I. ORIGINS

The cosmic origins of our spiritual musings. Awakening through the sea, angels, the experience of death, and the return of the light in midwinter, the mystery of time…

The Sea Dance

Choreographed and danced by Satya Dunning, The Sea Dance explores the primary spiritual symbol of the sea. We are drawn to the sea for re-creation, returning to childhood - and to the maternal, womb experience of the water. La mer, la mere... The origin of animal life, the opening of our horizons to the beyond.
Powerful feminine symbol, yet endangered too by global warming - the rising sea. The Sea Dance is a meditation, a prayer for the healing of the sea and our healing through the sea. The music is based on a medieval sacred chant, Ave Maris Stella, "Hail, Star of the Sea", which itself probably originating in an Italian folk song. It is sung on the Catholic Feast of the Assumption, which is a celebration of body as as spiritual, celebrates the entry of the Virgin Mary (whose name means “Star of the Sea”) into heaven at the end of her life - her body glorified as well as her soul, heaven and earth connected. It is a prayer for integrity (symbolised by virginity), harmony fo body and soul, release from the guilt that holds us down, and unconditional love (the real meaning of chastity). Here is a translation of the Latin text:
Hail, Star of the Sea,
Dear Mother of God,
Ever a Virgin,
Blessed gate of Heaven.

Show yourself a mother:
Let Him, your Son, receive our prayer through you,
He, who born for us,
Took His flesh from you.

O Virgin without compare,
Gentlest of all,
Let us be released from our guilt,
Make us gentle and chaste.

Amen.
Our bodies are revitalised by the sea, and through our bodies our spirits are restored. Stars and sea, heaven and earth.

Angels

Our culture seems to be more and more aware of angels. Reports abound of angels of traditional appearance, or superhuman rescuers, lights, voices, smells… And they can’t all be explained away. Angels are a sign of the incredible richness and diversity of the cosmos – that there are spiritual entities which are just as real as the physical. They are reported in all cultures.

One thing is clear – angels are not pretty fairies. Nor are they just handy heroes, or spiritual shopping assistants, who help out but go away when we don’t need them. They are powerful spiritual beings, far more powerful than us. Nor should we automatically assume that every angel is good… Demons are nothing but fallen angels, with all their power, but turned to deception and harm.

The word “angel” really means messenger. A messenger of whom or what? In Cosmos we believe that true angels, the angels who will benefit and enhance our lives and the well-being of the natural world, are angels who are messengers of the Divine, bringing light and harmony from heaven to earth. Michael, “Who is like God”, Gabriel, “Strength of God”, Raphael, “God Heals”. The Seraphim and Cherubim, and the Guardian angels.

In Angels we have drawn on diverse sources. The text of Angels is an ancient hymn of the Greek Christian community of Alexandria, Egypt, sung for the celebration of their Mysteries:

The melody is a balance for the heavenly text: an earthy French Noel. The second verse brings in a new tune in the old folk tradition of the contrechant of the Rouergue, in the South of France: one voice has the melody, the other weaves a melody against it. Earth responds to heaven, the song springs up from the soil. As Angels ends on the Chord of Eternity, earth and sky, divine and human are united in the song and dance of the angels.

Develop a more conscious relationship with your own guardian angel who loves, embraces and supports your creative talents. Invoke the strength of Gabriel, the healing of Raphael, the awesome Seraphim and Cherubim, until Michael, who is like God, brings God to you and you into God.

Back To Top

Season of the Dead

November is a time of death. After the fruitfulness of autumn, the darkness grows, and the leaves fall and die, taken into the earth from which they drew their nourishment. There are more human deaths at this time of year too. We are confronted with the stark reality of death, of that total separation as far as this world is concerned. Death is as much part of nature as growth and love. Bereavement, with its phases of denial/bargaining, anger, and grief follow. But because we are opened up, it is also a time when we are more open to the spiritual – an originary moment. Even though we may be dumbfounded and angry, the desire and need to stay connected with our loved one opens a need to connect with them now on a spiritual, metaphysical plane. And this can be a point of new contact with our own spiritual needs, a place of beginning... Just as the leaves die, and disappear, and turn to earth, which nourishes new growth in the spring, so the pain of loss can be the impetus for spiritual growth, a deeper awareness.

