Review
Art
Community
Culture
5 min read

Ceremony's superpower is on show at Berwick Parade

Reinventing historic touchpoints between faith and community.

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

A projected image of a person dressed as a mermaid being pushed on a trolley falls on the wall and windows of an old barracks.
The Maltings (Berwick) Trust, Jennifer Charlton Photography.

Watch the parade

Ceremony is beating a retreat. Although wheeled out for major life events: naming newborns, marriage and bidding last goodbyes, and for grand state and civic occasions, standing on ceremony is frowned upon in day-to-day life. Ritual is treated warily, in case it creates an ‘us and them’ chasm between participants, seen as elite, and spectators, presumed to be condemned to disempowering passivity. 

But what if, far from alienating people, the power of ritual, ceremony and spectacle could be a force for engagement? The church and military both have a history of creating, reinventing and refreshing rituals to meet changing social needs. The army chaplaincy is an invention of the late eighteeneeth century, responding to the move towards more settled communities of soldiers, requiring spiritual support. Drumhead altars, a centrepiece of November’s Festival of Remembrance, have origins going back into the mists of time, but quite how far back it is hard to say with certainty.  

Processions and festivities for holy days are more apparent in Catholic countries, with Seville’s Semana Santa parades springing to mind, but well -dressing, May Queens, harvest festivals and Remembrance Sunday reveal a continued desire for entwining of church and community rituals, across faith traditions. 

Art’s ability to step into the ceremonial space and create moments of communion, as well as giving voice to underrepresented groups, has been evident since Surrealism. British Surrealist Eileen Agar’s crustacean strewn ‘Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse’, 1936, attracted collective gasps when she wore it in London. In Sao Paolo in 1931, Brazilian modernist Flavio de Carvalho had to be rescued by police when he walked, hatless, in the opposite direction of a Corpus Christi procession, and the crowd wanted to beat him up. 

Artists can also create spectacles of togetherness and joy. 

Berwick Barracks is a challenging site for community arts. The massive walls and monumental stone-grey interior of Britian’s first purpose-built barracks is reminiscent of eighteenth century experiments in prison design. Even the windows on the living quarters, confirming it is not a prison, are tiny-paned and meanly spaced, like an afterthought dotted reluctantly on the overbearing grey expanse. 

But over the weekend of Berwick Parade, the barracks’ forbidding walls turned into a living portrait of the border town. Under a piercingly brilliant starlit sky – it was the night of the six planet alignment – an audience gathered in the middle of the parade ground to watch themselves, neighbours, friends and family members move across the barrack walls. Artist Matthew Rosier’s projection at x10 magnification transformed the townspeople into giants, and the forbidding military structure of Berwick Barracks into a canvas for joy and creativity. 

Berwick Parade shows you can draw community from a stone, forbidding, large grey stones at that. Paraders and audience were dazzled and dignified, seeing themselves anew. 

The dancing, riding and processing images were soundscaped by music from the repertoire of the Kings Own Scottish Borderers, who have their ceremonial base, and museum, at the barracks, accompanied by the Melrose and District Pipes and Drums. Positioned by the main gate, the musicians set the expectation of spectacle with the rousing music associated with marching bands, as Scotland the Brave gave way to Mairi’s Wedding, and then a medley of upbeat, om-papa outdoors tunes.  

Over 30 minutes, topped by veterans of the Kings Own Scottish Borderers and tailed by hi -vis vest wearing Berwick Parade production staff carrying metal barriers, a parade including processing clergy and the Bishop of Berwick, conga-ing medics in scrubs from Berwick Hospital, brownies, boys’ and girls' football teams, civic leaders in mayoral regalia, Morris, Highland and flamenco dancers, and midlife wild swimmers, shimmied across the walls. Berwick Riders Association were filmed on small ponies, so the magnified projection would not crop the riders into headless torsos. A wheelchair user crossed the expanse of barracks wall wearing a mermaid’s tail. Everybody involved was simultaneously true to life and larger than life. 

Consisting of 850 characters, some of Berwick’s residents played more than one role. “Ooh there’s Cheryl again” commented a spectator next to me, as another pageant of figures travelled across barracks’ perimeter. 

