St. David’s Episcopal Church was filled with the haunting voices of the choir group as their most recent performance tackled the subject of empowering women.
SACRA/PROFANA, a professional choir group from San Diego, opened with the feminist inspired hymn of “I Himmelen.” Four women begin in each corner of the large room, their voices crying out as they move forward the rest of the group marching through the pews, powerfully harmonizing the composition.
“What crystal purity / den Not even the sun in clarity / Can shine as bright as He, / Who is the sun that never sets, / He never even darkened gets.”
In another performance called “Gender: X,” SACRA/PROFANA speaks about controversial topics that many choral groups shy away from. They delivered raw and real compositions that focused on sexism, speaking honestly of the pain of those around the world. They also performed more uplifting and empowering songs.
The group’s chosen compositions sound beautiful, but as audience members read the lyrics to the songs performed, they can get a sense of underlying messages.
In their performance, on March 22 at St. David’s Episcopal Church, audience members were eye-to-eye with the performers and felt the raw emotion sprouting from the songs. The floors of the church curved around the hall, allowing the singers to circle around the audience in the church pews. With the additional space for movement, audience members constantly looked around for the source of beautiful voices and were fully engaged in the performance.
“Strange Fruit” was a piece with eerie out-of-sync vocals describing black people lynched from trees. Its composition moved its audience with many different emotions of fear and anger.
“Southern trees bear strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”
Speech against sexism was the main topic of the performance as the singers delivered several songs preaching about strong women. One composition performed by three women in the group, “What Happens When a Woman?” challenged the ideas of asking the question of what would happen when a woman takes charge.
“What happens when a woman takes power? / What happens when she wears the crown? / We rise above; we lead with love. / We have won; we’ve just begun,” composed by Alexandra Olsavsky, arranged by Artemisia.
Photo by Karelly Vidrio
Lara Korneychuk, SACRA/PROFANA’s core alto and assistant conductor, spoke of how they wanted to paint a picture of women around the world and their many struggles.
“We try to give a portrait of many women from several different backgrounds to really get into the intersectionality of feminism and women who are suffering throughout the world in various situations and represent that through choral music,” Korneychuk said.
Korneychuk said her favorite composition of the night was “Womanly Song of God,” composed by Libby Larsen, because its movement of vocal range and message of a maternal world spoke to her. The song gives an organic sense of the power of giving life that women have and gave goose bumps to the audience with its heavenly notes accompanied by meaningful words.
“I am the birthing woman / Kneeling by the river / Heaving, pushing forth a sacred body!”
The premiere of “The Devil’s Tower” left the audience with chills. SACRA/PROFANA had recently held a composition competition with Sarah Rimkus’s rising long above nearly 80 their entries. Rimkus said she was elated to win the competition and have her composition be featured.
With the overlapping and repetitive lyrics of a story that starts out sweetly, SACRA/PROFANA carried the audience through “The Devil’s Tower” with heart wrenching sensations of a story getting progressively more traumatic.
Rimkus told the story of her piece, saying it was based on the tale of young sisters escaping the clutches of a beast that was once their brother, a Kiowa legend in Crook County, Wyoming.
“The bear rears to kill the sisters, / But they are beyond his grasp. / He scored the bark with his claws. / The seven sisters are borne into the stars.”
Emilie Amrein, a guest conductor for the Gender: X event with over a decade of experience within choral music, says that she found it wonderful to work with SACRA/PROFANA. Amrein said she hopes that more choir groups will move to change the course of choral music in a more positive way.
“Reinventing the choir, asking important questions, and kind of challenging some of the traditional practices of choir,” said Amrein. SACRA/PROFANA is never shy in delivering raw truth and emotion to their performances. As a choral group, it is important they represent different races and identities in a discipline that is fairly more ‘traditional’ and almost backwards in thinking.
