The Witness at The Core

The sacred and profane collide in Jo Blake and Carbon Theatre’s new performance The Witness, inspired by the rediscovered Gospel of Mary Magdalene.  The Witness is part of a larger multi-stranded art project called Heresy, which also includes an installation at The Grosvenor Centre, an exhibition at Delapré Abbey and county wide community workshops.  

Moving through humour, bold physicality and intricate storytelling, The Witness reveals how one woman’s buried 2,000-year-old history comes into the life of a contemporary woman, demanding that the missing pages be written anew. While she was never formally branded a heretic, Mary Magdalene – one of Jesus’s companions, often negatively framed and misportrayed as a prostitute – and her teachings have long been pushed to one side, and never legitimised by the Church. But three copies of the Gospel have now been found, having been buried in the sands of Egypt for the last 1,500 years. All three copies have the same missing pages, but those that remain reveal Magdalene to be a spiritual adept and closest companion of Christ. 

Mary’s fragmented testimony has been exiled and denigrated over millennia, emblematic of the omittance of women, their voices, and bodies in Western society, religion, and its teachings.  The Witness is brought to life by Midlands-based interdisciplinary performer Jo Blake, who examines Mary’s ‘heretical’ Gospel and how she has from the start been suppressed and dismissed, reframing it as necessary and courageous female testimony.