Speaking to Rossier the following morning, he revealed Parade participants had been filmed in the barracks, travelling across a10 metre stage. Magnification made these sequences large enough to cover one wall of the rectangular parade ground. Editing and projection created the appearance of participants entering at one corner and disappearing around the next.  

Movement filmed across short distances opened up participation in the Parade to people with mobility and health issues, in a way that physically journeying around the whole parade ground, repeated over three nights, never could. 

Filmed over six bitterly cold days, choreographer Chloe Sayers had to keep participants’ spirits and energy up as they devised ways of travelling across 10 metres that represented their personality, role and creativity. Sayers specialises with creating events with the public rather than professional dancers, and says that enabling people to express themselves through movement in spaces not always thought of as welcoming, breaks down barriers and creates a sense of ownership. 

Some of the funniest moments in Berwick Parade were rare breeds sheep hogging the limelight like divas, and children clowning around with policemen’s helmets and clipboards. Rosier says primary school years are a sweet spot for performance. ”I love the energy kids bring. We had all age groups, but the six- to 10-year-olds bring so much energy. They just bounce. They have no inhibitions but are good at following instructions. At 12 or 13 heads start to drop and they become more self-aware.” 

Rosier drew on his Irish Catholic mother’s tradition of ceremony and celebration with food and drinking, whether for a wedding or a funeral, to make Berwick Parade a fun place to hang out - food stalls included - beyond the performance. “I want people to have a nice time and not be subservient to the thing they have come to watch.” 

Berwick Parade shows you can draw community from a stone, forbidding, large grey stones at that. Paraders and audience were dazzled and dignified, seeing themselves anew. 

At King Charles’ coronation, the church’s ceremonial superpower was on display to the world. And as artists demonstrate, ceremony does not have to be confined to great occasions. Churches in all traditions can draw on their legacy of historic touchpoints between faith and community, to reinvent, reinstate and refresh rituals to engage with people’s contemporary concerns and hope. 

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Article
Culture
Easter
Romance
Theatre
6 min read

Hadestown hints at so much more

The subterranean stage hit resonates deeply.

Freya is a curate at St Mary's Church, Islington.

A theatrical staging shows a couple seperated by a man standing between them.
Eurydice and Orpheus separated.
Hadestown.com

Hadestown – a folk jazz opera interpretation of the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice – is currently flourishing in London’s West End. Like the myth upon which it is based, Anaïs Mitchell’s opus has had many iterations. I had been listening to these songs for a decade by the time I saw the stage show. As a Christian priest, I am used to relating all myths, narratives, and fables to the story of Christianity. And yet, it was not until I saw Hadestown performed that the resonance with the Christian “myth” hit me all at once.  

In the myth (and the musical), a hero goes down to the underworld to retrieve his beloved from Hades, god of the dead. On Holy Saturday (the day between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday), the church celebrates Christ’s descent to the dead and his freeing of imprisoned souls. This tradition is commonly known as the Harrowing of Hell. Art imagining this victory often depicts Jesus standing atop hell’s gates, ripped off their hinges, as he plunders the realm of a bound figure. Icons have Christ encircled in ripples of light as if he’s burst through the very walls of time and space to snatch his people from Death’s clutches. In some portrayals, he is pulling Adam and Eve – the original symbols of the rift in the God-humanity relationship – from their graves. The Harrowing of Hell receives more emphasis in Catholic and Orthodox traditions, but all Christians share some concept of Christ as rescuer, saviour, liberator.  

In the mythical world of Hadestown, something is broken. The seasons have collapsed, resources are scarce. Trouble in the underworld is causing everything to be off kilter in the overworld (not an uncommon concept in ancient thought). A contemporary audience can certainly relate to references to rising seas and widespread famine, as well as to the futility and despair permeating everyone’s inner monologue. The question the show poses is: can anyone break this cycle? Is there someone who could restore a broken relationship, rescue a soul back from the underworld…even make Spring come again?  

Humanity’s potential champion is Orpheus, a young man blessed with a supernatural gift for poetry and music. He is composing a melody “to fix what’s wrong”. When the song is finally sung, “Spring will come again” – the world will come “back into tune”, and “all the flowers will bloom”.  

