I’ve seen a lot of weird shit in sacred spaces, but Aleta Hayes’ Chocolate Heads turning Stanford’s Memorial Church into some kind of Byzantine hallucination hits different when that same building held my father’s memorial service. When my brother, who hated Stanford with a kind of pure contempt that honestly scared me, inexplicably chose to get married there anyway.
That’s the thing about these monuments to institutional grandeur: they collect your personal ghosts whether you want them to or not. The mosaic walls, all that gold-leaf reverence and architectural pomposity, suddenly become a stage for something that shouldn’t work but absolutely does. Aleta understands what few artists grasp: the friction between the profane and the divine, between family mythology and artistic intervention, isn’t a problem to solve, it’s the whole fucking point.
Bodies moving in that cavernous space, sound bouncing off stone that’s heard a thousand sermons about salvation, weddings, eulogies… and here comes performance that doesn’t give a shit about my comfort level or my memories.
There’s something almost violent in the honesty of it. What Aleta does with Chocolate Heads is create spectacle that matters, that uses every inch of that ornate space to ask uncomfortable questions about bodies, presence, and what we allow ourselves to witness when we gather together. The Church becomes complicit, its architecture framing the work like it was always meant for this kind of disruption.
Every child has known God,
Not the God of names,
Not the God of don’ts,
Not the God who ever does anything weird,
But the God who knows only four words.
And keeps repeating them, saying:
‘Come dance with me, come dance.’
Hafiz (translation by Daniel Ladinsky)
Memorial Church has historically been an important center of spiritual and ceremonial life at Stanford University since the church was dedicated in 1903. The Church is open to all, wherever you may be on your spiritual journey: University Public Worship, Sunday mornings at 10:00 am in this spectacular and sacred venue.
Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann
Featuring dance by Chocolate Heads