Pater noster, plant good seeds

I caught the Pope's death services on television yesterday. I liked this Pope. He was a good man, a Polish man. I have seen his church in Krakow. Part of my heart felt panged that he was being buried in Rome, so far from his own cobblestones and skies.

An old man in red robes stepped up to the mic, and in a quavery voice sang the lord's prayer in Latin: Pater noster, qui es en cielis, sanctificateur nomen tuum...

I was stunned. I first heard that prayer when Akropolis actors sang it in Jeanne the Maid; the priests sang it sweetly as they destroyed Joan of Arc.

What blew me away was -- the tune was identical. I thought Akropolis had made it up. But no, they'd done their research. It was the real thing.

To have those two singings overlaid inside me -- Joan's feral killers against this Pope's sorrowing mourners -- was fantastic. Like cold water and hot water at once.

"Play the moment you're in," says Bart Sher. "Let the audience put it together."

Leonid Anisimov says, "We never know what seeds we are planting with our work. It might be thirteen years before your performance helps this man... and you will never know it. And perhaps he will not know either. It is not our job to know. It is our job to plant good seeds."

Using the exact Latin words, tune, and intonation -- that was good seeds.

When I was at the Odin Teatret, and Eugenio Barba was building Andersen's Dream, one of the guidelines was: nothing could go in the performance that was not tied to Hans Christian Andersen's texts. Nothing. So even when they needed a certain material to fill a box, and wanted coffee-beans -- they could not use them, until they found an Andersen text about coffee.

This is ethics. When every level is attended to cleanly, you can trust the work. It resonates differently because of the precision of the ethics.