Masked and Answered | Arts & Entertainment | Salt Lake City Weekly

Masked and Answered 

This Bird of Dawning returns with its unique spin on the Nativity story

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It's hard enough for a company to sell a production that makes use of theatrical masks, as The Sting & Honey Company's artistic director Javen Tanner well knows. But with the company's holiday show This Bird of Dawning returning from last year's pandemic hiatus, it becomes even more complicated in a world where the meaning of masks has changed.

"I'm working with performers right now who when they don't have their masks on, they have masks on," Tanner says, referring to backstage safety protocols. "So it has been different to think about what it means that we're doing a mask piece."

Now in its 12th year of production, This Bird of Dawning presents an interpretation of the Nativity story that incorporates poetry, music and, yes, the ancient tradition of theatrical masks. According to Tanner, it's creation dates back to the mid-2000s, shortly after Tanner had relocated to Utah from New York, when a friend at the theatrical company with which he had been involved when he lived there reached out to him about the possibility of developing a seasonal Christmas piece—which, as Tanner notes with a laugh, "are really great for a non-profit's budget." Yet they also wanted something that was a bit more serious, and not fall into the predictable traps of the same old shows.

"We tossed around different ideas," Tanner recalls. "We were both very much into mask work, and into poetry. We initially thought about something connected to Dylan Thomas's 'A Child's Christmas in Wales.' Then I thought, what if we just do something around the Nativity, but use what we've done around mask work? I just kind of took it and built the piece from there."

For its initial Utah presentation in 2008, Tanner built the cast with students at Sandy's Waterford School, where Tanner is a faculty member and teaches the techniques employed for the show. While it was originally planned as a one-time fundraiser, with a cast of just eight students, it has since grown into an annual tradition that includes between 17 and 20, and once even as many as 32 cast members.

According to Tanner, continuing to produce This Bird of Dawning with his Waterford students is a significant part of why it has continued. "Some students do it all four years, he says. "And every year, the students who did it the year before, they're introducing it to students who are doing it for the first time."

Yet as is the case with any production that is put on annually for pragmatic reasons of popular audience support, there's the question of how it remains artistically interesting, especially for Tanner himself, after more than a decade of putting it on. For him, the answer has a lot to do with the powerful elements at play in this kind of story that transcend its specific spiritual meaning to believers.

"I'm fascinated by how theater all over the world, they all evolved out of ritual, out of religious practices," Tanner says. "One of the things that's so fascinating is how close this piece gets to that. The audience just connects to it. ... My job is to have a conversation with an audience. I've never been interested in it as a proselytizing piece, but I am interested in how deeply it connects with an audience, even people who are not Christian or not religious."

Tanner does acknowledge that over the years, he has considered expanding the concept to include non-Christian winter religious traditions, but that he himself didn't feel as comfortable writing about those traditions that were not his own without a great deal of research. And while he did think about ending the production after its tenth year, "I got lots of pushback from that. Even though we only do three shows a year, it has become a tradition for a lot of people.

It was a tradition that had to take a break in 2020, like so many holiday shows. While some companies offered streaming versions of their holiday shows, Tanner says that the existing recorded productions were not of a high enough quality to present to the public, and that it wasn't logistically reasonable at the time even to do a recording specifically for the purpose of online presentation. But now the show goes on, with plans for a professional filming in the studio, and the prospect of staging This Bird of Dawning in New York.

"So where it goes in the next few years," Tanner says "it seems to have built new life."

The Sting & Honey Company: This Bird of Dawning

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Scott Renshaw

Scott Renshaw

Bio:
Scott Renshaw has been a City Weekly staff member since 1999, including assuming the role of primary film critic in 2001 and Arts & Entertainment Editor in 2003. Scott has covered the Sundance Film Festival for 25 years, and provided coverage of local arts including theater, pop-culture conventions, comedy, literature,... more

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