An Evening of (something like) Lessons and Carols 2025

The Short:

This is Not A Performance presents a holiday fete in song and scene.

A playful reinterpretation of the "Lessons and Carols" traditional service--where the Advent story is told in song and scripture readings--this (non) lessons and carols service celebrates in a way that eschews any one tradition, so to find the common thread in them all.

Led by an eclectic band of creatives, the evening will cultivate a ritualistic setting for all to meditate on who we are, how we are and what we are when the darkness--literal and otherwise--enshrouds the world as it does come Winter Solstice.

Paradox being the nature of life, the evening will remember--and rejoice in--the truth that there is no up without down, no light without dark. Truth, in a very funny--sometimes vexing way--is oppositional, yet somehow united all at the same time. The solstice affirms this axiom as the shortest days of the year align with celebrations of light across cultures from Diwali to Hannukkah to Christmas and the New Year.

So please join for this ritual as fete as communal gathering to live (for at least an evening) life as art: for how we spend our days (and nights) is how we spend our lives.

The Long:

Performance connotes so much: mimicry, imitation, recitation, declamation, animation, imagination. All these things, most especially the ultimate, we celebrate, admire, perhaps even aspire towards. But it must also be said that increasingly (and perhaps always since the evolution of self-consciousness) performance has become commodified and thereby homogenized in a way that supersedes its original function.

For ancient societies and the anthropologists who study them concur: art was not mere entertainment. It was essential nourishment for human-merely-being. Those who found a way to thrive, were the ones who survived to tell the tale (in song, sculpture or otherwise) not the other way around. Our ancestors gathered for shamanistic performance not just to while the time away, but to heal individually and collectively. The Greeks gained catharsis through their theater--not just to fill their evenings with something to do. Centuries later, the church crafted mystery plays which evolved into the secular theater of Shakespeare, Moliere, Artaud and Beckett. While there is surely something about the act of performance that is entertaining, at times also enlightening and therapeutic, most assuredly PERFORMANCE itself is not nearly as interesting as LIFE (ironically, the thing which art prepares us for and sustains us through).

To be clear, on Friday the 10th of 2025, what we’ll gather for is NOT a performance. For performers, performance carries the weight of the Aristotelean Golden ideal; yet it never reaches that mythical height of perfection somehow only palpable in the practice room or the hall of mirrors of one's mind. Many performers agree that rehearsals--that fertile space for play and exploration, which is to say growth--are their favorite part of the artistic process. There is no right or wrong save for the thought (read: worry!) about being (so-called) right or wrong. This city and world abound with plentiful museums for “performance”: the Broadway stage, the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center and Museum Mile in total. We love these spaces and the artists they host; we hail them in their collective union to bring beauty into the world. But they are a vestige: often a revival of a revival of something that was once upon a time vital. Even if new, today, so much contemporary performance is a facsimile of some other perfect construction (see Broadway and now opera recapitulating blockbuster movies rather than telling original stories). Historically, however, most music, dance and theater was, to some degree, improvised: truly walking the exhilarating precipice where being becomes.

Above all else, that's the aspiration of (Non) Lessons and Carols: to merely be alive personified in rhythm, rhyme and all its cousins. Imperfection expected as such is the beauty mark of all that is human.