Ever since I was a child, I loved playing Mass. I hated actually sitting and kneeling and standing on cue during Catholic Mass with family, but there was something beautiful and mysterious and eternal about the ritual that called to me. I had no interest in simply watching and following along. I wanted to participate fully. I longed to be the priest, to be the server, to fling around the censor, and prod people with the collection basket and light candles and consecrate the body and blood of Jesus. (If truth be told, I wanted to be Jesus, but that’s another story.) Playing mass in the living room with my brothers and sisters and friends and stuffed animals gave me that chance to fully immerse myself in the experience of ritual magic of trans-substantiation. I thought I’d lost this chance forever until last weekend when I attended Fool’s Mass by a group from New York called Dzieci, “an experimental theatre ensemble dedicated to a search for the ‘sacred’ through the medium of theatre.”
I found Dziezi as I’ve found many of my current passions: through a chance meeting on the Internet. I’d been hunting down practitioners of experimental theatre methods as part of a quest to realize a lifelong dream, not to play mass, but to experience theatre experiments as described in a lifelong favorite film: My Dinner with Andre. Ever since I saw the film many years ago, I’ve harbored a fantasy in the back of my head to recreate some version of Jerzy Grotowski’s experiments as described by Andre Gregory in the film. I wanted to gather artists musicians and dancers in the woods and create experiences based on myth and folklore, religion and ritual. I dreamed of taking part in multi-modal art happenings not unlike children playing Mass, only with big people, musicians and dancers, and, of course, fools like me who are ready to dive in deep. And while I like to be entertained as much as anybody, what I’ve always wanted ultimately from art is an immersion in deep waters, in life-changing, limit-challenging experiences.
And so Google sent me to Dzieci’s website. I was enchanted. It just so happened that Dzieci was performing a Fool’s Mass (as well as Macbet) in Philadelphia, where my son lives. I bought my tickets, got on a plane and took my son with me to see my favorite Shakespeare play and to play Mass.
The two performances were held in a converted living room theater called PSALM in a grand and leafy residential neighborhood. As we approached the house, we were greeted by an eager kielbasa bearing gypsy, who invited me to take a bite. I knew I wouldn’t be disappointed. The cast warmed us up with food and libations, flattery and fortunetelling. The inventive, intensified version of Macbeth was delightful, but it was the interaction with the players who partied with us in artfully sustained character that created the possibility for the kind of paratheatrical experience I was looking for.
The next morning’s Fool’s Mass took us in even deeper. I didn’t actually get to play the priest or the altar boy, but I did get to revisit my imaginings about art and dance and theatre. The interactive sacrifice of the Mass consecrated by the medieval lunatics chilled me to the marrow. (I can still feel the gaze of one baby-doll-clutching woman. I do believe she looked right into me and saw what I cannot bare to see.) I never before experienced Mass as honoring the divine feminine, but this Mass certainly did
More than anything, I’m left with more questions.
What if all that I imagine about art, theatre, film, dance didn’t simply entertain and inspire, but were real? What if the ritual was not just for play, not simply for performance for someone else to watch, but for something bigger and deeper and more real than real? What if something more risky were at stake? What happens when players and audience agree to allow themselves to be truly challenged, to be altered by the experience? What if baby-doll-clutching woman wasn’t just acting and really did see something unbearable in me? What if what’s next for me (and a few other fools) is to camp out in the woods and play with a band of misfits to find out?
adventures in slow learning 