How might we do it? How might we perform the resurrection of Jesus, given the disorientating accounts we have in the gospels and given that, ’nothing like this had ever happened.’ (Resurrection isn’t an exotic word for revival as in the movie ‘The Matrix’ where Neo revives at a kiss, let alone a synonym for paranormal activity, as in the TV series ‘Resurrection’, where a dead child returns.) So how might you tell a story without precedent? You could follow a Roman soldier in pursuit of the truth as in the 2016 movie ‘Risen’; or you might have a tree appear through the floor and disappear as in Toibin’s ‘Testament of Mary’; or present it as publicity stunt as Phillip Pullman did in his 2010 novel, ‘The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ’; or have Jesus/a body emerge from the overflowing water of a cistern flanked by two women who then catch and cover the emergent body, as did Bill Viola in his 2002 video ‘Emergence’; or have Jesus appear as a ghost as in Adamo’s 2009 opera, ‘The Gospel of Mary Magdalene’; or wonder whether organ donation gets at it, as in the 2001 movie ‘Jesus of Montreal; while in the follow up to the movie ‘The Passion of the Christ’ it’s said that, ‘the resurrection will take place in another realm and there are things that will shock an audience.’
It seems that other realm is hell, based on an iconic image called the ‘Harrowing of Hell’, which was mentioned in a discussion after London’s National Theatre 2004 production of ‘In His Dark Materials’, the epic production of Philip Pullman’s trilogy of the same name. Rowan Williams and the author were in conversation and there was mention of the difference between the Western tradition of painting the resurrection, where you often end up with, ‘a sort of luminous figure bouncing out of the tomb on clouds and lots of people sitting around looking rather surprised’ – and the Orthodox tradition where there’s a recognition that you can’t actually show Jesus rising from the tomb, so what you see is the risen Jesus in Hell astride a great pit, dynamically rescuing Adam and Eve from out of their tombs in the presence of many others, showing us the effect of the resurrection as it were, the way it effects our lives. It’s based in a recognition that you can’t simply show it like it was – it’s impossible, even for Mel Gibson! To adapt what Williams said elsewhere in the discussion about Adam’s skull shown, in icons, at the foot of the cross, ‘it’s a deeply mythological moment.’
Interestingly enough, Pullman went on to suggest that a rational depiction of Jesus’ death and resurrection would be a sort of cinema like Mel Gibson’s movie, ‘The Passion of the Christ’, and then he asked two questions: ‘But that would miss the other part wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it miss the mythical element of it, which is something that has to be lived and lived and lived again?’ Furthermore he said that it’s, ‘something whose truth is not historical truth only, but it has a truth that sort of lives on.’ It’s easy enough to miss ‘the other part’, the ‘mythical element’ of it, the living out of it in the present.
Not that the performance of ‘In His Dark Materials’ was managing this mix of history and story (or myth) that is characteristic of the gospels, but it certainly seeks to think mythically about, or re-imagine, the Christian story (as Pullman did head-on in his 2010 novel). In doing so, as Pullman reminds us, he’s able to alert us as to what it is myth exists to do and which seemingly it did at odd moments in the production, resulting in a transcendent moment like this: ‘the dead are released from captivity on condition they tell true stories about everything they loved in life. Pullman’s extraordinary vision of a universe in which the untethered dead merge with wind and the trees is perfectly realised.’ (It’s a combination, said one writer, of Greek myth and a medieval harrowing of hell.)
The 4 Mysteries way of getting at this, ‘something which is to be lived again and again and again’, is through the creation of a ‘he/we’, a body which reveals how we might belong to one another and which is the central myth, we say, that all four gospel accounts, each in their own way, feed into. It’s a re-creation story: Jesus as a Body is a new creation. As the FAQs have it: ‘he/we’ is a particular take on how to view the four gospels together. It’s a mystery. This is a key to the project.’ The body is happening through the death – even before a new family emerges at the foot of the cross eg. at the Passover meal. Creating such a meaningful body – a body of work – is a means to our learning how to think in such a way that we might live it again and again, which is to say it enables us to think mythically. (As we suggest in a blog entry entitled ‘A Body of Words and Stage Images’, this is what Shakespeare’s plays enable us to do continually – it’s the myth of Shakespeare at work!)
Pullman’s image of the unreleased dead is a reminder too that the mythic moments are often the exhilarating moments, and you can see how this works in a 2017 State Theatre Company of South Australia /Frantic Assembly co-production of ‘Things I Know to be True’ written by Andrew Bovell. Scott Graham from Frantic Assembly, a UK physical theatre group, was involved in the development of the performance, working with another director, the writer, the actors, designers et al to open it out through and beyond naturalism. As he later wrote: ‘The deep love at the heart of the play must be able to soar and explode. We must be able to achieve what we call theatrical ‘lift-off’. The problem with naturalism is that it’s often rooted and ‘normal’. My aim was to make these heightened ‘lift-off’ moments just as normal.’ Then the follow up: ‘I began to explore how the stories might escape gravity.’ So, with the actors working together, ‘bodies were passed between hands and over heads; they’re gently embraced and let go’; they were silently able to embody what was spoken of in a number of moments through the show. In doing this the cast learnt to work as, ‘an affecting and strong unit’, even as the play was framed by the silent observing figure of the youngest member of the family. It added another dimension to the performance, we might even say a ‘mythic’ dimension. In 4 Mysteries terms, as the play unfolded, it resulted in the making of a body, so that, in the end, the family members preparing to head off to the mother’s funeral, simply held hands again: ‘it became a physical representation of how the family found their strength.’ It was a kind of muted lift-off, but its’ moving action draws attention to the unexpectedness of the gospel’s ending which, with its disorientating lift-off, ‘makes possible what had been impossible. And it does so without tearing the fabric of history and matter’.
