Prayer – a human function

Introduction

Prayer has been existing as long as human mankind. Practicing prayer means that we are creating patterns (movement patterns, thought/language patterns) which influence our habits, our way of sensing and thinking, our way of being in the world. As human beings we live in different cultures, environments, languages. Belonging to where we come from we are creating variations on the same themes. The way people walk for example is different, individually and culturally: Africans walk quite differently than Europeans and Asians, but they all walk.
Concerning prayer, we are interested in the way how people from all over the world pray today. And what praying means to them.
The main focus in Prayer – a Human Function is on movement and how it affects us; we are not dealing with the aspect of the words in prayer, even though this aspect is linked and mostly present. In the beginning there is a dialogue, a personal and intimate expression.
As the interviews are part of the performance the privacy becomes politically relevant.
It is from within that we are creating the world we live in.

The whole project consists of three parts: an interactive homepage meant to open up a dialogue about prayer and prayer habits, a performance in public places of a short choreography based on the collected prayer-movement material, a performance in a theatre that will end with an installation where people are kindly asked to participate with their ideas, thoughts, comments.

I want to thank everybody who took the time to meet, to exchange, to give an interview. I am deeply grateful to the openness and the trust, I encountered in the previous months.

Heike Schmidt