Borrowed light

Choreographer Tero Saarinen has been intrigued by the Shakers since the late 1980’s, when he first saw a documentary about Doris Humphrey’s  Shaker-inspired choreography. The strong communal values and strikingly  beautiful, functionalistic aesthetics of this radical religious  movement of the 18th and 19th centuries made a strong impression on  Saarinen. Over the years, he continued studying Shaker architecture,  design and ideas.

At the start of the 21st century, Saarinen came across The Boston Camerata album Simple Gifts.  The music’s manic repetition touched him deeply and the idea of a new  work began fermenting in his mind. In 2002, he contacted Joel Cohen, then Artistic Director of The Boston Camerata, about the possibility of a joint production.

The co-creative process with The Boston Camerata began with Cohen  humming melodies to Saarinen. The selection of 20 Shaker songs was made  from an archive of hundreds – some never published before. Saarinen and  Cohen met several times in Europe and the U.S., and also travelled to  the Sabbathday Lake Community in Maine to meet the four remaining  Shakers still alive at that time.

It took eighteen months of hard work for Saarinen and his collaborators to finalise the choreography and the visual form of Borrowed Light.  The work is named after the architectural practice, common for the  Shakers, of building windows into interior rooms, thus maximising  daylight and productivity. Saarinen and his trusted collaborators,  Lighting and Set Designer Mikki Kunttu and Costume Designer Erika Turunen,  approached light as a religious metaphor. The visual appearance of the  work is rooted in the aesthetic of frugality and the accentuation of  opposites. The costumes combine heavy felting with airy, transparent  fabrics. The lighting design emphasises the opposite worlds of mystical  shadows and piercingly bright light.

Even though the entire production team did not meet in one place  until a week before the premiere, the xtended working period and the  devotion of all the artists involved allowed these teo ensembles to be  seamlessly integrated into each other, into one performance.

Despite the strong influences of the Shakers, Borrowed Light addresses the themes of communitarian society on a general level: “My  main source of inspiration was the Shakers and I ended up using only  original Shaker music, but this work is not about Shakerism. It is about  community and devotion. To me the nature of total commitment – whether  religious, artistic or political – is fundamentally the same.”

Source: Tero Saarinen Company

About the musical tradition of the Shakers 

Shaker music employs the simplest means to achieve extraordinary levels of beauty and emotional intensity. The forms are generally short and binary, and use the melodic and modal language of English folk songs. The composers of these pieces were ordinary Shakers encouraged by the community to express their spirituality through song. At the height of the Shaker movement, the performance of this music was exclusively vocal, performed by a chaste community, a cappella and in unison. Thus, this repertoire of sacred vocal music is in a way the American equivalent of Gregorian chant. However, an important difference from the latter is the frequent presence of spirited dance rhythms which make these songs, yesterday as today, perfect means of expressing religious sentiment through movement. Several thousand of these songs have been transcribed by the Shakers, but until recently only a few were known outside the community. Much of the music in Borrowed Light was transcribed from manuscripts and remains unpublished to this day. For two songs, in this case – Repentance and Verdant Grove – we believe Borrowed Light is playing them for the first time outside of the community, and has done so for over 150 years. 

Source: Theatreonline.com