March 30, 2003
Awakened Woman's Circle is working for peace
All praise to Jennifer Berezan
for Praises for the World
by Stephanie Hiller
Tonight's celebration is … more prayer than performance, more ritual than show. And all of you are invited into the circle to chant and weave this prayerful meditation with us. May joining together to express our devotion for this beautiful and endangered world fill us all with a deep love, awe, and reverence. -- Jennifer Berezan
Jennifer Berezan has done something remarkable -- again.
She has picked up the spirit of ancient Malta and plopped it into the Scottish Rite Temple in Oakland. Enacted in song, dance and poetry, bedecked in the varied accoutrements of modernity, and facilitated by contemporary technology, the rituals of the goddess are restored to their original vibrancy and intent.
What an experience, and what a message.
Performed on March 22, Praises to the World is the second such extravaganza -- for extravaganza it is, especially considering the limited resources of the goddess community -- the first having been performed on the quivering eve of y2k, and this one following the vernal equinox and the opening days of the new Iraq war. What an instinct for timing.
Summoning talents from all over the goddess community, Praises calls in the Goddess from all four corners of the world and across thousands of years of herstory, from Tibet, Korea, Africa, and the Americas, while taking more than 3000 people on a powerful personal journey through the dark night of the soul, into rebirth and light.
Berezan is the Canadian folksinger who wrote songs to Emma Goldman and called in Cassandra before turning to her own unique adaptation of sacred chant in response to the call of the goddess. As a teacher in private workshops and in classes at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, Berezan has shared her knowledge of the profound healing power of musical invocation. And "she sings like an angel," as Vicki Noble has said. [see Vicki's review of an earlier recording, "Refuge".]
Her first journey to the Hypogeum in Malta in March 1998 with Joan Marler inspired her to take her work into new dimensions. [see our interview with her] She honored that inspiration by returning to the Hypogeum on the Winter Solstice to actually record in its depths her first full-length chant-CD, "Returning", in celebration of the cycle of death and life. "Returning" was performed at the Scottish Rites Temple on the winter solstice, 1999.
In "Praises for the World", it's cycles again that she invites us to celebrate, but this is the cycle of the effulgent expansiveness of spring. And to sit there on a cool, clear evening in the midst of a war, singing "praises to the world" in cascading harmonies, captured by sequences of extraordinary voices and various instruments, listening to poets like Alice Walker and Mary Oliver, and watching the incredible dancers of the Dance Brigade leaping to the complex rhythms of the drums, is to experience rapture.
It emerges from the depths of the soul, and it rises, spiraling, like the powerful voice of Ferron singing wordless passion, into round after round of intensifying crescendos of feeling, to a climactic battle of apparent opposites, conquering the imagined demon, whilst above the stage, an extraordinary unfolding takes place. Wrapped in white cloth and appearing like dewdrops, or the tears of the goddess Tara crying for the pain of the world, six cocooned dancers gradually emerge through the diaphanous folds of the cloth, as butterflies.
And then, remarkably, though surely it must have peaked, the journey goes on, its orgasmic celebration so deliciously intense that it seems impossible to separate one moment from another in the triumphant ecstasy of complete communion.
I only wish there would be another performance. Indeed, I think there must be another, and another, and another. If Vagina Monologues can play all over the country, why not Praises for the World? This is an experience that everyone should be able to have at least once in their lifetime -- and especially now.
I, who have been there with Jennifer twice already, would gladly attend again.
At least there is a recording! You can order it from Jennifer by visiting her very beautiful website or by sending a message to me. [$17 plus postage $3.50]
Don't do the dishes while it's playing. Turn up the volume -- let its choir fill the whole room. Let it carry you wherever it will -- to sit, to sing, to cry, to dance -- to imagine the dance of the cosmic journey as it courses through your soul and takes shape inside your eyelids. Dreaming the world into being…
As Jennifer told us after the show was done, "Tonight we have created the world the way we want it to be. Now lets make it happen."
It's a far, far better dream than the nightmare of shock and awe.
Unfortunately the CD does not match the power of the performance, and that's why we want to see it again! If Arianna Huffington can get 500 checks to produce 2 30-second commercials about the perils of SUVs [see Arianna in Sonoma, this issue at http://www.awakenedwoman.com/arianna.htm] why can't we send checks to Jennifer's recording company, Edge of Wonder, P.O. Box 6181, Albany, CA 94706, with a plea. Dear Jennifer, can you do it one more time?