The Kitchen presents HOLY SATURDAY, a day-long, multi-event performance liturgy created by Neal Medlyn in collaboration with Gillian Walsh and others.
Holy Saturday is the day before Easter, the actual day the show will take place, and the concept and organizing theme. As an artist twenty plus years into a practice wherein he is no longer young and nowhere near done, Medlyn’s life, history, and practice merge, as in all his previous work, with themes and subjects of a grand scale, in this case, religion, death, and anticipation.
HOLY SATURDAY has its roots in a series of mail art projects Medlyn began in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic for which he created seven sets of writing, collages, art works, and a performance for no audience. HOLY SATURDAY is also part three of Medlyn’s Death and Dying series of performance pieces, following Comeback Comeback (2022), and The Comfort in Being Sad (2023). Now, in 2024, Medlyn brings these various strands of research and work together in an afternoon of free smaller performances and installations culminating in a ticketed, evening-length performance.
HOLY SATURDAY seeks to continue a conversation that stretches backward and forward in time at the borders between gatherings of faith and gatherings of artists. From the prophet holding the tambourine 4000 years ago to performance, music, and dance in theaters today; from the holy mountain to the local church, art and ministry have sought to approach those places where the veil is thinnest between this world and the next one. HOLY SATURDAY, like its constituent parts and preceding projects, seeks to restart a dormant dialogue about how art and faith can talk to each other: non-dogmatically, open to conversation, open to allowing ourselves to be transformed by one another. As always, the dialogue is unique to the artist and the audience, but there is generally–perhaps due to the pandemic and the gradual ebb of the colonial Enlightenment era–a renewed desire for a thicker universe. One in which experience is not commodified, rationalized, and contained, and where art can grapple again with the spiritual, the internal, the felt, the messy, the glorious.
HOLY SATURDAY includes:
2pm INVITATORY XIII: a new iteration of a monthly series of informal performance events that Medlyn conducted at GTS from March 2022 to May 2023 while enrolled in a Masters of Divinity program at the seminary. FOLLOWED BY ADVENTURES IN WORSHIP: An installation of video and photos documenting a series of research and performance trips that Medlyn and Walsh undertook in 2021 to various sites of religious/spiritual significance in the United States. They shot video, met people, wrote postcards, and took photographs at sites significant to the histories of Mormonism (Hill Cumorah and the Priesthood Restoration Site); spiritualism (Lily Dale, New York); American Revivalism (the Cane Ridge revival site in Kentucky; First Presbyterian Church in Rochester, New York; Brushy Creek brush arbor, Texas); American apocalypticism (Cobb Hill, New York, site of the Great Disappointment); evangelicalism, civil rights, and the Black church (Mother Emanuel AME Church in Atlanta, Georgia; the COGIC church in Memphis, Tennessee; the Billy Graham Library, North Carolina); mystical Catholicism (the Vatican pavilion site in Queens, New York); and eccentric incarnations of American religiosity such as the Creation Museum and Holyland, Connecticut.
4pm GODS NOT FINISHED: an abstract music project with Gillian Walsh begun in 2022. They have previously performed at General Theological Seminary and at Union Theological Seminary, where Walsh is pursuing a Divinity degree. FOLLOWED BYINVITATORY XIV: a new iteration of a monthly series of informal performance events that Medlyn conducted at GTS from March 2022 to May 2023 while enrolled in a Masters of Divinity program at the seminary.
7pm PLAINSONG: The culminating event of the day in which Medlyn and a full band (consisting of Carl Baggaley, Joan Chew, Carmine Covelli, and Mike Jackson) accompanied by tableaux vivants (by dancers Hannah Applebaum, Emma Cohen, and Brianna Lux) perform songs from the Cure’s 1989 album Disintegration.
Neal Medlyn: HOLY SATURDAY is organized by Matthew Lyons, Curator.
FUNDING SUPPORT & CREDITS
The Kitchen’s programs are made possible in part with support from The Kitchen’s Board of Directors, The Kitchen Leadership Fund, and the Director’s Council, as well as through generous support from The Amphion Foundation, Inc., Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Aaron Copland Fund for. Music, The Cowles Charitable Trust, Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, Inc., Howard Gilman Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, Marta Heflin Foundation, Lambent Foundation Fund, a fund of Tides Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, Open Society Foundation, The Jerome Robbins Foundation, Ruth Foundation For The Arts, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Simons Foundation, and Teiger Foundation; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
GODDDDD PROJECT
ORIGINAL MAIL ART PROJECT 2020
For a suggested donation** using PayPal or Venmo (details below), I will send you limited edition artwork packets in the mail, beginning in about a week and a half. Seven separate packages*, one a week, or you can get one or two, it’s up to you! Essays, thoughts, drawings, ephemera, all unique and in a numbered edition. This first series will have a maximum run of 40.
These packages will be guaranteed to be fun, diverting, humorous, and they will save your soul. I went to church three times a week as a child and I have read the entire Bible and Simone Weil and The Cloud of Unknowing plus I was in a show with Karen Finley, and not a lot of people can say all that, so you can trust me to provide you with relevant art!
*Safety Information: i have been inside for over 47 days and i will be using gloves while making these pieces and also each package will have a three day cooling off period where it will sit untouched so the little cronies on there have a nice long chance to die before i mail them to you.
**Suggested Donation: $7 should cover the costs of each packet. I’d recommend just giving that for the first packet and seeing how you feel. You can then give again for the second packet or be done. Or you can send $49 for all seven. You can also just send me $100. I’m flexible!
ALSO GODDDDD ART BY ME ONLINE
Don't want mail? No problem. You can still access certain facets of this project because I am also hurling things into the void of the internet!
DJ MIXXES
I will be putting my GODDDD MIXXES out on SoundCloud and Instagram. These are twenty to sixty minutes live DJ mixes with songs by Hildegard von Bingen, Tori Amos, Insane Clown Posse, Second Chapter of Acts, Elvis Presley, The Clash and JS Bach, among others, together at last!