SPRING 2020
IT'S THAT QUIET MOMENT LATE IN THE MASS, after the Communion hymn has ended and the faithful are seated or kneeling to receive God’s blessings. With a whisper of flowing gowns, eight dancers – members of the liturgical dance ministry of St. Charles Borromeo, Harlem – glide up the aisle to the altar, where they stand facing the cross as the piano comes quietly to life.
The voices of the choir well up into a hymn of praise, and the dancers join the song in steps and gestures sweeping and subtle. In time, they move back into the aisle and, surrounded by the congregation, make visible the spiritual experience – receiving thankfully the grace of God and lifting the heart in thanks and joy. As the hymn comes to a close, the dancers recess back down the aisle and the priest rises for the closing of the liturgy. “Let us pray,” he says.
There are many ways to pray. When we are young, we are taught to “say” our prayers, and there are many powerful prayers in the Catholic tradition that we speak in church and in everyday life. But not all prayers are made up of words.
“For me,” wrote St. Therèse of Lisieux, “prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.”
Prayer can take the form of silent meditation or wordless music. It can be contemplative, sorrowful, joyful. A painting or sculpture can be a prayer by the artist, and its contemplation a prayer for the one who sees it. Liturgical dance, too, is a form of prayer, engaging the mind, ears and eyes, but also the whole body.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (2562) tells us, “Whether prayer is expressed in words or gestures, it is the whole man who prays.”
"The celebration of our Catholic Masses is steeped in ritual, and movement that focuses our attention on the spirit of the Lord in the liturgy,” says Nina Klyvert-Lawson, director the liturgical dance ministry at St. Charles Borromeo. “From the opening procession, to the sweep of the arm sprinkling the holy water on the parishioners or blessing the altar with the holy incense, to us bowing before receiving the Eucharist... all these are movements of prayer. Why not extend that movement to the celebration of a dance ministry – a ministry that might just provide another opportunity for God to touch someone’s soul?”
Klyvert-Lawson, an accomplished dancer, teacher and choreographer who studied as a scholarship recipient with Alvin Ailey and the Boston Ballet and danced professionally with Ailey II, has led the liturgical dance program at St. Charles Borromeo since 1997. The ministry, whose style mixes the idioms of classical ballet, modern and African dance, rehearses twice a week and performs several times each year, notably at the Christmas Midnight Mass, Holy Thursday Mass and the annual Central Harlem Deanery Revival. They have also performed at the Black History Month Mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
At St. Charles, “We are fortunate to minister with live music from our Gospelites Choir under the musical direction of Dr. BrVon Neal and choir director Karen Blake. Sometimes it feels like I’m witnessing a ball of energy that keeps growing.” Br. Tyrone Davis, director of the Black Ministry Office of the Archdiocese of New York, describes it as “the spirit in motion – the spirit of joy and sadness, the spirit of longing and receiving, the spirit of petition and gratitude; the spirit of life and death; the spirit of the party and the worship; but above all the spirit of the living God.”
There are several other liturgical dance ministries in the Archdiocese of New York, including Mater Dei, headquartered at the Hispanic Catholic Charismatic Center at St. Anthony of Padua in the Bronx, and The Moving Prayer, which has collaborated with numerous parishes and organizations throughout the archdiocese to bring liturgical and sacred dance to Masses, youth ministries, religious ed classes and other settings. Both of these groups have contributed performances to Mass at New York Catholic Youth Day in recent years.
“Sacred dance has been around since the beginning of time – that’s how people worshipped in early his- tory,” says Jessica Abejar, founder and director of The Moving Prayer, which performed at New York Catholic Youth Day in 2016 and 2017. “Dancing has been part of Jewish tradition for centuries. In Old Testament times the dancing was done in temples. In early Christianity, since the religion was underground there was no space for this. In the U.S., sacred dance began to take off in the early 20th century as modern dance began to emerge, and became connected to Catholicism around the time of Vatican II.”
Abejar started doing liturgical dance at 7 or 8 years of age, and in 2013 had the opportunity to dance at World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro. She was mentored by Carla DeSola, a pioneer in the liturgical dance movement who worked with Dorothy Day in the Catholic Worker movement. The Moving Prayer has collaborated with youth ministries, performed at Masses and other events and given workshops introducing the art of liturgical dance. “I teach how movement can be used as prayer – how creating a relationship with God can be creative, fun and something more than we could have thought.”
Denise Peralta founded Mater Dei in 2015. “Dancing is the most amazing way to praise God,” she says. “When words are not enough your body just wants to express praise to God.” She notes, however, that some Catholics view dance ministry with skepticism. “At New York Catholic Youth Day in 2018, I was approached by a nun who was upset that they would bring dance ministry to the event,” Peralta recalls. “After the event, she came up to me in tears and thanked me.”
“We are not just dancers, we are praising Jesus,” she says. “We hope in every instance that the congregation is led to want to worship Christ with us. We try to end our dance in a way that will not lead to applause. The praise is not for us.”
This in no way means that the experience does not bring rewards to the dancer. “Performing arts ministry is where art meets the soul,” says Klyvert-Lawson, director of the ministry at St. Charles Borromeo. “It revives the soul of the person who is ministering and also the person who is receiving. The opportunity to create and offer movement that reflects the word of God through song or scripture is a blessed experience.”