Joris Lacoste: Nexus de l'adoration

ABOUT Nine officiants take the stage and begin to praise. They sing, chant, testify, and dance their way through the world's vast repertoire of devotion, gestures, and phrases gathered across faiths, cultures, and contexts and set loose in a single rite. Part concert, part ceremony, part something with no name yet, Joris Lacoste's Nexus de l'adoration asks a live question: with the old certainties gone, what does a fractured age still gather to worship? Fresh from its premiere at the Festival d'Avignon, the piece is by turns hypnotic, funny, and genuinely strange, a service for no religion in particular that turns collective attention into its true subject. Avignon called it a world where nine officiants sing, dance, and speak; the Festival d'Automne, a ceremony that looks a little like a musical. It closes NYU Skirball's fall with communal attention itself as the medium. Co-presented with L'Alliance New York's Crossing TheLine Festival.