Of course when Scott Graham speaks of lift-off he certainly doesn’t have in mind those Renaissance paintings of the resurrection of Jesus which delight in lift off, but nor do the gospels when they invite us into their moments of lift-off, into those ‘mythic spaces’ as we call them, like the tomb of Jesus. Yes, he did die, but he didn’t stay dead. How do we speak of this? The tomb is a womb we say, out of which we’re born, not simply a burial place carved out of rock, owned by whoever; and in Mark’s gospel, say, it’s a very strange place indeed. When the three women turn up to attend to the body, there’s no stone across the entrance, there’s no body, and there’s a young man dressed in white standing within, who speaks to them. The world, it seems, has gone crazy: they’re struck dumb. How do we speak of this? How might we perform it? The harrowing of hell is one powerful way of doing this – which is what you see in most of the medieval mystery plays and Orthodox churches at Easter – but we might also learn from its way of imagining resurrection. In the Mark performance, 4 Mysteries uses a Butoh-like movement, the break- up of language, lighting etc. breaking free of the constraints of naturalism in an attempt to do this. Similarly in the John performance we start with the risen, transformed body and end with the ‘once and always’ union which performers are now part of as the risen, transformed body. The John performance has transformation at its’ heart so there are five stories of transformation framed by a resurrection parade to begin with – featuring an empty tomb, an inhabited garden, and a spirit dance – and an expansive, dancing vision of the ‘once and always union’ to conclude. Again, in the Luke performance we see the cross and resurrection in the one striking central image – and watch as bodies slowly emanate from a centre with which they’re still connected. One goes to the top and the others emanate from that one. We see bodies in motion creating a body in motion: it gives us a sense of a new creation, as does the on-the-road scene that follows.
Clearly there’s a sense in these accounts of moving beyond and transforming naturalism, but also that, as this happens, ‘natural life and resurrection life are held as one’, which is something akin to what Scott Graham said: ‘I am always looking beyond naturalism, but I always want images, scenes or moments to be rooted in naturalistic truth.’ (It’s a version of the myth/history mix characteristic of the gospels.) Perhaps that’s why he encouraged Andrew Bovell to write without thinking about the Frantic Assembly contribution and why he spoke about the need not to impose stuff on the text. But what if you were to integrate the Frantic Assembly way of doing things into the writing of the play, indeed, insist even moreso, that this is what the play is about, their inseparability? This is what is distinctive about the gospel’s way of telling a new story. In 4 Mysteries terms you’re looking at not simply lift-off, but transformation, a new creation, which is what resurrection is about. In resurrection, naturalism is transformed and shown to be but one way to re-create the ‘real’. Now resurrection is part of the real; it’s a part of the naturalistic world that is transformed … by resurrection! Indeed, we might go further and say resurrection is the way the world is.
At which point, we might say, resurrection demands that we think mythically. It’s a way of thinking that expands the imagination in the way the icon of the resurrection mentioned at the beginning does. The icon doesn’t show Jesus somehow emerging from the tomb, or the meetings with Jesus, raised from the dead, that characterise each of the gospels, instead it shows Jesus bringing an aged Adam and Eve out of the pit of death into a new creation. So we begin again where it first began, showing the effect of resurrection.
We’re not talking a sort of magic realism here. As Rowan Williams says: ‘It’s not that the risen Christ appears saying, ‘By magic I will take away your history and I will smooth out your faces’; which is why, in the icon, Adam and Eve are not shown in their Edenic youthfulness, but in their old age. They’re not restored to their former selves, but are brought forth as they are: ‘The resurrection is not about the wiping out of our history, pain or failure, it is about how pain and failure themselves – humanity marked by history – may yet be transfigured and made beautiful.’ It’s in this ‘naturalistic truth’ – to quote Scott Graham again – that resurrection is rooted. In this way the icon, ‘opens us onto the inner story, to the bedrock of what’s going on.’
That’s the challenge if you’re to perform the resurrection of Jesus – including the subsequent resurrection encounters – and not end up doing something that, in attempting to show us what ‘really happened’, often ends up being weirdly flat, or too po-faced; once again revealing that it’s impossible to perform a transformed naturalism naturalistically and, more broadly, alerting us to the limits of naturalism when performing the gospel mix of myth and history. The icon reveals this, while the STCSA /Frantic Assembly performance alerts us to how we might move beyond and transform naturalism. Both the icon and the performance prepare you for the challenge of imagining a world where naturalism and ‘lift-off’ might be seen, not only as normal, but inseparable in a world where there’s no longer a division between spiritual and bodily realities. In doing so our insistent, one dimensional imagining might open onto a larger, less straightforward world, where we might hope to be returned to ourselves. As we’re reminded by the Harrowing of Hell icon and Scott Graham’s lift-off in ‘Things I Know To Be True’, myth as a way of imagining the world is a crucial element – ‘the other part’ – in enabling us to tell what otherwise couldn’t be told; and enabling us to live it again and again.