Deep Blue Sea: Shapes & Hymn

Bill T. here:
Here is a portrait of our community working remotely and arriving at a deep and moving response to the COVID-19 crisis itself.

The company’s Pause/Intermission has left me, like so many creators, feeling hungry if not starved for the magic of bodies creating, negating, examining, defining human relationships in space. A simple assignment given to the performers to record themselves doing 50 shapes from Deep Blue Sea has now – through the magic of digital technology and the deep and flexible imagination of my co-artistic director, Janet Wong – coalesced into a magisterial essay of relationship set against the vocal overlays of three of our company’s singers.” #DiaryPauseIntermission #DeepBlueSea #PAADeepBlueSea, The Hymn Lyrics from Moby Dick by Herman Melville:

The ribs and terror in the whale
Arched over me a dismal gloom
While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by
And left me deep’ning down to doom
I saw the opening maw of hell,
With endless pains and sorrows there;
Which none but they that feel can tell—
Oh, I was plunging to despair.
In black distress, I called my God,
When I could scarce believe him mine,
He bowed his ear to my complaints—
No more the whale did me confine.
With speed he flew to my relief,
As on a radiant dolphin borne;
Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone
The face of my Deliverer God.
My song for ever shall record
That terrible, that joyful hour;
I give the glory to my God,
His all the mercy and the power.