Questions of Faith

Last Wednesday, the 10th, I delayed my drive home to attend the "spoken word chorus" called "Questions of Faith," part of the Difficult Dialogues program and organized and coordinated by the Department's Meredith Neuman. It was most impressive, and one of the best things about it was that the script was co-written, along with Meredith, by two of our senior English Majors: Ayaan Agane on the left, and Heather Cenedella on the right. Kudos to them!

The program consisted of four sections, with four Clark actors--Christopher Church, Lee Gaines, Kate Rafey, and Zo Tobi--performing a variety of voices and perspectives drawn from one-on-one interviews with Clark students talking about their "experiences with issues of faith and religion on campus" (Program Notes).

I thought the rhythms of the interwoven voices established a richness that was stunning. All beliefs, from fundamentalist to dogged atheist, counterpointed each other. In fact, one of the best features, to my mind, was a "fugue": the four voices spoke over, around and past each other citing different ceremonial practices and positions to weave a tapestry of sound, in which meaning was subservient to the punctuated sound itself. I knew people were speaking, but I could not understand any one of them alone within the rise and fall of musical speech. The effect was vertiginous, but movingly similar to what the "gift of tongues" must sound like. Marvelous experience; and I hear that the whole thing was videotaped as well. Double marvelous.

Thank you, Meredith. And Ayaan and Heather: quite the sense of verbal artitecture! Bravo!

--Jay