Kemik: not your ordinary theatre group

"A punk Gregorian choir," was how Elizabeth Downey characterized the singers in various torn, edgy-looking, black costumes, whose a cappella performance of a medieval Latin Christmas liturgy comprised one component of "KEMÍK 3.2: Victory is Love," a play Downey wrote, directed and produced with the new independent theater company KEMÍK.

The play, which was performed at the Pittsburgh Waldorf School on December 21rst, mingled liturgical Gregorian chant from the first millennium A.D. with performances of slam poetry that called for resistance against violence, inequality and political marginalization. It also featured a "protest choir" who carried signs and shouted protest chants.

Downey started KEMÍK with the idea of creating theater that would bring together radically different cultural and artistic forms to explore parallels between the art forms themselves and the different cultural contexts in which they have existed. What interests her particularly about liturgies in the Anglican, Roman Catholic and Byzantine traditions is the drama the liturgy expresses, and its relationship to other traditions both religious and non-religious.

In "Victory is Love," for example, she wanted to look at the radical themes that she saw when she was studying the traditional Gregorian Christmas liturgy. The liturgy’s text talks about struggle against the repressive "kings of the earth," represented in the play by figures like a CEO, a "blue-suited politician," and a corrupt religious leader. The Christmas story, says Downey, celebrates the power of the previously marginalized, oppressed "common person" that eventually overcomes the kings of the earth. The liturgy, like the slam poetry and protest chants contains a challenge to the established order, and a hope for a different kind of future. She plans for future KEMÍK productions to use elements of Byzantine Christian liturgies, Tibetan Buddhist chants, rock and hip-hop music, and modern dance.

"My dramatic instincts come from church liturgies," she says. Even though she participated in some more traditional theater when she was in high school in Erie, Pennsylvania, she cites her experience with the Anglican liturgy in the Episcopal church when she was growing up as one of her major creative influences.

After majoring in music at the University of the South, in Tennessee, she won a Thomas B. Watson Fellowship, a grant that pays for work abroad toward an independent study project. She originally planned to study English Chant in England. The more she learned about the Chant tradition, however, the more she saw the links between different traditional religious music and texts. Studying the roots of English Chant in older Western European Chant, she went to France, Germany and Spain. Interested in the links between Western European, Byzantine and other Eastern chants, she then went Greece and Bulgaria to study Byzantine Chant, and to Syria and Nepal to study Syriac and Tibetan Chant.

The inspiration for the blending of religious and artistic traditions hit her while she was in a village in Thailand on her way back to the United States. The drama she envisioned then, which she hopes to produce through KEMÍK in the coming year, would consist of a series of choreographed "dance monologues," each of which would express the character of either an aspect of Buddha in the Buddhist tradition or a Christian saint.

She started working to form a group like KEMÍK after she moved to Pittsburgh in 2002. She picked the name KEMÍK because it sounds like the French word for "chemistry" -- a blending of different cultural and spiritual elements to create a new essence. The unusual sound and spelling of the word are meant to contribute to its cross-cultural feel. It seemed, said Downey, like "a neutral international word."

Like many new, independent creative groups, KEMÍK has functioned so far with limited resources and a dedicated core group of performers. The Taizé choir at East Liberty Presbyterian Church, a group Downey has worked with before, performed the Gregorian chant for KEMÍK 3.2. The singers spent Monday and Friday evenings before the performance rehearsing in each other’s apartments. They also had help from On Common Ground, a non-denominational group that explores alternative forms of spirituality.

Downey senses there is a need in the city for the type of theater an independent group like KEMÍK can create. In the coming year she plans to apply for grants to help expand the group’s capacities "I think Pittsburgh has a thirst for challenging, edgy, aggressive theater" she says, citing the recent success of Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the City Theater. In addition to "Saints and Buddhas," the dance monologue performance, she is also working on a play that will use Gregorian texts on the conversion of St. Paul as the background for a drama that explores religious and non-religious experiences of spirituality and revelation. KEMÍK will present both plays in 2004. Downey also would like to start a KEMÍK Studio, which will be,, as she describes it, "a unique music academy which teaches music as a life skill to people of all ages and ability levels."

She plans for some of KEMÍK’s productions to rely on trained singers, dancers and choreographers, but is also interested in working with community members who have a broad range of talents to contribute.

KEMÍK’s schedule for 2004, as well as its web-site and email list, are still in process, but anyone interested in more information can call 412.583.4971 or e-mail bethranger@hotmail.com.

- Patricia Lietz