The dance takes us on a journey of grieving, to light and peace at last. The music is based on the Gregorian funeral chant, Requiem aeternam. Here is a translation of the Latin text:

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord,
And let perpetual light shine upon them:
May they rest in peace.
Yours is a hymn in Sion, O God;
Let prayer be made to you in Jerusalem.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord,
And let perpetual light shine upon them:
May they rest in peace.

As the melody develops, it returns to its roots in the Jewish chants of the Jerusalem Temple, roots which is shares with Armenian and Byzantine chant, which have been particular inspirations here. This common source is also shared with Islamic chant. The melody gains volume and power, confronting the most violent deaths. Atom Egoyan’s Ararat, a film about memory of the Armenian Genocide, is a particular inspiration. But the moment of death is not the end – by grace the soul rises up through the ether: the soul which journeys to light if its earthly life has not been completed closed to love. Even as we see the horror of death, especially the outrage of death inflicted in the name of religion, our dance, our prayer is one of hope in resurrection, of the reunion of bodies, souls and communities, transformed and immortal.

The music of Season of the Dead is dedicated to the victims of all religious genocides: some of the worst, in chronological order, the long-forgotten genocide of Balkan Muslims in the 19th century, the Armenian, the Jewish Holocaust, and the ongoing persecution, expulsion and killing of the Buddhists of Tibet, Christians in China, Pakistan, Sudan and the Middle East, and people of many religions in Iraq. May the dead rest in peace. May their loved ones be given healing and new spiritual connection with them, and their persecutors – and the darkness of violence and prejudice in all of us – be healed by the Light.

Another great inspiration was the great but little-known 4th century poet, Prudentius, beautifully embodying autumn spirituality, here in Helen Waddell’s translation:

Take him, earth, for cherishing,
to thy tender breast receive him.
Body of a man I bring thee,
noble even in its ruin.

Once was this a spirit’s dwelling,
by the breath of God created.
High the heart that here was beating,
Christ the prince of all its living.

Guard him well, the dead I give thee,
not unmindful of his creature
shall he ask it: he who made it
symbol of his mystery.

Comes the hour God hath appointed
to fulfil the hope of men,
then must thou, in very fashion,
what I give, return again.

Not though ancient time decaying
wear away these bones to sand,
ashes that a man might measure
in the hollow of his hand:

Not though wandering winds and idle,
drifting through the empty sky,
scatter dust was nerve and sinew,
is it given to man to die.

Once again the shining road
leads to ample Paradise;
open are the woods again,
that the serpent lost for men.

Take, O take him, mighty leader,
take again thy servant's soul.
Grave his name, and pour the fragrant
balm upon the icy stone.

Back To Top

The Mystery of Time

The final dance in Origins is music of spheres, the dance of the astral bodies, whose movement gives the earth light and the division of time. The vast scale of space, and of time. Time which we always seem so short of, but Time – if we give time – which heals. The Mystery of Time is from the cosmic perspective.

The music draws on medieval knowledge of sacred number, mode and harmony, and on ancient hymns by Prudentius and Venantius Fortunatus, which reveal the secret, cosmic meaning of Christmas – secret only because we are too hurried to see it. So let us be still, to enter into the dance of the Mystery of Time.

Of the Father’s love begotten
Ere the world from chaos rose,
He is Alpha: from that fountain
All that is and has flows.
He is Omega: of all things yet to come
The mystic Close.
Evermore and evermore.

The creation of the world – not just the Big Bang, the evolutionary process, but every instant of things coming into being. And yet a primeval time too, the dawning of light, and of the spiritual Light shining through matter, filling all things in peace. But the melody is hidden, in minor key and double time, tempus imperfectum, time incomplete.

But something went wrong. There is evil in the world. Even in ourselves, in spite of our talents and capacity to love, we let others down and let ourselves down. Nature suffers through this too – human greed which has brought about global warming. A sense of a fall. The music rise briefly, only to fall in a fast chromatic collapse.

But it is not all loss and destruction. Humankind discovers agriculture, the Age of Taurus. Earth and sky, humankind and – felt distantly – God. A new melody in a simple dialogue, the desire to be saved from all this, restoration. Come, thou Redeemer of the earth.

