Sacred Theatres: Shakers, Spiritualists, Theatricality, and the Indian in the 1830s and 1840s

Abstract

Shakers, Spiritualists, Theatricality, and the Indian in the s and s Bridget BennettThe celebrated spiritualist and historian of spiritualism Emma Hardinge Britten wrote in her autobiography of the frequent stage performances that she put on with fellow spiritualists.  After an enthusiastic helper had seen the effects that colored fires had "in spectacular scenes at the theatres," Britten began to use these effects in her own performances (Britten :). Key scenes were lit by burning materials in fire pans, which cast the required lighting color onto the stage. Britten had been an actor before becoming a spiritualist and clearly had a sophisticated understanding of the ways in which lighting could enhance her spiritualist extravaganza. Yet the lighting could also go terribly wrong, turning a "jolly gipsy encampment" that she had envisaged being lit up in red "á la 'Guy Mannering'" into "a company of ghastly phantoms" on one occasion, through the unexpected production of "a sickly glare of green fire" ().  On another occasion a tableaux vivant of Britten herself, dressed as Saint Cecilia, draped in white and lit by white lighting, was particularly successful at producing a heavenly aspect, as she noted, for "the white fire gave us [...] an angelic appearance" (). On the second encore, the men producing the colored lights became confused and when the curtain was raised again disaster struck. She wrote:[O]h horror! From one wing appeared the lurid glow of a crimson fire, from the other shone the dismal hue of the green light, and as if to make confusion worse confounded, the two poor gentlemen who held the pans had got so choked and blinded with the fire smoke that they thrust the pans full on the stage in sight of the audience, whilst they turned their half-suffocated heads the other way. () Clearly, such lighting could be a hazardous business, producing precisely the wrong effects. But if done correctly, it could help to create an impressive spectacle for the paying audience.  Here the transformation of St. Cecilia's brilliant whiteness to "lurid" crimson and "dismal" green suggests a movement from the celestial to the diabolic, whereas the reverse transformation of the "gipsy" scene from red to green suggested a movement to the phantasmal. St Cecilia's white drapery, formerly enhanced by white lighting, is first effaced and then transfigured by the commingling effects of the colored lights and the smoke from the pans.

Shaker dance and the religious production of spectacle

“…Shakers played with the boundaries between art and religion and their historical reception has followed suite; we often think of the Shaker “style” aesthetically rather than spiritually (Promey, 1993). But even before modern dance and furniture design riffed on the Shakers, the Shakers themselves understood that some religious activities feel more or less observable for outsiders (Bennett, 2005; Wergland 2007). Shakers experienced their own dance in two ways: as the fulfillment of an outsider's fantasy and as a private act that took place within closely guarded community boundaries.…”