The day after our Lily Dale video presentation we packed up and began our trip back East. Before heading to Schenectady for our final tour stop (come see us this Saturday at 7 PM), we stopped in Palmyra for the Hill Cumorah Pageant, a presentation of the story of the Book of Mormon through an elaborate pageant. The event is staged atop the Hill Cumorah where Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saints (LDS) is said to have found the gold plates he translated into the Book of Mormon. It was incredible.

We arrived at Palmyra at about 7:30 on Saturday, after a few hours drive through dreary, rainy Western New York. Friendly LDS parking helpers and somber anti-Mormon protesters greeted us as we arrived at the Hill Cumorah and were shepherded through a sea of cones to lines of cars forming in the fields.

We found some seats and chatted with a few friendly LDS teens in full Nephite and Lamanite dress who were in town for the week to participate in the pageant.

About 650 Saints, many of them teens and children, all amateur actors, volunteer as participants in the pageant. Additional hundreds volunteer with the crew. All spend a week in Palmyra preparing, building the stage, making costumes, learning their roles, before putting on the show.

The show started shortly after dark with white-robed trumpeters playing a fanfare from the top of the hill. As they played, the full cast marched up through the aisles, walking up on stage. This was so impressive, both for the coordination and scale of the tableaux. I was pretty much won over at that point.

The pageant traced ten episodes from the Book of Mormon. Starting in ancient Jerusalem, the pageant followed the prophet Lehi and his four sons as they left Jerusalem for the wilderness, and eventually made their way to the sea, built a boat, and sailed to the Americas. The pageant then depicted stories of the descendants of these prophets, including some battles between the two rival Nephite and Lamanite factions, and the persecution of prophets like Alma, Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni, who predicted the coming of Jesus Christ to America after his death in the Old World. The final chapter of the pageant portrayed Joseph Smith, recovering the gold tablets Moroni had buried on the Hill – this is all staged right on the hill itself – and the beginnings of the LDS Church.

Throughout, the production was impressive. The 10-tiered stage was used to great effect: bathed in different colors of light, appended with columns, trees, enhanced with bursts of flame, and streams of lighted mist. The battle scenes were dynamic, and certain scenes, a vision of a white tree, a prophet spreading his message by a waterfall in the wilderness, a storm, tearing apart a ship at sea were truly moving, thanks in part to their creative and beautiful staging.

Neither Carrie nor I ran off to join the LDS Church after the show, but we both found it moving, and thought provoking. It’s fascinating to see how LDS theology inscribes itself on the Judeo-Christian story, rearranging certain building blocks to make way for this compelling but strange story of Jesus Christ and the descendants of Lehi in America. The friendliness and happiness of the many Saints who have travelled across the country to see (and in many many cases) participate in the pageant, is also compelling, as is the story of the staging of pageant: this truly awesome event, a mere week in the making, staffed by amateur volunteers.

A thing I’ve noticed about myself over the past few years, is that I can suspend my disbelief about things, and engage very fully and deeply in religious contexts, but then afterward sort of just turn that suspension off, and return to my regular state of mind, but with the benefit of a more open, earnest understanding of whatever I’ve just experienced. While watching the pageant, I let myself be engulfed by the story, taking it as a real depiction of the lives of these prophets, as the actual burial and discovery of the Book of Mormon on the Hill Cumorah. I let myself be emotionally overwhelmed by the pageant, I came close to crying several times, and was left feeling elated, nearly numb with feeling.

Attending a spectacle like the Hill Cumorah Pageant reminds me of how entranced I am by passionate convictions. Much of my recent work (Rapture/Rupture, Azariah: Whom Jehovah Helps), has been about struggling with belief, the tension between connect and disconnect with spirituality, or the power and attractiveness of religious zeal. I find this zeal compelling, yet I can’t earnestly be a believer.