This dialogue, both wistful and peaceful, follows six cycles, and then shifts abruptly into conflict – the Age of Aries, the age of war. Yet in all the striving and violence and destruction there is a spiritual quest – dissatisfaction with the status quo, searching for more. Until…

War ends in exhaustion. Yet the watchers and holy ones have been waiting. The last discordant cry of war was the Chord of Eternity, which is now quietly raised up, a miracle of grace. The Word speaks from and on high, and descends into the womb of her who hears, to be enfleshed, to bring spirit back to matter. The light shines, we are with Christmas. The marriage of Heaven and Earth.

Blessed be that Day forever,
When the Virgin, full of grace,
By the Holy Ghost conceiving,
Bore the Saviour of our race,
And the child, the world’s Redeemer,
First revealed His sacred face,
Evermore and evermore.

We have entered the Age of Pisces, Christ the Fish, Ichthys, according to the acronym of the first Christians:

Iesous
CHristos
THeou
Yios
Soter

Jesus Christ, Son of God and Saviour.

So we cannot just sit in our comfort zone. The fishing stories in the Gospels represent the unconscious yearnings in us being brought to the surface, spirituality being activated in our lives. For this we need the light to shine on the dark places in us. The original light comes back, and jars against our singing, challenges us. We must be purified, transformed, if we are going to become spiritual and heal our world, and not just talk about it. We must journey, like the Zoroastrian Magi, following the Star.

This is He whom seer and sibyl
Sang for ages long gone by,
This is He of old revealed
In the page of prophecy;
Lo! He comes, the promised Saviour,
Let the world His praises cry,
Evermore and evermore.

And when the time is right, the cosmos will be transformed – the coming of the Cosmic Christ.

Let the storm and blaze of sunlight,
Flowing stream and sounding shore,
Sea and forest, frost and zephyr,
Day and night their Lord adore:
Glory to the Father, glory to the Son,
Glory to the Spirit,
Evermore and evermore.

Time is perfected, completed, according to medieval symbolism, in three threes, 9/8. The melody opens out like a kaleidoscope as it joins the dance of the stars, the harmonies of the earthly choir are enriched in the colours of the heavenly city, colours sought for in humanity’s striving. Not in discord, not in conflict, but in harmonies which point to the Age of Light. Time is completed.

II. THE RITES OF SPRING

The three pieces of this section are called The Rites of Spring, drawing inspiration from Stravinsky’s and Diaghilev’s radical ballet of 1915. Its music and dance are still challenging. In the Rites of Spring we respond to Stravinsky, but go further: Stravinsky’s rite ends in death. Our rites end in new life, for humanity and for the earth.

After awakening comes transformation – our transformation, and through our transformation the transformation of our environment. Each piece rises up in three stages:
Self, Beyond Self, Integration

or Earth, Heaven, the Union (hieros gamos, Sacred Marriage)

Again we draw on Gregorian chants, taken from the Holy Week Mysteries, and explore their universal meaning.

The Secret

The Secret was written in the spring drought of 2006, when the earth cracked open in the April sun. So it is a prayer for rain: water as refreshment, and the source of new life.
The “dry music” of the beginning is replaced by gradually intensifying water music, but the constant is the repetition of the chant Ubi Caritas:

Where there is charity and love, there is God.

This insight, a universal of all the world’s mystics, is the Secret. The love that moves the sun and the other stars, as Dante said. In the East it has long been recognised that when we behave negatively, acting from fear or control, we send out negative energy. But when we act from love, we send out positive energy. We love humanity and the world into being. We heal. Drawing on the music of the East, the chant expands around the words amor (love) and est (“is”) – loving into being.

The pace gathers as the earth responds in the drumming, and the cellos sings the divine words of spiritual transformation: the true alchemy, the transformation of base matter into gold – that is, into being. The alchemy that works. The choir leads us in meditation on the sheer gift of unconditional love.

Yet anyone who has ever loved will know that love hurts. Love comes at a price. Our tears, our life blood will flow. As the dance ends, it moves into the unavoidable, but the wound that heals: The Sacrifice.

