Listen: a king sat upon his throne, surrounded by lofty and wonderfully beautiful columns ornamented with ivory, bearing the banners of the king proudly to all. Then it pleased the king to lift a small feather from the ground, and he commanded it to fly. Yet a feather does not fly because of anything, but because the air bears it along. Thus, I am a feather on the breath of God, not gifted with great powers or education, nor even with good health, but I rely completely on God.Footnote 1

Hildegard of Bingen to Odo of Paris, ca. 1148–1149 (Kujawa-Holbrook 2016, 57)

When I first encountered the image of a feather suspended on the breath of God while reading Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook’s collection of works by Hildegard of Bingen, I immediately felt a visceral familiarity with the material world of Hildegard’s allegory.Footnote 2 As a medievalist who had trained for a career in professional dance performance, the feather borne along on the air, floating on the breath of God, seemed to be a perfect embodiment of one of the core dynamics of dance: suspension, the quality of a body balanced right at the peak of movement, almost paused, hovering in a leap or teetering on the edge of an arabesque (‘a position of the body, in profile, supported on one leg … with the other leg extended behind and at right angles to it, and the arms held in various harmonious positions creating the longest possible line from the fingertips to the toes’; see ‘Arabesque’ 2023), a breath held for a split-second at the top of a swing—before the body and the breath must release, surrender to gravity, and return to the earth. Suspension turns the body into the feather, borne for a moment on a breath.

I remember stopping suddenly at that line, caught by it, suspended then, too, before continuing. But the feather returned to my mind the next year, when I choreographed and performed in ‘Cosmic Dance,’ an evening-length work of modern dance accompanied by a live choral performance of Hildegard’s antiphons for St. Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins from her Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum, with additional music (credited as Straple[-Sovers] 2017). That feather became just one of many medieval legacies integral to the choreography and performance of the piece.

This essay is as much an experiment for me as the process of choreographing and performing ‘Cosmic Dance’ was: it is a reflection on and analysis of my working process as a scholar-artist and an effort to synthesize my identities as a scholar and a dancer, as the choir and dancers attempted to synthesize the modern and the medieval in dance and song. I begin by explaining our approach to the project, explicating the complexities and challenges of ‘recreating’ or ‘reconstructing’ medieval dance practices in modern performance, as well as the challenges particular to ‘Cosmic Dance.’ I then reflect on the ways in which engaging with legacies of the medieval—medieval dance, text, art, performance practice, and concepts of authorship—in my choreographic methodology and performance choices helped me to navigate those challenges.

Background and challenges of the project

‘Cosmic Dance’ was performed by three dancers—Briana Asmus, Amy Russell, and me—along with the female singers of Early Music Michigan (EMM) and several musicians at the inaugural Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival in 2017, a ‘performance festival showcasing and invigorating the global heritage of drama, music, dance, and performance styles from late antiquity through the Renaissance’ (Durham 2019).Footnote 3 I had begun singing with EMM several years before, and the artistic directors, Eric Strand and Ann Marie Boyle, knew about my dance background and asked me whether I would be interested in choreographing a dance piece to be performed alongside a live choral performance. I certainly was interested, and we started planning.

(Re)Construction?: The challenges of reenacting historical dance

Our early discussions about the nature of the project included whether we wanted the dance portion of the performance to attempt any kind of ‘recreation’ or ‘reconstruction’ of medieval dance practices. But we had doubts about the desirability of that strategy from the beginning, not least because the prospect of reconstructing medieval dance traditions is a daunting one. Reconstructing any historical performance practice is challenging, and there are vigorous debates over to what extent this is even possible and around the various approaches one can take in the effort (see Agnew et al. 2020 for a comprehensive background on reenactment studies). Practitioners and scholars of early music, for example, have been questioning the ‘limits of authenticity’ since at least the mid-twentieth century (Taruskin et al. 1984). Michael Morrow wrote in 1978 that:

Any piece of music, medieval, renaissance, baroque, what you will, offers the modern performer the potentiality of countless possibilities of interpretation: one medieval piece for instance, could be played in a dozen ways and the result would almost certainly appear to be twelve quite different pieces of music. Of course, one of these performances could, by sheer chance, be more or less historically correct. But how are we now to judge which? (Morrow 1978, 233).

