Deity of the Circle
Amens and epiphanies resound in the comments each time a form of this TikTok comes across my timeline. I remember walking the halls of a southern megachurch repurposed from an old Home Depot as worship boomed from the main hall and passing the time between service and afternoon Chinese school learning and practicing K-pop dances with my friends. Years later, attending the 2021 BTS shows in Los Angeles was another religious ceremony. Filled with faith, we raised our synchronized light sticks high.
Partitions between these containers for dionysian ecstasy are thin, but they remain cordoned off from academic or intellectual-artistic pursuits. So it was “damn, why does it feel like people in academia hate religion and religiosity?” and an interest in the Bible which composer/vocalist Eli Berman and interdisciplinary artist/researcher Armond Dorsey bonded over as Dartmouth students in 2021 in what is now called their “Digital Musics” Masters program. In 2022, Berman met multi-disciplinary performance artist Bonita Oliver through their work on Anaïs Maviel’s “Before before & After after”. The two connected over shared interests in vocal improvisation, ancestral musics, and the witchy & spiritual - Berman identifies as a “baby Jew-witch”. Berman introduced Dorsey and Oliver, beginning this collaborative configuration.
Berman, Dorsey, and Oliver debuted the installation and performance Deity of the Circle at the University of Maryland’s Driskell Center on April 3rd, 2025 as winners of the 2024–2025 David C. and Thelma G. Driskell Award for Creative Excellence. Ahead of the performance, we met on Zoom, spending two hours spinning the web of memory on how they met, became collaborators, and conceived of their project through their individual musical research. A list of inspirations, intellectual, and artistic kin accumulated alongside several references to myths and lineages each artist brought to Deity of the Circle. The trio draws inspiration from writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs, dancer Emilie Conrad, flutist & composer Nicole Mitchell, singing teacher Alfred Wolfsohn, composer Trevor Van de Velde, among others. Oliver’s explorations of her maternal and paternal lines and Berman’s engagement with Jewish folklore situate this collaboration within the cosmos of artwork that centers myth, family history, and technology.
The group’s collective assemblage and citation of African and Jewish diasporic worship practices and rituals manifested in this performance as a series of sonic vignettes, which they performed around a table prepared with blue tapestries, audio cables, pedals in the center of the Driskell gallery. Berman’s constructed functional vocal feedback PVC and EMT pipes, similarly adorned in blue, were assembled throughout the performance. Its final form resembled a portal, and the mouths of the pipes transported me to the mysterious playground telephones of childhood.
Resistant to the descriptor of “fusion,” the three led in turns, orating, singing, and dancing. While they interfaced with and invoked their religious heritages (Oliver repeated “It is not a taboo to go back and reclaim what has been forgotten,” referencing the Twi word “Sankofa”) they also acknowledged the rampant exploitation of religion. Berman sang bitterly of Elon Musk, mourning the displacement of Palestinians, and chanted over a club-instrumental. Dorsey played clarinet and preached like a minister - they are currently a student at Harvard’s Divinity School - and lamented the rejection and oppression queer folks face from the Church.
They orbited the space intentionally, at times perhaps timidly, working with the audience’s curiosity and uncertainty of their role of involvement in the piece’s unfolding. Like a congregation or crowd of polite stans we stood by and listened; folks in the front obliged when Oliver and Berman pulled them into their dance circle. The sonic fullness when Oliver got the audience clapping or dancing in a line behind her contrasted with transitory silence and stillness between songs and sentences. In those moments, Oliver, Berman, and Dorsey convened at the table to add a piece to the PVC pipe sculpture while the audience watched in wait. While some audience members glanced around the room or shuffled to get a better view of the instrument-in-progress, the silences maintained their delicate theatricality.
These performed pauses weighed against the violent silences in the archives, a violence which we continue to witness here and abroad. Scanning the room, which was not dimmed much for the show, I would have guessed that students made up only a small percentage of the audience. More folks looked to be seasoned professionals at home at a gallery opening, smartly-dressed in angular cuts of denim, statement jewelry, and retro glasses. We stood in a college campus art gallery in a performance sponsored in part by the university’s centers for Jewish Studies and African American/Africana Studies. After over a year of brutal suppression of student and artist activism protesting genocide across the US and worldwide, this performance brought containers of belief to sharp clarity. Our responsibilities as audience members mixed with our duties to one another beyond the context of relational aesthetics. The performance went on without interruption, so what use is a good audience who leaves and does nothing?
Though available to them, the performers chose to refrain from singing or speaking into the assembled PVC pipe sculpture. Thus, the communal instrument retained its metaphor. Berman shared: “it’s the mythologies and cosmologies of our own beliefs and the beliefs embedded in these ancestral practices that we’re exploring…the piece is a portal to allow them to talk to each other.” Left unblocked, the pipe openings allowed the audience members and university gallery walls to add the resonance of the sculpture and the installation dotted with history and grief. We applauded and adjourned for light refreshments – I felt we could lift our hands and become less shy.