The Lord of the Dance

This diminuitive sculpture has sat on the altar of the Episcopal Church at Cornell for many years. It suits the needs of a chaplaincy which shares space with other denominations and faiths and so must be able to move quickly and carry all our holy objects in our hands. In true Anglican fashion, it has become a symbol of the chaplaincy, or of its members' idea of the chaplaincy, simply because it has been there for so long. It is held in especially high regard because it was sculpted by ECC's Chaplain Emeritus, The Rev. Gurdon Brewster.

But what is it? On at least one occasion it has received the nickname "Jumping Jesus" (this IS a chaplaincy) and there is the occasional threat to glue a basketball in his hand. At one point it was temporarily banished on the grounds that "Jesus never did actually jump off the cross." So what is happening?

The title of the work is "Lord of the Dance," an allusion to the Shaker hymn, with its repeated command to follow the Lord of the Dance. In this case, the dancing is merged with one of the rarest of images in the enormous Christian iconography. While there are uncounted images of the Crucifixion, representations of the Resurrection are extremely rare. Some are resplendent, triumphal, and ultimately unconvincing. There were no witnesses to the Resurrection moment, after all, only to the moments afterward. The event itself seems not to hold importance in the sacred story. It endures insofar as it acts in the perception, and the subsequent lives, of believers.

The 15th century fresco of the Resurrection by Piero della Francesca in Sansepulcro, Italy, is a genuine pondering upon the event of the Resurrection. Piero retains the heaviness of Jesus's body as he pulls himself up out of the tomb. The low viewpoint, and the lift of the drapery above the framing forms of the sleeping soldiers, however, give the visual allusion of the still figure rising.

In "Lord of the Dance," this sense of paradox has been moved onto the cross. "They cut me down and I leapt up high." The leaping is the triumph over the death of the cross. The sculpture is a midrash upon the text, a commentary that goes to the heart of the text. It is a genuinely original interpretation, one which merges two events generally seen as separated in time into a single theological statement, something words alone cannot do.

Its connection to the hymn, which was certainly danced itself in worship, uses dance as the means for traversing the liminal space between earth and heaven. The story is reneacted each time it is told and enlivened in the ecstatic movement of the body before the altar – a fitting symbol for a Resurrection people.

Susan R. Dixon

And Death shall have no more dominion.