Debates around ‘authenticity,’ ‘historically informed performance,’ and other approaches to early music have continued since (see, for example, Taruskin 1982 and 1992; Dreyfus 1983; Taruskin et al. 1984; Kenyon 1988; Kivy 1995 and 2002; Dodd 2020; and Ravasio 2020, among many others).Footnote 4

I would argue that the prospect of reconstructing or reenacting historical dance practices is even more fraught than that of reconstructing musical performance. Reconstructing medieval dance is particularly difficult because of the paucity of surviving sources on that topic, relative to other forms of historical art and performance: the first surviving European dance manuals, for example, were not produced until the fifteenth century (see Straple-Sovers 2021, 22n5 for a list of examples), and even then Western dance notation was not always accurate or reliable until around the twentieth century. Dance is by nature a fundamentally ephemeral art, unable to be accurately and fully captured in the visual art forms of the medieval world and largely lacking widespread, standardized systems of notation. This was certainly true throughout the Middle Ages, and remains so even today: a variety of dance notation systems have been developed, but none are widely taught.Footnote 5

I have previously discussed the challenges of historical dance scholarship and of reconstruction of historical dance traditions, particularly those of the medieval world (Straple-Sovers 2021). Other scholars have examined the evidence for medieval dance practices in medieval literature or art in a variety of ways. Some have focused on a specific dance form, such as the carole (discussed further below; see also Hoppin 1978, 296; Sachs 1937, 269; and Mullaly 2011). Others mine a specific material or literary artifact for information about dance: Martha Bayless (2016), for example, argues that an early medieval English brooch depicts a dancer, rather than a representation of the five senses, which has been previously argued; Laura Hellsten claims that ‘dance creates theology’ through a case study of Gerald of Wales’s descriptions of the celebrations of St. Eluned’s feast day (2022 unpag.); and the contributors to Lynneth Miller Renberg and Bradley Phillis’s collection The Cursed Carolers in Context (2021) explore the medieval contexts, legacies, and meanings of the many versions of the tale of the cursed carolers of Kölbigk.

Then there are studies that investigate both the physical and metaphysical contexts and realities of medieval dance. Lynneth Miller Renberg, for example, studies the complex web between gender, dance, and religion in medieval English parishes and traces the transformation of dance in Western Europe over the medieval period from sacred to sinful (2022). Kathryn Dickason considers the deeply ‘polemical and controversial’ medieval discourses on dance and the ‘religious authorization of dance in Western Europe,’ arguing that ‘dance became an integral part of medieval religious life’ (2021, 2–3). And Seeta Chaganti proposes that dance was a more central, daily, and communal practice in the medieval world than in our own, and that its physical practice was intimately connected with and integral to the contemporary creation and understanding of medieval poetry (2018).

Ultimately, however, relying on literary or artistic representations of dance to tell us anything about the physical aspects of its performance is unreliable at best, since these sources were not created with the intent to accurately record physical movements, relationships of dancers to one another, or their movement through space. Paraphrasing Morrow (1978), any evidence we can glean about medieval dance could lend itself to a dozen different interpretations and performances—and how could we even know whether any of them would have looked familiar to a medieval dancer? Scholars such as Mark Franko (2000 [with Annette Richards]; 2015 [1993]; 2017), Linda J. Tomko (2004), Seeta Chaganti (2018), Cristina Baldacci and Susanne Franco (2022), and others, including the many contributors to Franko’s Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment (2017), have grappled with the concepts of reenactment, recreation, reconstruction, recovery, reinvention, etc., of past dance traditions and performances. As Franko acknowledges, attitudes toward ‘the relation of dance to concepts of the past, historicity, and memory […prove] to be as diverse as the protagonists—dancers, choreographers, and scholars—individually and collectively engaged with it’ (2017, 5).

Modern performances that engage with the ‘pastness’ of dance can range from true attempted reconstructions (particularly of pieces staged in the last two centuries, in which choreography, staging, sets, costumes, etc. are ‘rescued,’ ‘revived,’ or recreated from written notation, photographs, film, notes, and even dancers’ memories) to recovery of partial elements of performance or even reinvention—or, as Franko calls it, ‘construction’ (2017, 487). Rather than attempting to recreate the exact performance circumstances and movement of a piece or dance practice, construction—which is ‘purposively opposed to “reconstruction”’ by Franko—‘sacrifices the reproduction of a work to the replication of its most powerful intended effects’ (2015 [1993], 133).

For a variety of reasons, Strand, Boyle, and I decided against an attempt to reconstruct or reenact a particular medieval dance tradition. Even if such a reconstruction had been feasible, would it have made sense or even been desirable in our performance context? We were, after all, performing Hildegard’s music in circumstances vastly different to the original. While the manuscript transmission of the antiphons for St. Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins is complicated and leads to questions about their original purpose and use, William T. Flynn suggests that it is likely that ‘the song texts may always have been interpreted within a liturgical context’ (2012, 172), and Catherine Jeffreys argues that ‘the genres represented in the Symphonia suggest that the items included in the cycle were composed specifically for liturgical use’ (1994, 14; see also Jeffreys 1996; Newman 1998, 12–17; and Leigh-Choate et al. 2013a and 2013b, esp. 208–19). Whether these songs were intended as part of the liturgy or not, however, they were certainly not written to be sung by a secular choir in a black-box theatre for a decidedly performative form of entertainment.

