The Messiah Project
In a brilliantly lit gymnasium, the afternoon light streamed through narrow windows nearly 30 feet above our heads. A group of some of the best singers in Los Angeles moved out from behind a small chamber orchestra and took their places amongst an audience of nearly 150 unhoused people living in Skid Row. I felt the collective excitement grow as everyone looked to the center of the room, a sharp intake of breath immediately followed by the joyful sound of the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s Messiah erupting from the voices of everyone gathered. Within the outpouring of joy and connection through music lay an important question: how and why was this euphoria happening in Skid Row, a place supposedly trapped in a continuous loop of despair?
I found myself in that gymnasium last December at the invitation of Street Symphony’s founder, Vijay Gupta, to help out with their annual production of the Messiah Project. I first heard about Street Symphony, a community of Los Angeles-based musicians dedicated to creating performances, workshops, and new songs with Los Angeles’ unhoused population, during grad school. Eventually, Vijay and I became close creative collaborators. Over the years, the Messiah Project has been something I’ve heard about, but have never been able to participate in. So after too many years missed due to the pandemic (though I was still able to tune in virtually), we decided I had to come to LA and witness the event in-person.
Driving into Skid Row on the morning of the event was a tale of two cities. We exited the highway into Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill neighborhood surrounded by luxury apartment buildings and high-culture landmarks like the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Museum of Contemporary Art. As we kept going down the road, I slowly started to see tents pitched along the street. Within one more block, we were surrounded by tent encampments that encompassed entire blocks of sidewalk, garbage bags and shopping carts full of people’s belongings, and the huddled silhouettes of people leaning against buildings or laying on the ground trying to catch some sleep in the early morning light.
I had the perception that Skid Row existed as a separate neighborhood. The closeness of Bunker Hill and Skid Row though belies an important lesson. These communities are intrinsically connected. One cannot exist without the other. Despite socioeconomic differences, the same spirit and need to create flows through them. In the couple of blocks it took to reach our destination, I saw stunning visual art leaned against tents, took in colorful and vibrant murals on the walls, and heard a beautiful chorus of voices sharing the persistence of the human spirit through song and spoken word. In the shadow of the carefully curated, affluent shrines to human cultural achievement in Bunker Hill, creativity blossomed in Skid Row.
We arrived just prior to 9am at the Midnight Mission, a 12-step recovery shelter, the host of the Messiah Project, and the principal partner of Street Symphony in Skid Row. We were greeted by a lively staff member named Andrew at the elevator. As I stuck out my hand to introduce myself, he let out a room-filling laugh and pulled me into an unexpected but welcoming and warm bear hug. It was a sign from the very beginning that the day would be all about human connection up close and without filter.
Shortly thereafter, a crowd of volunteers arrived (nearly 140 volunteers helped out over the course of the whole-day event) and began creating over 500 hygiene kits for people living in the Mission and on the streets. It surprised me that so many of the volunteers were non-musicians, coming from other fields and professions not necessarily knowing what to expect. I was in a group with another musician, a lawyer, and a surgeon stuffing toothbrushes into paper bags and chatting about the different walks of life that had brought us to that room. They came because they had heard about the event on the radio or seen a post on social media. They were interested in what a concert could do in Skid Row. Most importantly they wanted to serve others.
Street Symphony’s selection of Handel’s Messiah is particularly apropos given the work’s history. At the time of its composition, Georg Freidrich Handel, a German man, composing Italian opera, living in London, England, was facing cultural pushback against his music due to increasingly nationalistic cultural taste. He kept financing productions of his own Italian operas at great personal cost to the point that when approached by a friend, Charles Jennens, with a libretto that eventually became the Messiah, Handel was facing debtors' prison. A group of charities in Dublin, Ireland funded the premiere of the Messiah with the proceeds of that performance going to free 142 men from debtor’s prison. The success of the Messiah also reversed Handel’s own career fortunes, forever intertwining the story of Handel’s Messiah with the spirit of charity and human compassion. So while we hear thousands of performances of the Messiah in churches, concert halls, and community centers during December, it’s meant to be heard in a place like the Midnight Mission in Skid Row.
After creating the hygiene kits, we shifted into the most important part of the whole day: inviting community members to the performance. We first went to the cafeteria during the lunch meal service. We entered a dimly lit, windowless concrete room with low hanging ceilings descending on rows of long tables. It felt cramped, the air weighed down by a room designed only for function, and a far cry from the lofty, sunlit gym where the concert would be. A group of men and women snaked around the perimeter of the room, entering from a door to the Mission’s courtyard, passing by a room-length, stainless steel food service counter to pick up their meal on paper plates before fanning out to claim seats at one of the tables.
We set up a table for the hygiene kits near an open door to the courtyard, through which we could hear Las Chorizeras, a mariachi band, and the Asé Ashe West-African drummers welcoming community members into the Mission for the meal service. Then we started moving from table to table inviting people to come pick up a hygiene kit after their meal before heading upstairs to the afternoon concert. I was moved by the graciousness of the community members I talked to. I knew many of them had never been to a concert like this before. Most are in the throes of addiction or recovery, which is one of the hardest things anyone can do. When the world is that heavy, it’s hard to see how playing and listening to music will make things better. Yet, they paused while eating their meals, all their belongings gathered on the floor next to them, and willingly listened, asked questions, and expressed genuine curiosity about the event. They were so thankful for the invitation, when it felt like I should be the one thanking them for the gift of their attention.
