Friday & Saturday, February 9 & 10, 2024 (7pm)
Saturday, February 10, 2024 (2pm)
CENTER FOR THE ARTS
Wesleyan University
Middletown, CT
$20 general public; $15 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students; $8 Wesleyan students, youth under 18
“Liturgy|Order|Bridge is…inspired by communal embodiment in the Black church.”
—Berkshire Magazine
“In our gardens flowers grow to human scale, liturgical vestments adorn more than one body at the same time — we just might bloom ourselves as we sing together, clap together, find virtuosity in a chorus of step touches, and bear witness.”
—Deborah Goffe
Scapegoat Garden, directed by Deborah Goffe MA ’19, presents the latest iteration of Liturgy|Order|Bridge, a participatory dance ritual that fuses sacred traditions and secular performance modalities to make porous the border between audience and performance. Calling on Black church traditions, a group of performers, along with a chorus of local artists and change-makers, brings guests into a collective score of movement, clapping, and vocalization.
Drawing from practices of Black cultural and religious life, the work is a contemporary ceremony for gathering—through acts of care, hospitality, and shared witness. Liturgy|Order|Bridge stages an encounter through which participants can identify and establish shared connections among and to one another in ways that ripple out beyond the performance itself.
Liturgy|Order|Bridge has been developed with support from Creative Capital; and from the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) “New Work New England” program, whose support is made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Rescue Plan, Seedlings Foundation, the Fund for the Arts at NEFA, and individual donors.
The work was also incubated during a Pillow Lab Residency at Jacob’s Pillow, and is co-commissioned by the Prior Performing Arts Center at the College of the Holy Cross.
An early iteration of the piece was part of New England Dance on Tour at Wesleyan in February 2020.
