Topic: Movement - Dance
Ballet, as exemplified by the corps in long-skirted white tutus, was challenged by women in the early twentieth century who disliked its restraints. Best known was Isadora Duncan who posed in flowing gowns and long scarves.
Equally important, but less well known was Ruth St. Denis. She was inspired by pictures of Egyptian goddess, and reimagined them moving. She and Ted Shawn formed their own school and company that incorporated elements of Oriental mysticism.
One of her students, Martha Graham, was the most influential, in part because she codified a method that challenged that of ballet. Instead of working from the balance of a plie, she used abdominal contractions for power. Her costumes often were long dresses that fell from the chest in loose circles she shaped with her legs and turns.
Clariece Paulk’s dancers borrowed Graham’s vocabulary for a version of "Come by Here" prepared for a conference sponsored by a charismatic church in Decatur, Georgia. The bishop of the Chapel Hill Harvester church was the son of an official in the Spurling-Tomlinson Church of God [1] that had drawn upon the same sources as Charles Parham and William Seymour to develop a separate form of Pentecostalism.
Earl Paulk became the church’s representative on radio in 1958. Clariece Miller played piano for his weekly broadcasts from the church’s headquarters in Cleveland, Tennessee. [2] She was raised in the city, and then was studying piano at the nearby University of Chattanooga. She later married Earl’s brother, Don. [3]
Both Earl and Clariece were what Scott Thumma called second-generation Pentecostals, [4] who were uncomfortable with the "hyper emotionalism" of the camp meetings. [5] After Earl, Don and their sister Myrtle left the church to form what became the Chapel Hill Harvesters, Clariece defined the order of service. [6]
Thumma suggested she professionalized [7] the rituals by transferring functions from the congregation to people she had trained. He noted "the expressive portions of worship, typically unpredictably spontaneous and difficult to control, soon decreased as they became more structured and domesticated." [8] Further, the spontaneous "prophecies, tongues, and healings" were cut from tapes of services made for television broadcast, then limited during the service by Clariece’s use of music. [9]
She remembered church gatherings she had attended that were so unstructured, one choir director asked the congregation what they should sing and another pastor waited for volunteers to fill the choir loft before he began the service. She also had "been in churches that didn’t believe in dancing, yet there was shouting and ‘dancing in the Spirit’." [10]
When she saw her first liturgical dance at a ministerial conference in the 1960s, it suggested ways movement could be regularized. She thought, "if we could rehearse the music we were going to sing in a particular service and rehearse the instrumental music, and perform drama from a script, why couldn’t we have choreographed dance?" [11]
Her version of "Come by Here" was part of a spectacle dramatizing the Civil Rights movement. [12] It began with two white men in suits walking away from each other. A Black male soloist in a torn undershirt and knee pants stood with his back to the audience with his knees bent and his arms raised high.
An African-American woman with a scarf around her head reached her arms forward. She did a contraction then threw her head back and her arms to her sides. He lifted her from behind and slowly turned.
As the music changed from the opening repetitions of "oh, Lord" to "somebody’s praying" they knelt on the floor. He stood with his arms raised in front of him, his hands together, while she remained of her knees, with her body erect, head thrown back, and arms opened wide.
So far, the choreography could have been a dramatization of slavery. A chorus of women repeated the "oh Lord" verse as the song moved from the prelude into the denouement. Women in long dresses and two additional men came on stage to execute more movements derived from Graham.
It was in the denouement that the Paulks’ discomfort with the emotional aspects of Pentecostalism became obvious. The musical accompaniment changed from random drum beats and strums of a string bass to a keyboard, but the choir’s vocal style didn’t changed. The women sang with the same kind of pure voices Madison Short had cultivated in the local high school twenty years before. [13] This lack of vocal emotion continued when a man joined them to sing verses over their repeated phrases.
The failure of the music to progress toward a climax was reflected in the dance, which continued to include more variations on Graham’s style for no apparent reason other than their own virtuosity. The tape ended before they were done, as if fading away were the appropriate ending for a religious experience.
