Celebrating The Feast of Mary Magdalene 

July 22nd 2024 (online)

 5pm - 9:30pm UK (with a one hour break in the middle)   Check your local time here

Special showing of THE WITNESS by Jo Blake with Q&A

Embodied Practices of the Women Disciples with Fay Barratt

"Mary Magdalene: A Leader for the 1st & 21st Centuries", with Dr Shirley Paulson

Thunder Perfect Mind with David Curtis

Welcome to this international gathering, coming together to honour the Feast Day of Mary Magdalene. We have a varied program of People, Prayers, Practices and Performances with an underlying theme of embodied practice running through the event. May the spirit, message and gospel of Mary Magdalene take shape in us all. 

This year we are running the event as a fundraiser for Jo's performance piece 'The Witness' , 100% of your donation will go towards taking this back out on the road in 2025. Everyone today has given their time and resources freely to make this happen, so please give generously to support Jo's ground breaking work and help bring its valuable message to a wider audience. 

The Witness by Jo Blake, with Q&A

His story became History. Her story became Heresy. The sacred and profane collide in a new performance by interdisciplinary artist Jo Blake, inspired by the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Moving through humour, bold physicality and intricate storytelling; The Witness reveals how one woman’s 2000 year old testimony comes clattering into the life of a contemporary woman, initiating a reckoning and demanding that the missing pages be written anew.

Jo Blake is an interdisciplinary performance maker whose practice sits at the intersection of storytelling, dance and theatre. She describes herself as a lover of words, bodies and performance. Something of a shapeshifter, her work moves between storytelling, dance, theatre, psychophysical acting and somatics. Myth, fairytale, psyche and soul underpin Jo's approach to performance, as does a deep relationship to the feminine. She is interested in the untold and the exiled… performance as resistance, reclamation, cultural therapeutics and spiritual activism. Jo holds a PHD in Emergent Storytelling Practices.

Embodied Practices of the Women Disciples with Fay Barratt

Fay Barratt is an artist and an Interfaith Minister. For many years Fay held workshops and retreats on the Divine Feminine. In 2011 she had a profound awakening to the teachings of Mary Magdalene and was soon unearthing the other women disciples around Jesus. Fay went on to found the Mary Magdalene School of Wisdom which she led until 2022, and has recently published a set of cards and book - Mary Magdalene and the Women Disciples . Fay can be found at The Monastery Manchester, UK, holding One Spirit services and Sacred Art workshops. Her art work and online teaching can be found on: https://fay-barratt-sacred-art.mailchimpsites.com/

"Mary Magdalene: A Leader for the 1st & 21st Centuries", with Dr Shirley Paulson

Shirley Paulson, PhD, js the principal producer of the website, Early Christian Texts: The Bible and Beyond. She is especially interested in the significant relationship between the canonical and extracanonical writings of early Christianity, with a focus on the healing role these ancient, long-forgotten extracanonical texts can be.

From her 30 years’ healing experience as a Christian Science practitioner, she discovers messages of hope and healing from the ancient texts. Her book, Illuminating the Secret Revelation of John: Catching the Light, was published by Cascade books in 2022. Her online courses cover topics such as Mary Magdalene, Nag Hammadi writings, and what was happening between Jesus and the fourth-century adoption of a Christian doctrine.

Shirley’s forthcoming course “Mary Magdalene: A Leader for the First and Twenty First Centuries” starts on September 1^st.

Thunder Perfect Mind with David Curtis

David Curtis is author of The Gospel of Mary website where he has recently published the third draft of his ongoing translation project for copyright-free distribution under a creative commons license. He leads Friendly Study Groups on the text using a non-hierarchical Quaker study method. David was Mallory scholar at Winchester College, studied Comparative Religion at Lancaster University, and is now Associate tutor at Woodbrooke Quaker College. Despite this academic background, David says that he likes to take a more holistic approach to the gospel, engaging with all aspects of self - emotional, rational, and spiritual. His growing understanding of the text is continually informed by such diverse tools as pilgrimage, non-violent communication, compassionate inquiry, yoga nidra and meditation.

David is an active Quaker, but also has a long background in Tibetan Buddhism as a student of Ringu Tulku Rinpoche. He is intrigued by the powerful notion of ‘holding difference’ – of seeing our diversity of human perspectives as something complementary and constructive, rather than competitive and contradictory.

David will be delivering his short new performance piece with words from "Thunder Perfect Mind"