After the pageant Carrie and I went back to Palmyra where Bonnie was letting us stay at her house. We bracketed a good night’s sleep with marvelous conversation, and we got to see Bonnie’s husband Steve, just back from a fishing tackle convention, and Irene, our host at the Liberty House B&B, before leaving town.

–Jesse

Artist Carrie Dashow and shape note singer and composer Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg of the Society for a Subliminal State will bring their touring community art, video, and music project, the Subliminal History of New York State to six towns and cities along the Erie Canal this June and July.

Locations & dates (See our CALENDAR):
Troy, June 12; Rome, June 17; Palmyra, June 22; Lockport, June 28; Lily Dale, July 13; and Schenectady, July 21.

Read more about the project, or listen to an example of shape note singing.

A moment ago we finished what we came to start in Lily Dale.

After some difficulty and abandonment by our liaison, we managed to have a wonderful screening and production of the 13th screen on ala Friday the 13th. This was a special shoot as I think my own previous experiences in Lily Dale informed the conception of the 13th screen, which could be seen as a form of mediumship, each participant new to video gravitating in their own direction, the audience acting as the interpreter as images and events are put together not randomly but by the combined mind of the group.

Before abandoning us, our liaison did a great job at securing 9 healthy and excited video disciples. We had a good workshop and I added a few extras into the cauldron for this one.

Every participant was given a bell to ring when the spirit moved them, and two smoke bombs with matches. They decided to dress up for the shoot which took place on the Thursday the 12th of July. We started the video off with all our hands in the center and each videographer throwing in individual words of prayer, harmony, hope, inspiration then through Lily Dale they went.

The screening was held in the Assembly Hall, and we had a good discussion afterwards. It seemed as though we were witness to extra presence as we watched the video, with a few viewers seeing an extra shadow in the healing temple, along with a general feeling of really capturing the deepness of place.

We were unable to hold the singing portion of our program, Jesse and I were very disappointed to make this decision. We did however write 4 songs and one of them, a riddle about the Maplewood Hotel, we sang on every floor before we left.

During this portion of the trip we also had a jovial singing school off site at the Woodside campground in Cassadaga, where I spent the summer a couple of years ago while working on my thesis in Lily Dale. We had about 35 guests including a bunch of kids. This was lots of fun, we had a few good singers, smokers and drinkers backed by the infamous Woodside boys. We were happy to be able to sing the new songs with them about Lily Dale, though not many people at the campground actually go to Lily Dale. In total we sang: New Britain (Amazing Grace), Animals Don’t Tell Stories, Maplewood, You Know and End.

Back to Friday the 13th after the final presentation.

Still not getting the horse out of our throats we ventured to May’s Place, a local bar in Cassadaga. (if you’ve ever been to Mom’s in Troy, you know what I mean) And alas it was karaoke night!

We were needless to say very happy, drank copious amounts of cheap Yuengling and Started of with Jesse singing Bob Segar’s “Old Time Rock and Roll”, in a loud jumpy and fully gutteral sound. Then he sang Revolution, they ignored us a bit more then. I sang “I write the songs” by Barry Manilow, sometimes they looked at me, and though I didn’t really know the words, managed to own them nonetheless. In between we heard Chris a local guy with quite a musical repertoire and an awesome throaty vivacious munchkin singing woman, who ran the show. Jesse then sang the very romantic “Fly me to the moon” (Sinatra) to swooning ladies. and I sang Master of Puppets, I might have been in a trance, so I can’t say much about what happened there, though I shook alot and lots of people chimed into the laugh at the end.

The evening of our final presentation ended as Jesse took on Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

Soon after that we left Lily Dale, and then that is a whole other story, listen for Jesse, or I to tell.

We have just arrived to Schenectady, our last stop….. sadness has overtaken us, but excited to start unearthing Vale Park.

Please come to Schenectady if you can to our last and final final will be held at the Schenectady Museum and Planetarium on Saturday July 21st at 7 pm.

Goodbye for now - Carrie