"The Chapel in the HIve"

Come March 1 as we build a hive in Marquand Chapel with The Chapel in the Hive.

Performers:

Joseph Campana, poetry

Kurt Stallmann, music

The Chapel in the Hive is a forty-minute live performance featuring poet/scholar Joseph Campana and composer/performer Kurt Stallmann, who drawing from history and natural history and reflecting on them through literary and electro-eco-acoustic techniques. The audience will be immersed in sound, words, and images that evoke and render palpable the long history of human devotion to bees. A post-concert discussion about bees and biodiversity loss will follow this event.

The Chapel in the Hive begins with two potent moments of apian sacrality. The first comes from Charles Butler’s The Feminine Monarchie (1607), a natural history and husbandry text full of lore and reflection. The chapters are full of practical bee knowledge, meditations on the political organizations of hives, and the first articulation that a queen bee ruled the hive. Amidst these scientific and philosophical reflections, Butler narrates a wonder as he tells the story of bees that built a chapel in their hive to celebrate the Eucharist. The second draws from longstanding Buddhist attention to bees, for example, from a dharma talk by Thai forest tradition teacher Ajahn Chah, whose teaching draws an extended parallel between the bee and the fly. Whereas the bee prefers the sweetness of flowers, the fly only attends to the carcasses of the dead, indicating its gruesome attachment to materiality (in the form of rotting flesh).

Moreover, Buddhists more broadly celebrate the capacity of the bee to be nurtured by flowers and other forms of life without destructively extracting from the world around them as they seek sustenance. This attention to the symbiotic relationship between bees and their environs and their mutual thriving contrasts with one of the more famous proverbs of the era of Charles Butler (“Pro Bono Malum” or goodness and virtue repaid with ill) as bees were victims of human extractive practices. The labor of bees produced sweet honey and valuable wax appropriated, often violently, by the greed of humans. The performance moves toward a consideration of what it means to strike a new equilibrium with bees, and perhaps find a new sacrality in nature, in our age of biodiversity loss.

A post-concert panel discussion will follow the event.

Free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the ISM’s Religion, Ecology, and Expressive Culture Initiative.