‘Authenticity’ was also not a central focus for the choir. Strand and Boyle included other compositions by Hildegard (several Songs to the Virgin and Favus distillans, a responsory for St. Ursula and her companions) at the beginning and end of the piece as bookends and incorporated improvisational vocal sections and instrumental accompaniment throughout. We recognized that we were not attempting to ‘authentically’ recreate the performance conditions of the antiphons; we were providing entertainment at a theatre festival with the tagline ‘Mostly Medieval, Mostly Theatre.’ In that spirit, we decided that we would mix medieval music and modern dance in our performance, hoping that the end result would be enjoyable and engaging for our audience. Our program notes for the night read:

Instead of presenting the music of Hildegard of Bingen in concert form with an academic musicological approach, here in ‘Cosmic Dance’ we are offering an experience for the audience. The dancers draw us in and present a possible image of the kind of ecstatic visions that Hildegard was known for, in which her art and science were delivered to her. Hildegard’s music can be described as unusual having many idiosyncrasies, but it is exactly that which sets it apart and makes it so intriguing. This also makes it exciting to perform as it is different every time because the performer finds nuances to bring forth in the expression of the text by way of an expansive melodic structure. The instrumental portion is completely improvised but influenced by various approaches to the music, where Hildegard’s melodies were expanded upon using old and modern instruments. Because of the flexible nature of the music, portions of the dance are choreographed and other sections are improvised drawing influence from early folk dance forms (Boyle and Strand 2017).

As an organization, EMM’s goal was to interpret the medieval legacy of Hildegard’s work through a modern artistic lens for the enjoyment of our audience. As the choreographer, my goal was for my modern dance choreography to be the feather on the breath of Hildegard’s medieval music.

Practical challenges

My dancers and I faced a constellation of challenges as we choreographed and rehearsed. The longest piece I had choreographed prior to this project was under ten minutes; this piece would be five times as long. We were all in our thirties, no longer performing consistently, with full-time graduate school or work responsibilities that meant that we could rehearse only one or two times a week over a three-month rehearsal period—far too few rehearsals for the length of the piece! We would be performing to live music, some of which would be improvised, but had access only to recorded music for most of our rehearsal time and would not be together onstage with the musicians until the week of the performance. All of this meant that composing set (that is, non-improvised) choreography for the entire piece, teaching it to the dancers, and rehearsing it sufficiently was going to be incredibly difficult. Finally, while Hildegard’s music is certainly captivating, it is not particularly ideal for dancing—it has little driving rhythm, and while its layering harmonies create gorgeous musical texture, they make it difficult to establish distinct phrases of dance.

As I began thinking about choreography and how we would deal with these issues, I returned to Hildegard’s writing, both the text of the antiphons as well as her other works. I thought about what I did know about medieval dance and looked to illustrations from manuscripts of Hildegard’s work and images of medieval dancers for inspiration. I did want to engage with medieval dance traditions—to nod toward them in my choreography—but not to reconstruct them. I came to realize that playing with medieval sources and traditions could help me navigate these choreographic and practical challenges. Thus, I settled on a choreographic methodology of construction, which ‘abandon[s] the quest for historical authenticity by staging multiple temporalities related to disparate historical moments put into dialogue with each other’ (Franko 2017, 487). That was, after all, exactly what we were trying to do: to put several artforms from multiple temporalities and disparate historical moments into dialogue. In the first chapter of her excellent and fascinating Strange Footing, Chaganti discusses her similar methodology of ‘narrative reenactment’: a method that explores ‘what lies in the interstice between a medieval representation of dance and an accessible viewing experience of a contemporary dance that shares certain structural features with the earlier example’ (2018, 34). In the remainder of this essay, I reflect on the medieval legacies that influenced my work and analyse how my interpretation of them became embodied in my choreography and performance.

Legacies of medieval dance

While the artistic directors of EMM and I had decided that ‘Cosmic Dance’ would blend medieval music and modern dance, I did not want to completely ignore medieval dance traditions in my choreography. What I knew about medieval dance was based on scholarship and medieval artistic depictions of social dances such as the carole—group dances performed hand-in-hand, probably in the form of circles and/or lines, or alternating between shapes and figures (Hoppin 1978, 296; Mullaly 2011; Sachs 1937, 269). These kinds of figures survive in many styles of European folk dance, such as the Irish step dancing I practiced for over a decade while growing up and the contra and English country dancing I had done as a hobby, and are depicted in medieval manuscript illustrations such as those found in manuscripts of Le Roman de la Rose (see Figures 1, 2, 3).

