“But I am the dance and I still go on.”
“Lord of the Dance” — the 1963 church hymn by English songwriter Sydney Carter that liturgical traditionalists love to hate — is an apt entry into the story of Ann Lee. The polarizing song is set to the Shaker community’s most famous and thematized melody — “Simple Gifts.” Tis a gift to be simple, tis a gift to be free.
“Simple Gifts,” composed in the mid-19th century, became the classic earworm it is today only after Aaron Copeland used it as a tune in his “Appalachian Spring Suite” in 1944. “Simple Gifts’” tune is ubiquitous and straightforward. Nothing about it suggests the community that composed it is any more remarkable than another artifact of Americana, same as apple pie and Currier and Ives. Yet, in “The Testament of Ann Lee,” religion is odder than fiction.
Religion, that purveyor and enforcer of middle-class bourgeois respectability in the American political imaginary, gets unleashed in “Ann Lee” as a startling liberation. The religion of Ann Lee is not only a spiritual or metaphysical freedom, but a thoroughly physical release.
“The Testament of Ann Lee” premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2025 to general acclaim. Director Mona Fastvold and her creative and life partner Brady Corbet began filming the biopic about the founder of the Shakers immediately after they wrapped filming for Corbet’s best-picture-front runner “The Brutalist” in Hungary.
Ann Lee, in her mesmerizing incarnation by Amanda Seyfried, is a luminous, angelic soul trapped in the rushing physical reality of a working-class woman at the earliest dawn of the industrial revolution. Her body, for much of the film’s first act, is not her own.
After Ann protests at how her father treats her mother — her first exposure to sexuality, which she finds distasteful from the jump — he whips her hands at the kitchen table. Ann works at a cotton mill with her younger brother and first disciple, William, and masks her face with cloth to keep from breathing the jute dust.
She is married to a blacksmith named Abraham — but his ideas of sex are far from egalitarian, and Ann finds herself trapped in a relationship whose carnality is divorced from love. Marriage, for Ann, is a trap rather than a liberation. Fastvold paints a portrait that serves as a poignant piece of evidence in support of Ann’s belief that “fornication” was the human race’s first sin. This sort of mutual enslavement of their bodies to each other’s lust was the original sin of Adam and Eve that got them exiled from life with God, Ann believed. Her body writhes in pain as she bears four children into the world, only to have them die in her arms.
So, when Ann comes upon a meeting of the Wardley Society, an offshoot of the Quakers, the shaking, praising, moaning and movement that fills the meeting are a life-altering moment of divine revelation. Throughout the film, there are several extended dance sequences, depicting Shaker house church, which looks more like house ballet rave than high liturgy. In the parlors and libraries of upper-class Manchesterians, lines of singers and dancers waltz through the halls with their hands clasped, enacting a liberation of exuberant, ecstatic dancing that erupts from the shackles of the film’s first act.
For contemporary viewers, that sort of visual bacchanal might suggest sexual liberation as well as purely physical. And, for Ann, it certainly did, but her liberation came by renouncing her marriage bed and the pain and death it had brought her. Shakers, like “Mother Ann,” continued to practice celibacy. Because there were no children brought into the religion by marriage, the sect remained small — there were an estimated 6,000 Shakers at the community’s height in the mid-19th century, according to Fastvold’s credits. Today, there are three.
Ann Lee yearns for a sort of physical intimacy with the divine, with a liberation of her body, abused and in pain, and she finds it through song, through dance, through an ecstatic spiritual experience expressed physically.
Shaker dances were standardized by Mother Lucy Wright in the 1820s. Thus, recreations of Shaker “labor,” as they call their prayer, depict rhythmic, repetitive movements. Nothing about their simple melodies or even-keeled line dancing screams of the cinematic cacophony of Fastvold’s film. In “The Testament of Ann Lee,” the Shakers at labor are an untamed chorus line. They throw themselves into their prayer, almost writhing with the effort.
An oft-repeated motion is a reaching up to heaven and beating one’s chest. The motion suggests the lifting up of the heart to God, and a drawing down of the spirit into one’s heartbeat and breath. It’s a catchy antiphon punctuating the scenes of communal prayer. It is repeated over and over throughout the Shaker’s prayer, keeping time with the stomping of the dancers’ feet. This pound of hands upon the chest, the loud breaths that accentuate this prayer, and the pounding of feet become the film’s sonic heartbeat. This repeated manual invocation is reminiscent of the prayer position of the early church, the “orans,” with the hands lifted up next to the head of the standing worshipper.
With no one in the surrounding pews, feeling a little bit anonymous, I found myself imitating the Shaker motion at Mass the next day. “Lift up your hearts,” the priest said. “We lift them up to the Lord,” I said, my hands usually rising up in imitation of the celebrant’s orans posture. This time, I let my hands pound a beat on my chest before they rose up, limp wristed, as Ann’s did in the film. A longer experiment with repeating this gesture revealed that this sort of repetition draws attention to the breath. As the hands come down, beating my chest, I inhale; as the hands lift up, I exhale. I feel a bit larger, a bit lighter after each repetition.
Anglo Catholics in the United States are allergic to the mixing of liturgy and dance. Liturgical dance is a frequently invoked bugbear in liturgy wars, but liturgy and dance, the rhythmic, ritualized movement of the body — go hand in hand. In charismatic spaces, liturgy can be a sweating labor: swaying, raising of the arms high to welcome the spirit, calling out ejaculative prayers and responses, falling down, and lifting one hand to heaven and holding the other on the heart to represent the dialogue between our innermost selves and the divine.
At Mass, we repeat many of the same core movements as Fastvold’s Shakers — kneeling, sitting, standing, lifting up our hands, moving of our bodies — albeit at a more contemplative pace and with less sweating. Because, although it may not feel this way to those of us living in relative material comfort and bodily security, liturgy is an act of liberation that comes not just to heal our souls, but also our bodies.
Through our prayer, we reconnect with the author of life and liberation, the God who made us, the Spirit of Christ who advocates for us, through whom we pray. Ann Lee yearns for a sort of physical intimacy with the divine, with a liberation of her body, abused and in pain, and she finds it through song, through dance, through an ecstatic spiritual experience expressed physically. Catholic Eucharistic liturgy may, to lifelong practitioners, seem staid and orderly; physical movement may seem like a kind of addendum rather than the heart of the work.
Fastvold’s film is a timely reminder at the beginning of the Lenten season of physical mortification, that our bodies are the locus of divine liberation.
But Fastvold’s film is a timely reminder at the beginning of the Lenten season of physical mortification, that our bodies are the locus of divine liberation. The aim of Lenten discipline is not mortification for its own sake, but with the goal of attaining a new form of life in our bodies. We seek a transcendence of our Adam’s flesh to inhabit the new mystical body of Christ. The heavenly community in C.S. Lewis’ “Perelandra” is Great Dance. “I am the Dance, and I still go on,” as that hymn you don’t like proclaims.
In our liturgy, prayer, fasting and almsgiving this Lent, you might catch me repeating the pound-reach-pound-reach of the Shaker prayer. As I recreate my heartbeat and direct my breath with my hands, I’ll remind myself that the goal of all this physical activity is something a bit lighter and higher than what is here around me. And that all of us, here below, are a part of and have a part in that great dance of creation that moves the sun and other stars.
