The rediscovered Hildegard Von Bingen (1098-1179) is experiencing a renaissance. Besides her thoughts and writings, there are a good number of treatments and reissues of her musical oeuvre and work. These musical recordings and releases pay tribute to Europe’s first female composer Hildegard Von Bingen, the diverse and ramifying German mystic, the naturalist abbess, whose work spread into the fields of natural science, of medicine, of poetry and of music. It’s exciting to rediscover Hildegard from the distance of a millennium and to give her voice in the present.

At the same time, a different experience and discovery led me to her and to the concept through which this musical work came about.
My work was conceived during contemplation at church when I noticed the space formed by the lack of dance, when every single art form is present in churches from painting, to sculpture, to music, to architecture, from the stained glass windows to the joinery. The church is an internal image of the human world reflected outwards by the soul. A vision in form! All this was created by artists in order to communicate with God. Art is communication, alliance, the deepest primordial expressive force of the human soul. But how could dance be overlooked?

Recognising this question, work on Sacred Songs began. It grew from a lack of dance into a complex audio-visual work, whose final goal was to reintegrate dance into sacred spaces, and to which I wanted to give a poetic, but provocative language. And so, the basic idea didn’t begin with a need for music, but with a need for dance, movement, for which I found Hildegard Von Bingen’s pieces.

Since dance is an elusive medium similar to music, we only have indirect information on the history of dance. In all likelihood, the early church praised God with dance, too, in accordance with earlier Jewish traditions. The changes started later with the spreading of pagan Christianity, and the simultaneous appearance of steadily more prevalent Neoplatonist and Gnostic teachings. The separation of body and soul was typical of both philosophies, the elevation of the spiritual world and the rejection of the body.

The main thought of Gnosticism is that salvation can be found in true – hidden and secret – knowledge: we have split from our divine genesis and forgotten about our grand origin which can only be reacquired with the help of true knowledge. At the very top is the informed, the knowledgeable, an entirely spiritual being, and at the bottom predominantly are the carnal. This is the origin of dualism, and the teachings of good and bad.

Neoplatonism’s attitude towards the duality of the world is similar: every visible thing is a weaker version, a reflection of something which already exists in the soul. Similar to a Gnostic, this philosophy deems the body, the earthly visible world to be of a lower rank. The body is linked to the fallen world, which is impure and perishes. It is the lowest, basest form of existence. (1) In the old Christian church these teachings put forth the perspective which was one of the main reasons for the rejection of dance. The other reason was dance’s connection with pagan religions. (E.g. the Cult of Dionysus.)
1. This view completely contradicts the Bible in which the God tells the earth it’s good. (Genesis 1:31)

The situation was worsened after Constantine I issued the Edict of Milan when pagan religions were “consecrated”, and pagan icons and customs to be integrated into Christian teachings were given new labels. Consequently, as with drinking, the pious fathers forbid dances from the sacrament. Things came to the point where because of the entertaining dances typically held to celebrate the first night of the holidays in 789 the church council forbid dancing in churches and churchyards.

At the same time, in old Christian liturgy dance had a role. The significance of dance is apparent, as it’s frequently addressed in the old Christian writings. Tertullian mentions that on the eve of the 2nd and 3rd centuries the hymns in the church were accompanied by dance performances, the scenes of dance in the old testament were added to the liturgy. In early Christian churches, in the space in front of the altar, dance was part of the ceremony during larger holidays (Christmas, Twelfth Night, Easter, Whitsun).

So with this work I wanted to give rise to dance, to sacred dance and to provocation. To reintroduce dance to churches. I wanted to provoke because since the birth of Christianity we have built tight spiritual restrictions around ourselves which won’t help us to communicate with God, but on the contrary, we’re separating ourselves from God, denying one of the oldest and purest forms of communication, as old as mankind, and born out of love for life.

In order to make this idea a reality, I presented an arrangement of three pieces by Hildegard Von Bingen’s “O vis eternitatis”, “O tu sauvissima virga” and “O vis eternitatis_eternity”, in a collaboration with the singer Julia Heeger, and dancing from Anna Kivinen, Tiina Sysimusta, Sanna-Maria Santos as the visual aspect of this musical material. Together, music, dance, film meld into a greater audio-visual work, of which this is the musical part.