If you’ve been anywhere near me at all at any point in the last four years, you will definitely have heard me waxing lyrical about Mary Magdalene. Yes… she and I have been stalking each other for some time..
For three of these four years, I’ve been trying to make a performance about her re-discovered gospel. But, just like the gospel itself, several attempts to bring this story to the public have been delayed or thwarted. It’s beginning to feel personal. However, I have worked with myth for long enough now to know that story has it’s own timing… and that timing rarely fits with my desires, or the careful planning of arts council timelines and theatre programming. So it’s an interesting dance, to say the least… one that requires much patience, resilience and fancy footwork.
However, in spring 2021, thanks to an initial input of Arts Council funding, I was fortunate enough to go into the studio with Rob Clark and Ben Duke to start the research & development phase. This lead to the initial sharing of the performance that is now called The Witness – you can read more about this on my ‘Projects’ page.
But clearly, making one performance is not enough. This is a big topic after all – as the only gospel written in the name of a woman and buried for 2000 years, the story of The Gospel of Mary Magdalene is emblematic of the de-feminization of Christianity and it’s legacy on contemporary Western culture. Appropriately then, the project has grown into a larger multi-stranded arts project called ‘Heresy’.
‘Heresy’ explores female heretical spirituality and the current transcultural reclamation of female images of divinity. It seeks to reframe heresy as a courageous and life-giving act of transgression. Our aim – that is, me and my producer Courtenay Johnson – is for the project to run from September 2022 into 2023, and will involve a large number of artists and events, including: a full production and initial tour of The Witness; Gospel writing workshops – creative writing and papermaking workshops, to give local audiences a hands-on opportunity to creatively explore themes from the performance; Four live online performance-lectures with incredible, international guest artists and expert authors speaking about Mary Magdalene, heresy and the divine feminine; A curated exhibition at Northampton Museum exploring Heresy more broadly, with particular links made to Northampton’s history of witches; and an interactive exhibition in the local shopping centre in Northampton.
It sounds good, doesn’t it?! However, all this beauty and inspiration requires money to bring it into form. A generous patron has donated match funding to the project via The Kenneth Fund/Northamptonshire Community Foundation, and we submitted our Arts Council funding application last month. So now have the many weeks ahead of waiting… seven more weeks to go before we find out the result… at least seven is Mary’s number. May the winds be favourable and the spirit of those heretics burn bright in the arts council evaluators! Watch this space for updates…