A work of fiction inspired by the composer’s eight years of research into the practices of the Community of Jesus in Orleans, Massachusetts, this is the second concert-length choral theater work by Thomas Lloyd following his acclaimed, Grammy-nominated Bonhoeffer. In the Light probes the dystopian social dynamics of a religious community where psychological control is maintained through the choir and its Abbess-conductor.
“With choral music, Christian liturgy, and support for women’s leadership in those traditions having long been at the center of my own life's work, discovering that such a community was the home of a choir whose professional quality recordings I had long admired was deeply disturbing. I had to find out more about how such a thing could happen.” Starting soon after completing Bonhoeffer, Lloyd began exploring more about the community through public documents, national media exposés, long discussions with former members, and time spent at the community as a guest.
In his earlier Bonhoeffer, Lloyd sought to probe the meaning of the evil of fascism through a community that sang African-American Spirituals and was led by a charismatic leader whose writings about that evil constantly referred to hymns and music he had learned as a pianist. With this new work, he saw a challenge to get beneath the surface of a coercive community dynamic where choral singing was an instrument of control and subjugation in and of itself.
Asking the choir to perform in an open, immersive staging to recreate the feeling of a visit to the community itself, Lloyd has structured the work with distinctly different kinds of scenes where the distinctions between the public and private dimensions of the community are clearly both seen and heard. Transitions between those two worlds are aided by videos produced by Lloyd with electronic music composed by his son Jeremy Lloyd (producer/performer with the Platinum recording artists Marian Hill).
Some scenes bring the two worlds together by having a visiting choral conductor come and rehearse the choir. He hears one kind of ‘public’ singing, after which the audience hears another as the choir acts out the internal dialogue of leaders and followers with the aid of special lighting and electronic sampling. In other scenes, four individuals step out from the community and through the theater’s ‘fourth wall’ to sing soliloquies directly to the audience revealing their conflicted individual perspectives on their life in the community. Three central “light session” scenes reveal through music the seductive energy of the community that leads an ordinary person to subject themselves extraordinary humiliation. The whole work is framed by fragments of a public worship service the composer attended at the community, and scenes that freely imagine how such a community might begin and end.
The experience of coming closer to this community through its music, its liturgical setting, and its charismatic but troubling leadership led the composer to create a work that is not meant to shock (if that would even be possible in the modern world of Scientology, Al Qaeda, and multiple authoritarian cults of personality in national and world politics). Instead, with an unflinching but compassionate view of a coercive community and its members, Lloyd reveals such a social pathology as not something that can simply be dismissed as extreme. He raises essential questions about what it means to lead and what it means to follow within social organizations at all levels of our society.
When do we cross the line from productive to dysfunctional, from life-affirming to demonic? Can individuals survive such an experience and come out the other side with a sense of self still remaining? Can even traditional religious faith survive such a reckoning with the persistence of human evil?
