(Now available for streaming or download at archive.org!)
Shekhinah: the Presence, a dance/theatre piece, was first presented in Austin, Texas in November, 1992, by the Human Systems Performance Group.
Shekhinah: The Presence developed from the movements, texts, and structures of Jewish worship. Focusing on the figure of the Shekhinah, the mystic embodiment of the Presence of God, as she appears to the congregants at a morning service, the work examines the meaning of tradition and the power of prayer.
Although I had a well-rounded Jewish education, I never consciously heard of the Shekhinah until after I moved to Austin in1989. In my reading there, found references to her, almost simultaneously, in an article, “Encountering the Shechinah, the Jewish Goddess,” by Rabbi Leah Novick, and in the novel The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick.
After meeting Jan Barstow while we both were working at IBM and creating the dance piece Spiral for her, I wanted to create a large piece for her and for her daughter, Jana Stevens. That fall, I attended a performance by Buddhist monks at the Paramount Theater in Austin. While the friend with whom I went to the show found it all extremely strange, I was surprised by how familiar it seemed. I wondered, seeing the full house there, what audience might be drawn to a theatricalized performance of Jewish rites corresponding to it. While Shekhinah is not nearly the literal translation of ritual that the Buddhist performance was, that show directly inspired me to create this piece.
During the first rehearsal, one of the dancers (who dropped out of the project due to job overload, and whose name I no longer remember) asked me to write an explanation of the piece so that they could understand its roots, since none of them were Jewish. When I started writing it, I surprised to see it develop as poetry. It quickly became the text of the show. I realized that it was far too long to be used in that form. I trimmed the performance text down to an usable length, and published a book of the complete text. Late in the process, I recorded music for the performance, which I later released as a CD.
