at the beginning of March. Our artist members who are available for commissions are as follows:

• Harvey Bradley: My creative work includes: Stoneware and Porcelain pottery (domestic with ecclesiastical commissions); Oil Paintings (reflective, figurative subjects that are open to prayerful interpretation); and Designs for banners (carried out by Emmanuel banner group).
• Alexander Chaplin has been appointed Music Director of East London Chorus from April 2009. Educated as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral, he held the organ scholarships at Lincoln Cathedral and Lincoln College, Oxford, where he read Music, before studying conducting and organ at the Royal College of Music under Neil Thomson, Edwin Roxburgh and Nicholas Danby; he participated in masterclasses with George Hurst, Paul Goodwin and Sir Peter Maxwell-Davies. He graduated from the RCM with distinction and as a major prize-winner. In February 2008 Alexander was invited to participate in a competitive masterclass in St Petersburg with Alexander Polishchuk, from which he emerged as one of the prizewinning conductors.
• Anne Creasey: Textile artist and embroider working in a variety of styles from traditional to abstract and experimental. Also very interested in helping people discover their spirituality through the creative process.
• Michael Creasey: A serious amateur painter who has sold a good amount of work over the years, including a number of commissions. I am not especially a religious painter, as I mainly paint portraits and figure studies, but I do also paint abstract works which tap into emotional and spiritual aspects of my life and reflect my Christianity.
• Jonathan Evens paints in a symbolic expressionist style and has facilitated the involvement of churches in a range of public art projects. His arts journalism has featured in publications including 'Art & Christianity' and 'The Church Times'. He is also a creative writer (meditations, poetry, short stories, and a blog) and is the Vicar of St John the Evangelist Seven Kings. Jonathan is the Secretary for commission4mission.
• David Hawkins: The Bishop of Barking is the Patron of commission4mission and a practising artist in his own right. Predominantly a landscape painter, he has also participated in a collaborative art project with Pippa Hale and Stuart Tarbuck for Situation Leeds. Mene Mene located 13 New Testament texts around Leeds city centre in a variety of formats from high profile banners and adverts on bus shelters, to more intimate plaques on benches and handwritten signs. Some were affirming and instructive, whilst others were more predictive and challenging.
• Rosalind Hore: I am a sculptor and painter of Christian subject – Christ figures, nativity sets, Ecce Homo, Stations of the Cross etc. I work in clay, plaster, concrete (figures can also be bronze cast at the foundry). My paintings are mostly in acrylic of the events in the life of Christ. Rosalind’s Pieta is currently on display at St Laurence’s Upminster.
• Mark Lewis: Mark is an artist, silversmith, Arts Lecturer at London Metropolitan University and Chair of Faith & Image. He has undertaken drawing and painting in a Christian context and has designed and made Church plate.
• Henry Shelton is a noted painter of religious art in a contemporary style. He trained as an apprentice draughtsman in a London studio developing his drawing skills in lettering and fine art. After 15 years he set up his own studio receiving many commissions to design for such clients as the Science Museum, Borough Councils, private and corporate bodies. In recent years he has worked designing in studios across the world, including Hong Kong and the USA. Throughout this time he has painted Christian art and his commissions include an Ascension installed as an Altar piece in the Church of the Saviour, Chell Heath; the Millennium clock tower in Goodmayes and, most recently, the memorial etched glass windows in All Saints Church, Goodmayes, depicting events in the life of Jesus. Henry is the Chair of commission4mission.
• Peter Shorer: Museum trained Conservator and Archeologist commissioned to mould original antiquities for reproduction in bronze, gold, silver and pewter.
• Joy Rousell Stone: Studied under John Nash, Edward Bawden, Stanley Spencer, Edward Ardizzone at Royal College of Art. Many one man shows. Favourite subject matters: The Holy Land, Egypt, Greece, Italy (especially Assisi) and USA. All media. Retired Head of Art & Design at The Plume School, Maldon, Essex.
• Martin Webster: I am interested in promoting Christian Art as a form of engaging with the gospel. I paint (oils and acrylics) particularly 'sacred spaces' usually forest/landscape views.

We are currently planning towards the following events:

• Four commission4mission members will exhibit in the Pentecost Festival Art Exhibition (30th May at Central Hall Westminster).
• An art workshop for the 'Fun in the Park' event being organised by Holy Trinity Barkingside on Saturday 13th June 2009. Workshop participants will be asked to create an artwork that says something about themselves. These will be hung on a large wooden cross which will be displayed at Holy Trinity Barkingside after the event.
• An invitation to exhibit at All Saints West Ham for the West Ham Festival from 20th - 27th June 2009.
• A concert given by the East London Chorus conducted by Alexander Chaplin at All Saints' Goodmayes on 17th October 2009. Artworks by commission4mission members will also be on display.
• exhibition (2nd - 7th November) and Study Day (7th November) featuring the Bishop of Barking, Dean of Chelmsford Cathedral, DAC Chair and commission4mission artists at Chelmsford Cathedral.
  

We have recently been awarded a grant by the London Over The Border Council to produce a catalogue of commission4mission artists and activities to encourage Churches to commission contemporary Christian Art.

We have also been contacted by Wallspace, a gallery based in All Hallows on the Wall, as part of promoting networks and partnerships exploring the relationship between contemporary art and spirituality.

We have recently set up a website for commission4mission which can be viewed by clicking here.

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Maurice Durufle - Requiem, Op. 9, Agnus Dei.