Performers
Dancers: at least seven women, three men [14]
Vocal Soloist: man
Vocal Group: women
Instrumental Accompaniment: keyboard
Rhythm Accompaniment: occasional drum or string bass
Credits
From the original drama, "The March Goes On.’ [15]
Written by Charles Reed and Marie Middleton [16]
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Verses: come by here, needs you, praying, need you in the morning, looking for a blessing
Vocabulary
Pronoun: somebody
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: prelude-denouement
Verse Repetition Pattern: each verse repeated twice; "oh Lord" verse used to begin, end, and make the transition from the prelude to the denouement.
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: each line on one tone
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: prelude and first part of denouement used only female singers; in second part of the denouement, a male singer first echoed them, then sang over their repetitions.
Singing Style: clear tones with no vibrato
Vocal-Accompaniment Dynamics: prelude nearly a capella with occasional drum beats or strokes on the string bass; keyboard took over in the denouement, but was restrained.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: World Congress on the Kingdom of God, 1990
Location: stage, K Center, Chapel Hill Harvester Church, Decatur, Georgia
Microphones: none visible
Clothing: shades of lavender; women in long shapeless dresses and darker ankle length tights; men in sleeveless undershirts and knee-length pants
Notes on Movement
Dance in the style of Martha Graham.
Notes on Audience
Video was cut off before the dancers finished.
Notes on Performers
Clariece began playing piano as a child, but her mother made sure she "would learn to read music, arrange music, compose and transpose." [17] She met her husband when she was a freshman at the Church of God’s Lee College in Cleveland. The next year, she attended Wheaton College where "Rolf Espeseth introduced me to a whole new world of sacred classical music. In his choral conducting class he taught me how important it is to select music for worship services." [18]
She returned to Tennessee for her junior and senior years at the University of Chattanooga, where she "danced and sung in productions for the Chattanooga Opera Association," [19] including the Threepenny Opera. [20]
In 1983, the church opened an elementary school that "devoted an hour every day to arts education for each child." When students wanted more, she opened the Clarience Paulk School of the Performing Arts. [21] Among other projects it mounted productions of The Nutcracker and Alvin Ailey’s Revelations. [22]
The church, by then renamed the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, closed after Earl Paulk was accused of preying on young women and girls in his church. One consequence of the litigation was a DNA test that proved he had fathered Clariece’s son. [23] His son/nephew, Donald Junior, reorganized the church after the scandals as the Spirit and Truth Sanctuary in Decatur. [24]
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by Don Paulk for Cathedral of the Holy Spirit on 28 November 2013.
End Notes
1. Scott Thumma. "The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: Megachurches in Modern American Society." PhD dissertation. Emory University, 1996. Chapter 2, 13-14.
2. Thumma. Chapter 2, 27.
3. Earl Paulk. Unfinished Course. Shippensburg, Pennsylvania: Destiny Press, 2004. 64.
4. Thumma. Chapter 2, 16-17.
5. Thumma. Chapter 2, 16. "In a sermon in 1977 he stated this feeling very more succinctly, ‘I used to go to camp meetings and I used to dread it with a holy terror’." Paulk also remembered "As a kid I watched the hyper emotionalism and vowed, ‘God I want to serve you...but I don’t want that because I don’t understand that. It has no meaning to me’."
6. Wikipedia. "Earl Paulk."
7. Thumma. Chapter 7, 9-10.
8. Thumma. Chapter 7, 10.
9. Thumma. Chapter 7, 10.
10. Clariece Paulk. People Don’t Know What They Like...They Like What They Know. Maitland, Florida: Xulon Press, 2017. 34.
11. Clariece Paulk. 35.
12. Clariece Paulk. 93.
13. For more on Madison Short and Columbia High School, see the post for 12 August 2018.
14. The company was integrated. The other African-American male and female dancers were not paired during the lifts, which meant a Black man touched a white woman. Clariece named some of her later dancers (page 153), and noted Denise Guzzardi was her first choreographer. (Clariece Paulk. 35.)
15. Don Paulk, YouTube notes.
16. Clariece Paulk. 236.
17. Clariece Paulk. 46.
18. Clariece Paulk. 60.
19. Earl Paulk. 76.
20. Clariece Paulk. 43.
21. Clarience Paulk. 85.
22. Clarience Paulk. 236.
23. John Blake. "How the Ultimate Scandal Saved One Pastor." CNN website. March 2015. He suggested Clariece became involved with Earl because she wanted a son, and had had only daughters.
24. Wikipedia.
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