Figure 1
figure 1

Courtesy invites Amant into the carole in a miniature across two columns in Le roman de la rose, France, ca. 1400–1600. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Douce 195, fol. 007r. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, CC-BY-NC 4.0

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Figure 2
figure 2

A group dances a carole in Le roman de la rose, France, ca. 1400–1402. Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France fr. 1665, fol. 10v. Source gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France. Image in the public domain

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Figure 3
figure 3

A group dances a carole in the Garden of Deduiz in Le roman de la rose, France, ca. 1450. London, The British Library, Additional 12042, fol. 7. Image in the public domain

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But I had also learned that the circular, ring-form dance was not exclusively associated with secular dance in the Middle Ages: Ruth Lightbourne points out that ‘it was a widely held belief during the Middle Ages that heavenly beings danced,’ and that this dance was ‘a heavenly ring dance’ (1991, 55, emphasis added). Lightbourne traces the history of this idea from the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Babylonians through medieval Christianity, citing Christian authorities such as Gregory of Nazianzus and texts such as the Hymn of Jesus that describe sacred or heavenly dance as ‘going about in a ring’ or ‘encircling,’ respectively (ibid., 58, 60).Footnote 6 Lightbourne argues that ‘there is evidence to suggest that this dance was imitated by the earthly Church’ (ibid., 55).

Dickason discusses a specific text that lends support to Lightbourne’s argument: the Llibre Vermell de Montserrat (Red Book of Montserrat), a fourteenth-century manuscript collection of devotional texts that contains evidence of pilgrims’ singing and dancing activities, which contains a virelai called Regina Polorum and a ‘scribal annotation indicat[ing] that a ball redon (round, circular dance) may accompany [it]’ (2021, 62).Footnote 7 The Llibre Vermell, compiled by an anonymous monk at the Santa Maria de Montserrat abbey, a major site of pilgrimage in the late Middle Ages, contains songs and dances that the compiler considered appropriate for performance by the pilgrims, possibly even ‘in the church’ (ibid., 62)—thus suggesting that circular dances, probably resembling the carole, also enjoyed a sacred use in the Middle Ages.

Even more fascinating, especially for this discussion, is Lightbourne’s suggestion that Hildegard’s twelfth-century musical drama Ordo Virtutem, ‘The Play of the Virtues,’ would have featured Hildegard’s nuns playing musical instruments and dancing as they portrayed the characters of the Virtues. As Lightbourne explains, ‘it is certain that Hildegard wrote this play for her nuns to perform,’ and she argues that ‘although there is no mention of dancing in the manuscript, there is a strong possibility that dancing was intended,’ at least partially ‘because of the alternating solo and choral items, a form resembling that of the secular dance-song’ (1991, 55). She also points out that ‘allusions to the celestial dance in the writings of Hildegard are not difficult to find’ and discusses a particularly striking example from Scivias I.6:

In this, Hildegard describes the nine orders of celestial spirits praising God with amazing voices and with every kind of music… What is of particular interest is the circular formation in which they are depicted in the accompanying illustration. Towards the end of her description of this vision, Hildegard describes these orders as performing a dance of exultation (tripudium exultationis), and it can be seen from the illumination that she pictured them praising God in a ring formation. This would seem to be an obvious reference to a celestial round or ring dance (Lightbourne 1991, 56; see also Dronke 1984, 55–103).

Lightbourne is not the first scholar to suggest that the Virtues dance in the second scene of Ordo Virtutem; Peter Dronke (1970), Richard Axton (1975), and Kent Kraft (1984) have all also done so, although as Lightbourne notes, none of the others provided a basis for their assertions, as she has here.Footnote 8

The original performance context of the Ordo Virtutem is unclear—Axton believes it was performed as part of formal Church worship (1975), but Lightbourne counters that ‘it is possible that this drama could have been part of Church worship, but it could also have been performed in a church without being a part of any particular liturgy’ (1991, 50). As I noted above, the original performance context of the antiphons for St. Ursula is also not clear, although it seems likely that they were meant for liturgical use. The enduring uncertainty about the performative conditions of the Ordo Virtutem and the antiphons for St. Ursula, combined with suggestions that Hildegard’s nuns may have danced—possibly even a ring dance—as the Virtues in the former, opened up intriguing possibilities for me as a choreographer. Hildegard’s frequent references to wheels, rotating, and rings also convinced me that invoking the ring dance made perfect sense in this performance context.

