A brand new work on the New York stage by the sublimely gifted composer, performer, and excessive priestess of modern-day ritual Heather Christian is at all times a trigger for celebration. However within the midst of this winter of our discontent, her newest piece, the ravishing Terce: A Sensible Breviary, now enjoying on the Area at Irondale in Park Slope, feels nearly like a benediction. Described by Christian as a “wild riff” on a 9 a.m. Catholic mass that addresses the Holy Spirit by way of “the lens of the Divine Female,” it’s the second of a deliberate eight such flights of liturgical fancy primarily based on what are often called Breviaries, plenty which have been sung at particular instances of day by cloistered nuns and monks because the eleventh Century.

The primary, Prime, tied to the 6 a.m. service, was carried out as a podcast underneath the auspices of Playwrights Horizons on the top of lockdown in 2020. Nonetheless to return, Christian says, are a movie with a dwell rating, both a digital actuality manufacturing or an extravagant efficiency for an viewers of 1, a rock live performance, a concerto, a dance piece, and a pop-up live performance at a practice station. “Because the pandemic, there appears to be an urge for food for this sort of materials,” she informed me from her home in Beacon, NY. “We have all gone a bit extra introspective, develop into extra snug with being uncomfortable, with stewing in existential emotions, and with questioning how we’re dwelling.”

Idiosyncratic takes on Catholic rituals and gorgeously eclectic reinventions of liturgical music, fueled by a deeply private gnostic imaginative and prescient, are Christian’s bread and butter. In 2017’s Animal Knowledge, on the Bushwick Starr, she gave us an intimate portrait of the (literal) ghosts of her Mississippi childhood, culminating in a 20-minute Requiem Mass in pitch blackness, inviting us to each join with and let go of the spirits haunting our lives. In her 2022 Oratorio For Residing Issues, she used the voices of twelve singers to show an Off-Broadway theater right into a sacred house for considering our collective destiny on earth and place within the universe, with music so ethereally stunning that it introduced many within the viewers to tears (reader, I used to be one in all them).