On October 8, Grace Cathedral’s 2022 Artist in Residence Lee Mingwei presented his work, Our Labyrinth For Grace. It is an epic twelve-hour performance by three dancers, the Men of the cathedral’s Choir of Men and Boys, and organist Susan Jane Matthews.  

In Our Labyrinth, dancers use a broom to sweep a mound of rice along a labyrinthian path, to the subtle sound of ankle bells. At each location, the performance has changed, as the space and time where it takes place infuses the work with a different feeling and character.  

 Join Malcolm Clemens Young in a conversation with Lee Mingwei and the dancers who performed Our Labyrinth For Grace about the creation of the work, what it feels like to perform it, and how the work has evolved over time and space. For more about Lee’s residency, visit gracecathedral.org/air2022. 

You can help us bring the arts to life at Grace with a gift today to The Forum. gracecathedral.org/givetograce.   

About the Guests 

Born in Taiwan in 1964 and currently living in Paris and New York City, Mingwei Lee creates participatory installations, where strangers can explore issues of trust, intimacy, and self-awareness. leemingwei.com.

Jean-Gabriel Manolis is a French dancer-performer. He has taken part in the performances of Our Labyrinth at Centre Pompidou (Paris, France) and provided artistic advice and supported the new performers at Museum MACAN (Jakarta, Indonesia) in 2018, at Gropius Bau (Berlin, Germany) in 2020 and more recently at Tate Modern (London, UK) in 2022. 

  Born in Kyoto, Japan, Aya Sone started taking ballet class at the age of four. In 2021, she performed Our Labyrinth for the first time at Museum Villa Stuck in Munich and since then at Intermediatheque in Tokyo and at Tate Modern in London (2022).    Wu Cheng-Lung has studied Taichi Dowing, Chinese martial art, Chinese drum, meditation, Gurdjieff movements, Mevlevi Sema Ceremony, and Jerzy Grotowski’s physical training. He has performed Our Labyrinth at Taipei Fine Arts Museum and Museum of National Taipei University of Education (MoNTUE) in Taiwan (2015 and 2016); Center Georges Pompidou, France (2017); and Tate Modern, UK (2022).

About the Moderator 

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young is the dean of Grace Cathedral. He is the author of The Spiritual Journal of Henry David Thoreau and The Invisible Hand in Wilderness: Economics, Ecology, and God, and is a regular contributor on religion to the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner.     

About The Forum  

The Forum is a series of stimulating conversations about faith and ethics in relation to the important issues of our day. We invite inspiring and illustrious people to sit down for a real conversation with the Forum’s host and with you. Our guests range from artists, inventors and philosophers to pop culturists and elected officials, but the point of The Forum is singular: civil, sophisticated discourse that engages minds and hearts to think in new ways about the world.  gracecathedral.org/the-forum.