Practically, however, recreating this kind of dancing would be challenging in ‘Cosmic Dance,’ as I had only three dancers, including myself—meaning that our ‘circular’ figures would always seem more triangular than round. Thus I opted to evoke the form of the carole and the sacred ring-dance rather than try to make a true ring or circle, and to focus on the rotating shapes Hildegard conjures in her poetry. Early in the piece, the dancers form a circle of three, holding hands and walking in a rotating ring, interspersing the circling locomotion with gestural motion, core contractions, or turns (Straple[-Sovers] 2017, 10:18–10:43).Footnote 9 That figure and pattern return throughout the piece, particularly near the middle of the performance, in what I thought of as the structural climax (30:35–32:35), and again near the end (49:38–50:20), setting up the medievally inspired movement as both the framing device and the core of the performance and emphasizing its significance.Footnote 10 Beyond the hand-in-hand circling evoking the carole, I also integrated other figure work into the choreography, including figure-eights (10:54–11:15) and knots woven by movements of the dancers with clasped hands (30:54–31:26).Footnote 11 These circles and line patterns were, again, inspired by and meant to evoke both the secular danced figures in illustrations such as those above and the rotating movement of the sacred and celestial ring-dance cited in Hildegard’s poetry.

Legacies of medieval text and imagery

I consulted Hildegard’s writing again early in my choreographic process, both the text of the antiphons to which we were dancing and other works. Ultimately, her body of work deeply influenced my choreography in three ways: through narrative elements within the antiphons, through textual imagery, and through visual imagery from illustrations found in manuscripts of her work.

Narrative elements from the antiphons

Hildegard’s series of antiphons is written in praise of St. Ursula, who, according to her medieval legend (which has many variations), was a Romano-British Christian princess whose father wished to marry her to a pagan. Sent to meet her betrothed, she and eleven thousand virginal companions—who, in some versions, were requested by Ursula as a ploy to postpone or avert the marriage, as she thought finding eleven thousand virgins would be too difficult—sailed for three years before being blown off-course or shipwrecked near Rome. Ursula declared that she and her companions would set off on a pan-European pilgrimage, which ultimately ended in Cologne, where invading Huns beheaded the eleven thousand virgins and shot Ursula with an arrow and where their alleged relics rest in the Basilica of St. Ursula.Footnote 12

Hildegard’s antiphons do not directly relate this narrative; rather, they express a more abstract narrative shape while mostly focusing on praising the saint and her companions. Nathaniel M. Campbell has produced a helpful ‘Introduction to the Lauds Antiphons for St. Ursula,’ published on the blog of the International Society for Hildegard von Bingen Studies (2021). This resource includes a reconstructed order for the office based on William Flynn’s (2012) proposed order; a table showing corresponding psalms or scriptural canticles for each antiphon and the corresponding order in the two manuscripts and in Barbara Newman’s edition of the Symphonia (1998); and the Latin text of each antiphon, collated from Newman’s edition and transcriptions by Beverly Lomer (on the blog of the International Society for Hildegard von Bingen Studies), with a modern English translation by Campbell.Footnote 13 The basic narrative structure of the nine antiphons is: the singers praise Ursula and her companions; proclaim that everywhere they went they were greeted with joy, and men came from all around to travel with them and protect them; warn that the devil mocks everything, everywhere; and profess that Ursula and her companions were sustained in their virginity by God.

I do not tend to compose heavily narrative pieces when I choreograph. This personal aesthetic matched well with the antiphons, since they do not tell Ursula’s complete story in a linear tale, and with our performance’s structure, since the choir was performing the antiphons outside of any scholarly reconstructed order and adding several of Hildegard’s songs for the Virgin—O viridissima virga and O virga ac diadema —and a responsory for St. Ursula and her companions—Favus distillans—to our sequence.Footnote 14 Considering all of this, my plan for the structure of the dance was to convey, as our program notes indicated, ‘a possible image of the kind of ecstatic visions that Hildegard was known for,’ allowing me to create some sections that responded to and engaged with the music in more abstract ways, while others reflected the narrative, when it was clear to me, more directly (Boyle and Strand 2017).

The narrative resonated most strongly with me in three sections: Unde quocumque, De patria etiam earum, and Sed diabolus.Footnote 15 The former two depict the travels of Ursula and her companions and of all the men who come to join them:

So wherever they came,

they were received

as with the joy of celestial paradise,

for in the religious life

they appeared full of honor (Newman 1998, 239).

Both from their fatherland

and from other regions,

religious

and learned men

were joined with them.

These men protected them in virginal custody

And served them in all things (ibid., 239).

In these sections, then, I attempted to create a sense of movement and traveling, setting phrases of locomotory movement for each of us with which we crossed the stage from a variety of directions (Straple[-Sovers] 2017, 20:16–21:16).Footnote 16 Again, with only three dancers, creating the sense of a large group of traveling people was difficult, so we spaced our movements out to overlap in a way that would hopefully utilize as much of the stage area as possible and convey the idea of extensive travel.