The foil to Orpheus’s optimism is Eurydice, his lover. In this version, she is not killed but leaves for the underground realm of Hadestown, seeking food and shelter. I was moved afresh by her lament (‘Flowers’), sung in the depths of Hadestown’s mines, as Eurydice, like the prodigal son from St Luke’s story, realises what a mistake she has made. Hadestown’s inhabitants, it transpires, are not just trapped by the city walls – they are spiritually captive, indentured to Hades and his vision: eternal industry; perpetual war. Eurydice can no longer remember her beloved’s name, but she can remember that he could make flowers bloom in winter. She sings a petition for him to come and find her “lying in the bed [she] made.” 

We the audience know all along that Orpheus is coming, thanks to the song in the preceding act (‘Wait For Me’). Upon learning where Eurydice is, he undertakes the perilous descent to the underworld, all the while repeating “wait for me, I’m coming”. In a breathtaking moment of set design, the walls of Hadestown move aside in response to the beauty of Orpheus’s song. Eurydice’s prayer is answered by his sudden appearance, and his poignant invitation: “come home with me”.  

After the bows, the cast toast to the Orpheuses of the world, who show us things as they could be.

Orpheus is soon confronted, however, with the ugly reality of Hadestown. Eurydice has already signed her life away. Beaten and defeated, his innocent worldview shattered, Orpheus sings over and over “is it true?”. He is asking something more fundamental than if what is happening around him is real. He is demanding if this, the world that is, is the world that should be. Should we let the truth belong to those who “load the dice”, he asks?  

Hadestown’s walls take pity on Orpheus as they did before, echoing his song through the mines, where the workers – millions of other Eurydices – take up his song. The Dead-to-the-world realise they have been deceived, and remember who they were. And their faith starts to grow – that if Orpheus can walk out of Hades, then they can too. They want freedom.  

Persephone, Hades’ estranged queen, is won over by Orpheus. But Hades understands the truth about love: one flower starts a Spring. The fall of a kingdom begins with a crack in the wall. Unwilling to kill Orpheus because of Persephone, Hades instead sets up the famous tragic terms: if Orpheus can walk all the way to the surface without looking back to check Eurydice is behind him, freedom is theirs. It is a test Orpheus is doomed to fail, thanks to his experience in Hadestown. The mentality of the underworld has come to live in Orpheus’s head, and so “the path to paradise” becomes “the road to ruin”, and the story meets its inevitable end.  

And yet Orpheus does not fail as completely as he thinks. His musical gift has reconciled Persephone and Hades, and this has brought Spring to the world again. After the bows, the cast toast to the Orpheuses of the world, who show us things as they could be, and leave us with the responsibility to keep singing despite the circumstances, to reject despair, to hold on to that vision of every captive soul walking out of Hell. 

Myths tell us what we collectively fear and desire. Contemporary retellings show us how these longings have changed – or not. In what C.S. Lewis called the “true myth” of Christ, we see the fulfilment of Hadestown’s hopeful vision.  An early modern hymn describes Christ like Hadestown’s Orpheus – his presence “sees December turn’d to May”, making all the ground of the expectant “under-earth” turn to flowers. He is the one who has walked “the road that no one ever walked before”. The one who didn’t need to persuade the gods to empathise with him, because he was God. The one who was the perfect advocate for humankind, because he was human. Divinity without caprice, love without finitude: the one who experienced fear, temptation, ridicule – and yet did not turn back from the task. A peasant living under occupation: “this poor boy brought the world back into tune”.  

I was fortunate enough to see Melanie La Barrie in one of her final performances as Hadestown’s Hermes. Her voice gives the divine storyteller a godparental authority: La Barrie’s Hermes doesn’t so much narrate the story as prophesies it. At the inescapable end of the play, Hermes stands looking down like a graveside mourner, searching for the words to reignite the company. Hermes seems to have a divine vocation to keep telling the tale “regardless of how it ends” until it changes. This act is presented to us as faith, hope, resistance. In this new reality, where Spring has returned and the cosmic order has shifted, the tale might turn out differently upon the next telling, and so Hermes strikes up the band once more.  

Every year we sing the sad song again. The betrayal, the trial, the burial: the body in the tomb; the disciples in hiding. For so many, the-world-as-it-is feels like an endless Holy Saturday. The tradition of the Harrowing of Hell whispers to us to hold steady, because the rescuer is coming. “The darkest hour of the darkest night comes right before the dawn”, and a crack is appearing in the wall. 

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