The Arts: Music and Dance
The arts play an important role in creating community, connecting us within congregations and to people beyond the walls of our churches. I encourage congregations to incorporate a variety of arts --- performing arts of music, dance, and theater; visual arts of painting, sculpture, quilt-making, and more --- into their religious and community life. The arts can be especially important during periods of transition, providing unique frames for shaping how we are together as we engage in the work of transformation. Offering primarily ‘heart’ rather than ‘head’ experiences, the arts enhance spiritual and worship life, they support social events and community building, and they even influence membership growth. For example, I have seen how a theater group in one congregation increased the membership roster as actors who were attracted to the church to participate in a play decided to join the church. Attractive art galleries in church buildings welcome visitors who might be in the building for activities other than congregational events. Choirs may enhance worship, but they also become a small-group ministry to their members, often the first door that persons interested in music come through as they become acquainted with our congregations.
As I describe in other portions of this portfolio, throughout my life, the arts have played an important role in my spiritual identity and spiritual deepening. A career in the field of music before ministry created for me many deep, lasting connections with other musicians. Since leaving music as a career path, I have discovered magnificent new layers of spiritual inspiration now when I do perform in worship services and at professional ministerial gatherings. In my music career, I was primarily an instrumentalist, focused on keyboard and various string instruments (violin, viola da gamba). Since leaving music professionally, I have also been drawn to choral singing. Pre-pandemic I regularly participated in the annual ministers choir at UU Ministry Days and General Assembly: in addition to artistic inspiration, singing in the choir connects me to colleagues. Music-making was also important to family life when my own children were young, as in the many performances I did with my son during his cello-playing career and with my daughter during her much briefer career as a fledgling violinist.
Through my professional experiences in both ministry and music, I bring valuable support to congregational life. In my experience, many ministers would welcome having better understanding of music, especially to enhance their relationships with church musicians. Particularly in smaller congregations with part-time or volunteer music directors, I believe there is much more that ministers could do to enhance congregational music-making and hymn-singing if they only knew a few basic principles of music leadership. In my experience, often ministers of the word and ministers of music might communicate more effectively. In my transitioning ministries, at least twice a year I offer worship workshops for lay worship leaders. Routinely I also invite the congregation's musicians to these workshops and we discuss intersections between worship and music: topics such as how to choose hymns appropriate to the congregation's singing capacity, so to support the worship theme.
Complementing music, social dance is one of my most important spiritual practices as well as one of my most important social connections outside congregational life. I started dancing during my performing career in Early Music. The style of dance dearest to my heart is English Country Dance: contradance comes in a close second! Dancing helps put the daily events of life into perspective, sets the world right when it seems to have gone awry, and always leaves me smiling. I know with certainty that as long as this beautiful art form continues, there is hope that love and beauty will prevail in this world. Social dancing all but shut down during the pandemic: I look forward to resuming in-person dancing during summer 2022.
Absolutely, for me, social dance is spiritual practice. I encourage others to give it a try. Dancing perhaps more than any other art form gets us out of our heads, since the instrument of dance is the body itself. I try to preach on dance as the worship schedule allows and may invite my local dancer friends to include live performance in the service . I don’t do what is generally known as ‘liturgical dance’ but I would support others in a congregation who wanted to offer this style during worship. Dancing is spiritual practice in that it not primarily about how we move our feet: social dancing is about how we are together in community. On the dance floor, we interact with other dancers equally, regardless of job, economic status, political preferences, and even dancing ability. Social dancing is about how we are together. I organized a contradance as part of the festivities on the weekend of my Ordination to ministry in 2005. The Ordination was an important religious ritual, but the community dance the evening before was an equally important statement about spiritual connections.
Absolutely, for me, social dance is spiritual practice. I encourage others to give it a try. Dancing perhaps more than any other art form gets us out of our heads, since the instrument of dance is the body itself. I try to preach on dance as the worship schedule allows and may invite my local dancer friends to include live performance in the service . I don’t do what is generally known as ‘liturgical dance’ but I would support others in a congregation who wanted to offer this style during worship. Dancing is spiritual practice in that it not primarily about how we move our feet: social dancing is about how we are together in community. On the dance floor, we interact with other dancers equally, regardless of job, economic status, political preferences, and even dancing ability. Social dancing is about how we are together. I organized a contradance as part of the festivities on the weekend of my Ordination to ministry in 2005. The Ordination was an important religious ritual, but the community dance the evening before was an equally important statement about spiritual connections.
Perhaps a stretch for some congregations, I encourage dancing from time to time as part of congregational activities: some congregations I have served have annual all-church dances; some include dancing in other social celebrations such as Stewardship dinners.
No matter where I serve transitioning ministry, I connect with local dance groups. My goal is to go dancing at least one a week. From many years of attending workshops and dance camps in all parts of the country, I know dancers almost anywhere I serve: they provide important social networks for me outside of congregational life.
In the words of UU musician and composer Ric Masten, "Let It Be a Dance." (SLT 301)
A good relationship has a pattern like a dance
and is built on some of the same rules.
The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because
they move confidently in the same pattern,
intricate but gay and swift and free,
like a country dance of Mozart’s.
--- Anne Morrow Lindbergh