Alistair McIntosh's
unexpected collaboration with Paul Henry took McIntosh's identity as
a veteran political campaigner and Christian activist, and cast it
into a multi-media performance that rolled from lecture through
story-telling to a butoh inspired choreography. McIntosh himself –
elderly, bearded, with the occasional presence of an Old Testament
patriarch – provided the text and the recitation, with Henry's
throbbing drones and chimes complementing his meditations on ecology,
advertising and spiritual renewal.
Somewhere between
nature mysticism and a politically aware church, McIntosh reaches
back to Celtic traditions, where the boundaries between paganism and
Christianity are worn and insecure. Brigdit, a saint who was once a
Celtic goddess, embodied a feminine divine, a spirit who enters the
physical world to bring salvation. Beginning with a formal lecture on
the state of affairs in the urban world, via a meditation on the cult
if death within advertising, McIntosh settles on telling an
autobiographical episode, of his own pilgrimage across Harris, before
entering an ecstatic state of revelation.
Unmentioned yet
present, the history of Scottish Christianity is a heavy burden. The
beautiful psalms of the Free Church, re-imagined by Henry, march
alongside a legacy of patriarchal dominance. This dominance is
reflected in the final movement, as the celestial female presence is
reduced to the prophet's handmaiden. And in the words, the words
themselves, that have always been the tool of the church, that are a
remove from the twisting bodies of the two dancers, that scatter
ideas towards the audience, in the words are the disconnection from
the embodied, from the spiritual as directly experienced, the
mediating force of language...
The surreal images
of cigarette advertising, says McIntosh, hide a preoccupation with
death: a subconscious desire for death, tucked away in fanciful
images of pyramids and carrion-carrying ants. Is McIntosh finding
Freud's controversial hypothesis that the mind has a compulsion to
both life and death? Is advertising, the controlling mechanism of
consumerism, the hidden ruler of this world, embracing death so as to
cast humanity into the arms of destruction? The desire to consume too
much... the violence in the Middle East... the unknown heat of our
Globally Warming July... massacres on the tip of Africa... a slash
along the seam of a silk sheet... an evocation of a popular film...
McIntosh offers an alternative, his retreat back to the islands of
his youth, the slow trek across the landscape and only the ruins of
past homes on his lonely, unmade, track.
Yet his archetype
is the preacher, and can the preacher be redeemed? Has the history of
the church, now entwined with western moralities, now entrenched in
an establishment of capital, prevented it from attaining the ecstasy
of an ecological consciousness?
The touches of
butoh are ornaments on the solid cathedral of ideas. The treated
sounds are echoes of lustily sung hymns. Can an authentic sense of
soul, all the ontologies of theology (that is to say, the idea of a
personal God, the community of believers and the status of the Word)
be transformed into a foundation, a corner-stone of a new
consciousness that recognises ecology, environmental politics, as the
alternative to capitalism?
They present a
moment of ecstasy, a communion with God, and The Tibetan Book of the
Dead is read, warning against fear. Something... the greediness...
Boris Johnston's avowal of envy's worth, the inversion of all values
and all matter reduced to commodity... do not be afraid. This breaks,
this breaks, McIntosh performs the moment he once had, alone and in
the hills... a theatrical shamanism. It is a memory of that moment.
It is not the moment in itself. It is faked and recreated. The angel
reads from a photocopied sheet of paper.
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