Give Me Some Hell, Ms. Thorson. Please Just Give Me Some Hell.

Morgan Thorson's "Heaven." Photo by Cameron Whittig.

Sitting in the audience at On the Boards Friday night, watching Morgan Thorson's Heaven, I got to thinking about a line from Blackadder the First. Edmund, having been made Archbishop of Canterbury for the explicit purpose of preventing nobles from leaving their estates to the church rather than the crown, finds himself begging a sinner on his deathbed not to repent, explaining that "the thing about heaven is that heaven is for people who like the sort of things that go on in heaven. Like, well, singing, talking to God, watering potted plants."

Actually, my guest had pointed out this quote before we went in, based on what she'd read about Thorson's dance collaboration with the band Low. It started as a (nervous) joke, but as the night went on, it became more and more apt.

Other things I thought about watching Heaven: I recalled how Julian Barnes envisioned heaven in A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, as a place where people get to do whatever they want until they get bored (and they all get bored, except the ones who really like watering potted plants). And then I tried to recall the name of Dante's book on heaven, from The Divine Comedy. There's Inferno, and Purgatorio, but what's the third...?

Okay, so maybe the problem with Heaven is that a work which explores only one half of a dichotomy is probably doomed from the start. Paradise (there it is!) in traditional Judeo-Christian thought is really just the opposite of Hell: in the one, you're exposed to God, and in the other, you're denied His grace, and that's your suffering, because what could possibly be worse? All the sado-masochistic fantasies of exactly what constitutes eternal damnation are wrought from the desire to fill that simple absence with something tangible. Unable to imagine the exquisite loss of God's grace, we conjure up hell in more human terms. But heaven? What are you supposed to do with that?

For Thorson, apparently, it's all about the longing for the sublime. At least longing and yearning were what I saw onstage. As the show opens, the nine performers (seven dancers and the two members of Low) slowly parade in unison around the perimeter of the stage, all dressed in white costumes with some cross-dressing thrown in for some reason. This goes on for like ten minutes. I don't know why. Then there's organ music, and choral harmonies, and some bowing (again, no idea why) as the dancers, in long, languid phrases, prance about, looking up, arms open, and yearn for rapture, the loss of body, and the immersion of self into something greater.

For 45 minutes this goes on, until finally Thorson gets around to dealing with the fact that these people still have bodies that tie them to earth, which will be expressed--I kid you not--by having the dancers jump up in the air and fall down.

I want to assume that Thorson is trying to explore the sublime, the longing for spiritual wholeness and all that jazz, but honestly, I don't think she is. What I think she's done with Heaven is collect every cliche image of religious experience she can find that's somehow in the collective mental library of American culture and simply vomited it back up onstage in a performance piece that's got more sanctimoniousness than sanctity. Let's see. People with spread arms, open hands, palms up, with divine light bathing them from above? Check. Lots of white? Check. Church-y music? Check. "The light" you follow at death? Check, and bonus points for appropriating and ruining an otherwise classic vaudeville gag.

Frankly, about 50 minutes in, I was holding an imaginary betting pool in my head as to what wouldn't show up onstage. I figured we might get out without seeing someone speaking in tongues, but no, Thorson leaves no rock unturned.

What we didn't get, I suppose, was subtlety, thoughtfulness, or an actual demonstration of real movement language. The best points of the night were when--and I'm pretty sure these were mistakes--two dancers tripped, one on the hem of his skirt and one simply slipping on the floor. And I don't say this to make fun of them. Rather, they were beautiful, moments of actual human frailty intruding on an otherwise contrived attempt to express a desire for perfection, not through using a dancer's body to evoke actual longing, but by invoking a montage of images so blunt the audience can't help but get the point.

As for the much ballyhooed collaboration with the band Low, it was incredibly disappointing. I don't suppose there's much bad you can say about Mimi Parker's droning organ work or choral singing, but it didn't add anything that a recorded soundtrack couldn't have done just as well. And as for Alan Spearhawk's one guitar song, it was a ridiculously simplistic chord progression that reminded me of nothing so much as Stewie Griffin's warm-up from The Family Guy. While the ensemble's singing was all lovely, lyrically the songs never went much beyond re-stating exactly what you just saw performed as movement.

I really hate writing things this negative, and for a couple days I've been struggling--talking with my guest, reflecting on the show--to come up with something good to say about Heaven. But I just can't. Neither the movement nor the imagery nor the music managed anything remotely original or meaningful, leaving me mostly to wonder why it is that heaven would be so much more difficult to explore through art than hell. For my money, the reason damnation works so much better in creative works is because hell is immediately appreciable--it's who we are, a catalog of our weaknesses, excesses, and failures, whereas heaven is what we wish we could be. It seems like this should offer some material for artists, but Thorson apparently decided that rather than let her dancers explore this, she'd just serve up imagery and references.

In the end, what Heaven reminded of most was my grandfather's funeral last year, after he passed away in his mid-eighties. At the service, the preacher, who'd ministered to my grandparents for years, never really addressed my grandfather's life, his achievements and struggles, any of that. Instead, he kept repeating, as though trying to convince himself and the living gathered there, that my grandfather was in heaven "because he believed." It would have offended me if it wasn't so ridiculous, as though simply repeating a truism like a mantra would make it true, rather than suggesting the opposite might just as well be the case. This is Thorson's heaven, unfortunately: an empty husk of inherited ideas held up as a totem by an artist too afraid, or too lazy, to actually ask a provocative question or two.