A new work on the New York stage by the sublimely gifted composer, performer, and high priestess of modern-day ritual Heather Christian is always a cause for celebration. But in the midst of this winter of our discontent, her latest piece, the ravishing Terce: A Practical Breviary, now playing at the Space at Irondale in Park Slope, feels almost like a benediction. Described by Christian as a “wild riff” on a 9 a.m. Catholic mass that addresses the Holy Spirit through “the lens of the Divine Feminine,” it is the second of a planned eight such flights of liturgical fancy based on what are known as Breviaries, masses that have been sung at specific times of day by cloistered nuns and monks since the 11th Century.
The first, Prime, tied to the 6 a.m. service, was performed as a podcast under the auspices of Playwrights Horizons at the height of lockdown in 2020. Still to come, Christian says, are a film with a live score, either a virtual reality production or an extravagant performance for an audience of one, a rock concert, a concerto, a dance piece, and a pop-up concert at a train station. “Since the pandemic, there seems to be an appetite for this kind of material,” she told me from her house in Beacon, NY. “We’ve all gone a little more introspective, become more comfortable with being uncomfortable, with stewing in existential feelings, and with questioning how we’re living.”
Idiosyncratic takes on Catholic rituals and gorgeously eclectic reinventions of liturgical music, fueled by a deeply personal gnostic vision, are Christian’s bread and butter. In 2017’s Animal Wisdom, at the Bushwick Starr, she gave us an intimate portrait of the (literal) ghosts of her Mississippi childhood, culminating in a 20-minute Requiem Mass in pitch blackness, inviting us to both connect with and let go of the spirits haunting our lives. In her 2022 Oratorio For Living Things, she used the voices of twelve singers to turn an Off-Broadway theater into a sacred space for contemplating our collective fate on earth and place in the universe, with music so ethereally beautiful that it brought many in the audience to tears (reader, I was one of them).