For Sed diabolus, I did the exact opposite, isolating myself in a solo and performing most of the movement on the floor. The antiphon warns about the devil’s envy:

But the devil in his envy

made a mockery of it:

by envy he has left no work of God

untouched (Newman 1998, 239).

For most of the section I’m curled in on myself, moving on the floor, reaching out with laboured movements and hiding my face (Straple[-Sovers] 2017, 39:26–40:26, 40:56–41:55), in direct opposition to the largely upward- and outward-facing movements of the rest of the piece (which I discuss further below). Footnote 17Throughout the piece the dancers stand in both for a Hildegard-like mystic, receiving a vision of the saint’s legend, as well as for the ‘characters’ within the vision itself. I wanted to embody the image in this antiphon, with the devil leaving neither the mystic nor the saintly subjects of her vision untouched—but ultimately, of course, failing to completely destroy them. In our sequence, we followed Sed diabolus with a reprise of O rubor sanguinis, the antiphon with which we began the performance:

O redness of blood,

you flowed from that lofty height

that Divinity touched:

you are a flower

that the winter of the serpent’s breath

has never harmed (Newman 1998, 233).

At the beginning of O rubor sanguinis, I slowly unfurl from my crouched posture and eventually direct my face and upper body back upwards and stand, joined again by my companions (Straple[-Sovers] 2017, 41:38–42:20).Footnote 18 Thus, the narrative structure of our sequence, both in song and in dance, conveys the idea that, although the devil may touch the work of God, he cannot damage it.

Finally, I took general narrative inspiration from the idea of Hildegard as a mystic, as someone who received visions from God. To try to embody this idea, I opened and closed the piece in a statuesque, gestural posture, with a ‘sternum lift’—in which the dancer directs their sternum upwards, as if pulled by a string from above, so that the upper body is arched back and the face looks upward—and with my hands positioned to ‘receive’ the vision (see Figure 4).

Figure 4
figure 4

Sternum lift from the beginning of ‘Cosmic Dance,’ also repeated at the end of the piece. Courtesy of Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival/Western Michigan University

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This upward-facing posture, and the hands or arms in a receiving or gathering motion, was a significant motif throughout the piece (see Figures 5 and 6).

Figure 5
figure 5

Dancers with upturned faces in ‘Cosmic Dance.’ Courtesy of Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival/Western Michigan University

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Figure 6
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Amy Russell in a slight sternum lift, and with arms raised, in ‘Cosmic Dance.’ Courtesy of Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival/Western Michigan University

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Textual imagery from Hildegard’s body of work

I also looked to textual phrases and literary images in Hildegard’s writing, including texts beyond the songs featured in the performance, for inspiration for choreographic motifs and tone within the piece. The first and most important of these was, of course, the image of the feather on the breath of God, which led me to incorporate as many suspended and hovering movements as possible—movements where the body’s momentum is directed upward or out as far as it can go, seeming to pause before it must fall back. I included many of these moments in my solo sections, including the very beginning of the piece (7:08–7:44), where I thought of myself as representing the role of the mystic, attempting to embody Hildegard’s comment to Odo: ‘Yet a feather does not fly because of anything, but because the air bears it along. Thus, I am a feather on the breath of God’ (Kujawa-Holbrook 2016, 57, emphasis added).Footnote 19 I tried to physically evoke as much as possible the image of a feather wafting on air, catching currents and resisting gravity as it floats (Straple[-Sovers] 2017, 18:18–19:17).Footnote 20

Other phrases from the antiphons that inspired airy, light, and billowing movements included the lines ‘you are a flower / that the winter of the serpent’s breath / has never harmed’ (Newman 1998, 233) and ‘for the air flies’ (ibid., 237). I also found inspiration from Hildegard’s descriptions of the cosmos in Causa et Curae, within a collection of her writings translated by Mark Atherton (2001, 96–8, 102–3, 105). A list of quotations in my choreographic notes includes ‘fire and splendour’; ‘murmurings of thunder’; ‘the east wind embraces the air…the west wind mingles with the floating clouds’; ‘the moon is made of fire and thin air’; ‘flying in the air’; and ‘in its revolving the firmament emits marvellous sounds.’

My notes from the time show that I was particularly interested in other phrases by Hildegard concerning air, flying, breath, and floating, as well as images having to do with thunder and fire. While the main physical motif of the piece was expressed through light, airy movements recalling the feather floating on the breath of God, there were sections of the piece in which I employed more staccato, quicker, and sharper movements and contraction and expansion inspired by this dynamic imagery of fire and thunder (Straple[-Sovers] 2017, 37:13–37:37).Footnote 21

Visual imagery from manuscripts of Hildegard’s works

Finally, along with textual imagery from Hildegard’s writing, I also drew on visual imagery from illustrations found in manuscripts of her work. These included several of the illustrations from the Lucca manuscript of the Liber Divinorum Operum (Biblioteca Statale di Lucca, MS 1942). ‘The Fountain of God’s Work,’ for example, was a direct visual inspiration for our costuming, along with the white veils worn by nuns at Rupertsberg under Hildegard as abbess (see Hotchin 2009; Lightbourne 1991, 50); it was also the visual impetus for some of our tableau-like configurations using a roughly circular or triangular shape (see Figures 7, 8, 9).

