All Hallows’ Eve concert too spooky for chapel
Performance with occult readings moves to local bookstore
AHalloween concert that evokes witchcraft, alchemy and all sorts of magic has been cast out of the historic San Miguel Chapel downtown after conjuring up wicked controversy.
“The content of the concert was not consistent with the values of the chapel, and therefore, they will not be holding it at the chapel,” Taylor Gantt, president of St. Michael’s High School, which owns the centuries-old building, said Tuesday.
Though concerts are regularly performed at the chapel, the oldest known church in the continental United States, the building is a sacred site where Mass in English and Latin is celebrated every Sunday.
“We’re not open to those types of things happening in a Catholic church,” said Gantt, referring to a concert that promised to entrance listeners with the occult arts of early 17th-century England. “If [concert organizers] want to have those things happen, that’s fine. But we’re just not open to them happening in a Catholic church, the most historic church in the country.”
Mary Springfels, director of Severall Friends, a consortium of musicians who was scheduled to perform the concert at the chapel, said the mix of readings and music is neither spooky nor sinister.
“This is not Halloween II,” she said, referring to the 1981 slasher film starring Jamie Lee Curtis. “People are going to be disappointed if they’re interested in horror and guts. This is not what this is about. It’s a bunch of readings, and they’re from the period, so they’re in 16th century English, which is fairly understandable most of the time. … It’s readings about what is called the occult, and what the occult meant to them is pseudoscience.”
Springfels said the production, called The Shadow of Night: A Concert for All Hallows’ Eve, has been moved to Collected Works bookstore, 202 Galisteo St. The concert will still be held as originally scheduled at 7:30 p.m. Thursday. Admission is $20 and free for students, according to the Severall Friends’ website.
Said Springfels: “The show will go on in a very small venue. But everybody is welcome, and we’ll jam them in somehow.”
The concert also will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos, 1738 N. Sage Loop.
Springfels said she’s not entirely sure how the controversy in Santa Fe unfolded but that the concert became the source of complaints.
“A group of very devout people read the poster [for the event] and got on our website and started harassing [the concert promoter] and threatened to go to the Archdiocese [of Santa Fe],” she said. “We got an alarm from the people who are presenting the concert and ran around town crossing out with black marker the words ‘witchcraft’ and ‘occult’ from the posters.”
Springfels said the group wanted to defuse the situation by altering the posters, but it was too late.
“The protesters said that they were going to protest and perhaps interrupt the concert, at which point the presenters said, ‘We can’t put you on,’ ” she said, adding the production is part of a music series at the chapel on Old Santa Fe Trail.
“What the presenters are terribly worried about is that the powers that be may close down the concert series entirely, which would be a big shame, so they feel very caught in the middle of all of this,” Springfels said.
In a brief telephone interview, concert series organizer Laurianne Fiorentino declined to discuss the matter.
“It seems like Dorothy at Collected Works is really wanting to host them and embrace their project,” she said, referring to bookstore owner Dorothy Massey. “I think that would be a better thing to focus on.”
Springfels said her group offered to remove a scene from a play by Thomas Middleton “about a witch gathering her cronies to go flying.” But that didn’t assuage organizers’ concerns.
“For me, the thing that is concerning is that they are doing this without actually talking to us or allowing us to explain the content, which is all 400 years old,” she said. “We certainly know that [the building is a chapel where Mass is still celebrated], and we respect that, and I think it’s important to say that. We had actually written a disclaimer that we were going to read out loud that we in no way, obviously, in no way do we advocate these practices and that we do understand that it’s a sacred space.”
Gantt said St. Michael’s High School received “a bunch of complaints from the community.”
“The sanctity of the chapel and the purposes for which it’s used are extremely important to us, and we just didn’t feel this concert matched those priorities,” he said.
Ken Perlow, who is helping manage the concert, said “it may have been naive of us, being ex-Chicagoans, to think that this was actually not going to be a problem at all.
“Maybe we didn’t think it out fully enough that there might be an issue,” he said. “None of this was done in any sacrilegious way. … None of this was meant in any offensive way. There was no conjuring of evil spirits or anything like that.”
Springfels acknowledged her group could’ve done things differently.
“I think we were just a little bit insensitive,” she said. “I have to confess.”