The Sacrifice

Why? Why do I suffer? Why do my loved ones suffer? Why do innocent people, children, get hurt, abused and killed? Why is the environment in upheaval, polar ice caps melting, the Mediterranean roasting, freak storms, earthquakes and pandemics?

To ask why is the beginning. But there is no “Because…” answer. Nor will we profit from beating ourselves up (that’s only another way to avoid the question). The way of  spiritual men and women of all ages and places has been to witness our suffering and that of others, and journey with it – and refuse to give up on unconditional love. These people know that an energy will be given to us, beyond our own strength.

The Sacrifice is based on the chant for an ancient ritual, the unveiling of the cross.

“Behold, the wood of the cross, on which died the Saviour of the World.”
And the choir responds, “Come, let us adore him.”

The cross was not only a brutal instrument of execution; it also has inner meaning. Even in death, it connects – heaven with earth, East with West. Four points, four  winds, four elements.

Through three repetitions the music rises up, until the organ enters with the suffering of the whole universe

Even in stretching to breaking point, as we collapse in death, in the death of an old world, a space is opened to be filled by the Divine… birth of a new life.

Regeneration

In darkness: the dancers lie in foetal position, awaiting rebirth from the primal chaos
New fire, new Light
They awaken, and dance to a hypnotic chant. The rhythm of the saints.
They awaken the earth. Then they turn inward, to descend into the waters
And to rise again
The earth dances.
Having died to self and become one with the Divine and the Cosmos, the miracle: recovery of Self. The sunrise chant:
I have risen and I am still with you. You have placed your hand on me, and your knowledge has become wonderful.
Healed and regenerated, we not longer take ourselves too seriously. We can smile because we know we are loved. Here Regeneration revives the great heavenly dance traditions and sacred ball game of pelota performed on Easter Sunday in the cathedrals of Besançon and Auxerre in France. These had died out by 1595, but here they are revived as a fresh ingredient in modern British dance in Raymond Chai’s modern interpretation.

III. ECSTASY

Freed from fear and the hand of the past, we “stand out” from ourselves, we and the world live ecstatically.

Ascent

Ascent is a universal theme of spiritual wisdom. But in this ascent we do not leave our bodies or the earth – they go up together. Traditional peoples have always been very practical and earthy with their spirituality: in late spring they blessed the crops for a good harvest from the wholeness of the earth, praying that harmful forces and spirits be sent away. This continued until very recently in Europe.
And so, in the chant of Ascent, the angels sing, in music that recalls the Angels dance (no.2 above):
“Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go up to heaven.”
The spiritual secret of Ascent is actually coming back to earth: the spiritualisation of matter. That is why Ascent is the eighth piece – the four elements of We come back to earth, because earth has gone up to heaven. And in this the body/spirit, male/female conflicts are healed – for none of us ascends alone, but man and woman ascend together.
In Cosmos, as we branch out, a man and woman dance together, exploring their own and each other’s energies, and the energies of heaven and earth. The music branches out to include recorded improvisation of voices on the word “ascending” with a new musical instrument, the hang drum. (Find out more about Philip Roderick and Sally Horner and their voice/drum impro at www.contemplativefire.org) And then in a great chord of nine parts – the number of eternity. The choir improvises within the chord, dancing between heaven and earth.

The Fire Dance

The Fire of Spirit. It is the mighty whirlwind of Spirit which changes us and the world – so at last we can breathe. Setting the world on fire, not to destroy, like the forest fires of global warming, but to purify, to illuminate, to turn to gold.
The male and female energies of the Cosmos united in the Sufi whirling and fire dancing traditions and the Gregorian chant Factus est repente:

“And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them.” (Acts of the Apostles, 2.2-4)

In the fire, sevenfold gifts of the Spirit, a sevenfold rhythm sometimes moving to twelve, for the months and the stars, and then again in free flow.
In this chant masculine and feminine energies are fused, and musical material recalled from the feminine Sea Dance (no.1). And so the work that began in summer with the Sea Dance ends in summer with the whirlwind and fire from heaven. The spiral is complete – yet it always continues, in another cycle, as Spirit moves out through the Cosmos.

Back To Top