Figure 7
figure 7

Liber Divinorum Operum III.3: The Fountain of God’s Work, ca. 1210–1230. Lucca, Biblioteca Statale di Lucca, MS 1942, fol. 132r. Used with permission of the Ministry of Culture-State Library of Lucca

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Figure 8
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Still image from ‘Cosmic Dance’ showing the aesthetic influence of ‘The Fountain of God’s Work’ from Biblioteca Statale di Lucca, MS 1942, fol. 132r. Courtesy of Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival/Western Michigan University

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Figure 9
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Still image from ‘Cosmic Dance’ showing the aesthetic influence of ‘The Fountain of God’s Work’ from Biblioteca Statale di Lucca, MS 1942, fol. 132r. Courtesy of Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival/Western Michigan University

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Other images that had a visual influence on my choreography were, for example, rings or spherical images, such as those found in ‘Macrocosm of Winds, Microcosm of Humors’ and ‘Cosmos, Body, and Soul’ from the Liber Divinorum Operum (see Figures 10 and 11).

Figure 10
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Liber Divinorum Operum I.3: ‘Macrocosm of Winds, Microcosm of Humors,’ ca. 1210–1230. Lucca: Biblioteca Statale di Lucca, MS 1942, fol. 28v. Used with permission of the Ministry of Culture-State Library of Lucca

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Figure 11
figure 11

Liber Divinorum Operum I.4: ‘Cosmos, Body, and Soul,’ ca. 1210–1230. Lucca, Biblioteca Statale di Lucca, MS 1942, fol. 38r. Used with permission of the Ministry of Culture-State Library of Lucca

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In several sections of the dance I used rotating movements, which had been inspired by carolling and folk dances, separate from the linked circles described earlier. These were, instead, larger rotating figures created without linked hands, performed either by all three of us and interspersed with gestural movements (9:30–10:22) or created by two dancers rotating around a featured dancer in the middle (11:18–11:57), intended to reflect the rotational imagery of the cosmos in the Liber Divinorum Operum illustrations.Footnote 22

The inspirations and influences I have described thus far helped me in generating set choreography to teach to my dancers, but large sections of the piece were not actually choreographed and rehearsed before the performance at all. Improvisation was critically important to ‘Cosmic Dance,’ and I held the aforementioned inspirations and traditions in my mind as I improvised. In the last section of this essay, I discuss why improvisation was so important to this piece and how it connects to a final medieval legacy.

Legacies of medieval authorship, composition, and improvisation

As I briefly discussed above, our rehearsal time was nowhere near sufficient to generate, teach, and rehearse almost an hour of choreography. This was a challenge I considered deeply during the early stages of planning and rehearsal, until I realized that, along with medieval dance, texts, and imagery, I could also find inspiration from the fundamental importance of improvisation, translation, and adaptation to medieval composition. There is, of course, a significant body of work on translation, adaptation, and medieval authorship; I cite only a few scholars here to express the parallels between the medieval legacies upon which I drew and my own choreographic approach. I should also make it clear that while I was artistically inspired by these (very complex) concepts and drew loosely upon them as guides for my choreographic methodology, I did not analyse Hildegard’s texts through the lenses of variance or mouvance; these concepts generally inspired me, however, to include various practices of improvisation and adaptation in my choreographic process and my performance.

In our use of improvisation and adaptation, my dancers and I created something like what Bernard Cerquiglini terms variance, which he argues was the ‘basis of the medieval literary aesthetic’ until the end of the thirteenth century: ‘Medieval writing does not produce variants; it is variance…the endless rewriting to which medieval textuality is subjected, the joyful appropriation of which it is the object’ (1999, 77–78). Similarly, Paul Zumthor proposed the term mouvance to describe the essential mobility and mutability of some medieval compositions, which feature an ‘interplay between variant readings and reworkings,’ as texts are translated into new languages, adapted to new genres or for new audiences, and taken apart, shortened, rearranged, or added to (1992, 44; cf. Jacobs 1998; Altschul 2006).Footnote 23 Translation and adaptation were critically important to medieval methods of composition—not only for literature, but also for the composition and the performance of other arts.