After the meal service, we headed out onto the streets in the block surrounding the Midnight Mission to invite people who hadn’t entered for lunch. The contrast in environment and how people responded to our invitation out on the streets was stark. Crossing through the Mission doors, I set foot onto Skid Row for the first time. The smell of garbage and urine felt like a blanket that wrapped itself around you. Most of our invitations were met with apathy, non-responsiveness, or outright hostility. “F--- you! You can’t make me go in there! That music ain’t for me!” I had never experienced a response like that to an invitation to a concert, and while I had prepared for things to be different, it still made it challenging to keep going. I’ve been inviting people to concerts for decades, but this required a new level of empathy and communication.
With some encouragement from staff at the Mission, I discovered that making the invitation over and over in the face of very little “success” was actually a deep expression of humanity. I was learning what those who work in Skid Row have known for years: the most important thing you can do is show up, keep making the invitation. We were opening the doors of the Mission to those living on the streets, and only they could choose to enter when they were ready. Georgia, the Mission’s Chief Communications Officer, told me that the most they could ask for is one person coming in off the street to the concert and deciding they want to enter recovery and join the community in the Mission.
As we entered the Mission again, I noticed the way the building seemingly opened up as you passed the threshold of the now empty cafeteria into the main lobby. I felt myself opening up, the windows and higher ceilings creating more space physically to mirror the expanding of my own soul about to happen in the concert. I never got a chance to ask if that was intentional or not, but it certainly felt that way and I can imagine a similar experience for those who take those first steps from the cafeteria into the Mission to begin the process of recovery.
When finding a seat for the concert, we were encouraged to sit next to members of the community, engage in the music with them, and embody that physical bridge across social and economic differences that we know the music could create. I was sitting in a small group with a few community members and volunteers. After a brief welcome to the concert by various people, we got right into the music. A couple of men living in the Mission in front of me talked earnestly about the Messiah. One had grown up singing it in church, another was particularly excited for the “wonderful counselor bit,” which he conducted along with the orchestra when that number was performed. Around the room, I could see other people dancing in their seats or animatedly filming reactions to what they were hearing on a phone. The room was alive and busy. In a concert hall, we probably would have said the audience lacked the proper decorum, but in this space it felt right. It didn’t matter that they were active or noisy, because they were wholly focused on seeing themselves in the music that was unfolding. It was a focus that transcended the quiet attentiveness we’ve come to expect in classical music.
About halfway through the program, the Midnight Strings took the stage. This group, made up Mission community members — all individuals in recovery from addiction — meets weekly with a Street Symphony teaching artist to have conversation, study beginning guitar, and work on songwriting. They first performed a couple of tunes written by past iterations of the group, their “standard canon” as the lead teaching artist called it, before one member rose to introduce his own original tune. I felt the busyness in the room fade away. In the middle of one of the most lively concerts I’ve ever attended, it suddenly became eerily still. In the stillness though, I could sense a gathering of collective attention, the greatest gift we have to give, to bear witness to a moment of transformation.
He began to sing, a solo human voice accompanied by strumming guitar floating atop the silence of hundreds of people. He sang about what the Mission meant to him: a refuge in a dark place, an opportunity to look at a life being lived and choose something else, something more whole. Slowly, I began to hear quiet, and then louder, affirmations from the audience join the music. “You tell it man!” “Speak brother!” They encouraged him to keep going, to keep telling his story, and to lay claim to this part of his life through song. When he finished, the room erupted into the loudest applause of the whole performance. Even as someone who was visiting Skid Row for the first time from a completely different walk of life, I felt so welcomed and privileged to be a part of the tangible sense of hope, resilience, and belonging welling up in the room. It was music at its best: giving voice to our stories and bringing people together across life experience, socio-economic circumstance, and beliefs to imagine a better world for ourselves.
I came to the Messiah Project expecting to encounter teaching artistry during the concert. I didn’t plan on being confronted with it in every interaction I had with the community members of Skid Row. I had expected to be the one doing the engagement, but instead found myself being engaged. Andrew, the staff member whose hug caught me by surprise, the man on the street who told me that this music wasn’t for him, the community member who conducted along to “Wonderful Counselor, Prince of Peace” during the concert, all taught me an answer to the question posed by this event: why and how was this happening here in Skid Row.
Reflecting on what I learned, the presence of teaching artistry throughout makes sense. The foundation of the Messiah Project is human connection. That impulse for relationship is built into everything from the choice of music, to the venue, to the volunteer service, to the priority to witness artmaking from the community and more. My experience reinforced that core belief of teaching artistry that artistry isn't something that only trained/talented humans have, it’s something in all of us.
Just like the sunlight that illuminated the gym on that December afternoon, the community members are brilliant examples of human artistry in action. In the midst of life-threatening addiction and the pain of being unhoused, they have the creativity and the will to imagine a better life for themselves. They see past the pain and the stigma that society places on them and commit to radical change, not just as something to aspire to, but something to be lived every day. They understand deeply that despite our differences and our challenges, there is nothing that we can’t do when we can find a way to do it together with creativity and empathy. They commit to living a more artful life.
Skid Row is a place of liveness, authenticity, and change and the only way to learn is to go there. It was a gift to be among them. We’d do well to follow their example.
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