the egidien draft

Congregation: to come together, or the act of gathering, or the loudest lacuna of the current moment, or a string of failed attempts at what I wish was an integrated part of daily life. The congregation is also the group of people sitting in church pews, the audience of the egidien draft, to whom I ask, on what grounds is congregation even possible?

Shifting between the different performers one might find in a church — a host, a dancer, a bride, an organist, a tour guide, a choir director, and a priest — I guide the audience through different frames in the church’s architecture. The high ceilings, the drone of the organ pipes, the art historical artifacts strewn about the place, the pulpit, and the reverb are all put to work inhibiting and facilitating the audience’s experience of congregation.

Queering the usual modes of inhabiting a church, we enter through the stage door, we use the altar as a table, we roll a piano, we go where we aren’t supposed to. With a dance, a historical guided tour, and a sermon, I gently hold together the impossibility of togetherness while operationalizing the building’s architectural technologies of congregation: resonance, symmetry, light, the quiet cool of stone. Slowly, a mise-en-abîme of frames opens up: projections, assumptions, customs, biases, and of course the frame in which we are assembled.

The work is an extended argument with air, and the frames it passes through. I mean ‘air’ as the holy spirit, as energy, as breath, as what is hard to put into words because words too are frames air passed through.

That’s why the piece is called the egidien draft – draft as in air running through a space, a window accidentally blown open, an uncomfortable chill, a relief on a hot day. I also mean draft as in an attempt, a trial, an ongoing practice of manipulating, reordering, and revising sacred and secular frames of congregation.

This piece was the recipient of the DAAD award for excellence done by a foreigner in a German University.

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