Charles Sears Baldwin describes the medieval understanding of improvisation, especially concerning rhetoric, as ‘fluency of rehandling’ (1928, 15). Part of this fluency involves physical improvisation—that is, the spontaneous adjusting of one’s gestures and body language to the expectations and cultural codes of one’s audience. Domenico Pietropaolo argues that ‘there is no great risk of error in assuming that this situation obtains in all the performance arts of the late Middle Ages…in the art of dance, of course, physicality was the only perceivable dimension’ (2003, 10–11). Pietropaolo tells the story of Our Lady’s Tumbler, which features a ‘penitent tumbler [who] sought refuge among the monks of Clairvaux,’ but who did not know how to read or chant to honour the Virgin (ibid., 11). Instead, he ‘decided to honor her secretly with his body’ and performed a truly dazzling sequence of physical feats and flourishes:

the reverence and all of these vaults and leaps, preconceived structures of movement from the dance repertoire of the tumbler’s secular life, had no previous relation to Marian devotion, but they were arranged in a pattern and performed with such ornaments and variations that they became a silent orchestic chant of praise (ibid., 11, emphasis added).

The Virgin was so impressed by the tumbler’s performance that she ‘came out of her statue on the altar and gently stepped down to succor her devoted tumbler’ (ibid., 12).

Keeping all of these concepts (variance, mouvance, improvisation) in mind, I decided that instead of strictly choreographing and rehearsing fifty-five minutes of dance, we would choreograph and rehearse certain sections, but also incorporate large sections of improvisation into the piece (largely performed by me, to keep the pressure off my dancers) and use choreographic adaptation (reworking, rehandling, rewriting) of the set sections to help generate more movement. For example, during a certain rehearsal I asked my dancers to take the first sequence of movement I perform as a solo at the beginning of the piece (Straple[-Sovers] 2017, 7:10–7:46) and to rework it, creating an adapted sequence that still had ties to the original.Footnote 24 Later in the piece, then, all three of our versions are performed together, with me performing the original—the ‘source text’—and my dancers performing their adaptations/translations (29:45–30:09).Footnote 25 This is an effective method (used by many choreographers) to generate additional movement while maintaining some common movement vocabulary and physical motifs in the piece.

Beyond my own sequences of solo improvisation, we also used structured forms of cooperative improvisation called ‘shadowing,’ ‘mirroring,’ and ‘flocking’ to generate spontaneous movement in certain sections of the piece during performance. In shadowing and mirroring, one dancer is the lead, performing improvised movement—the ‘source text’—and the other dancers are arranged in a formation where they can either see the lead dancer or one dancer ahead of them. In shadowing, the dancers following the leader usually stand behind the leader, reproducing their movement soon after the original is performed, while in mirroring dancers usually face one another and reproduce the mirror image of the movement (37:38–38:16).Footnote 26 Flocking, which we used several times throughout the piece in different configurations, is based on the principles of shadowing, but is usually performed in clustered groups. The most significant change is that in flocking the leader can change. As dancers turn to face new directions based on the movement of an original leader, the dancer ending up in the new ‘front’ becomes the new leader: the new ‘author’ of a new ‘source text’ that the new followers then adapt and translate into their own movement (21:36–22:17).Footnote 27

The reproduction of movement produced by these collaborative improvisational strategies can be repeated and staggered, with dancers in a line, for example, following the dancer in front of them rather than the lead dancer—in this way, as movement is passed down the line, the movement is often not merely reproduced, but reworked, adapted, or reinterpreted, just as medieval works were based on various source texts that were themselves often reinterpretations or adaptations of earlier sources (15:22–16:10).Footnote 28 Each of these strategies also called back conceptually to medieval dance and song forms, many of which featured leaders or call-and-response formats (see Hoppin 1978, 296 for the carole specifically). Thus, legacies of medieval artistic composition, adaptation, improvisation, and performance helped my dancers and me navigate some of our most significant practical challenges regarding choreography and performance.

             * * *

Our hope in performing this piece at the Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival was to engage with the medieval and to offer a new way for our audience to do so as well: to construct an experience of multiple temporalities and artforms, to interlace the medieval and the modern. Many of our audience members were attendees of the International Medieval Congress on Medieval Studies (“Kalamazoo”), which was held concurrently with the festival; many of them had probably read Hildegard’s writing before, perhaps even the antiphons for St. Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins, as I had a year before embarking on this project. This performance gave these audience members the opportunity to experience the antiphons in a new way, in a living, embodied form rather than as silently read words on a page. For those audience members who were not medievalists, our performance offered them an exciting and engaging way to experience something (mostly) medieval. And for myself, as a medievalist interested in bodily movement and historical dance, this was a fantastic opportunity not to recreate or reconstruct medieval dance practices, but to engage with legacies of the medieval—medieval texts and images, methods of composition, adaptation, and improvisation, and dance—in a long tradition of rehandling, reworking, and rewriting: a modern scholar and performer suspended on a medieval breath.