“Like Maenads lost in festival revelry, these performers extended beyond themselves—earnestly transmitting the spiritualism at the heart of Athey and Griffin’s operatic spectacle. At its greatest pitch, this multitonal sound took over the bodies, minds, and emotions of performers and viewers alike. There was no room left to think about anything else, as these artists brought an audience into presence. A woman in front of me began to weep, and it took a full minute for her companion to put a gentle, comforting hand on her back. This was a tempest, whipping healing torrents of sound around the interior of a former house of God.
And then, like a Southern summer storm, it was over.”
— Andy Campbell in Artforum
GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT
Gifts of the Spirit: Prophecy, Automatism and Discernment is Ron Athey's vision for an "automatic writing machine" brought to life in collaboration with the composer Sean Griffin as a performance/installation made up of 16 writers, six typists, a hypnotist, vocalists, and musicians.
This living machine makes a tightly choreographed and scored visual spectacle bringing together writing, reading and listening into a layered performative action resulting in a collectively authored text and sound score.
Athey has been writing his memoir since 1980 when he moved away from the Pentecostal and Spiritualist practices in which he was raised. His writing describes the experience of having been raised as a living saint within an environment of abuse, vibrating with the energy of the otherworldly, but doing so without faith. The deconsecrated cathedral of St. Vibiana provides the perfect venue for this work, which strips faith from ritual and presents the orchestration of ecstatic states as art.
Gifts of the Spirit is co-produced by VOLUME, and has been made possible in part by a grant from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. Guest-curated for VOLUME by Jennifer Doyle.
