Like the Quakers who quaked, the Shakers certainly shook in worship.
That much is evident by the convulsive choreography of “The Testament of Ann Lee,” an adaptation of the epic odyssey of the woman who brought Shakerism to America.
Lee, embodied by Amanda Seyfried, protagonizes the faith’s origin story as the visionary who shaped the Shaker tradition: a woman preacher revered as “Mother Ann” by her followers and persecuted for unnamed heresies by the outside world.
Even as one of the most distinctive traits of her Christian sect — shaking — faded, and as her followers have severely dwindled in numbers, Lee’s legacy is alive on the silver screen and at Shaker Villages across the Northeast, including in Canterbury.
“I was struck by the title, ‘Testament,’ right? Another word for testament is ‘will.’ That’s powerful. Will is legacy. Will is empowerment. Will is a vision achieved,” Shirley Wajda, curator of research and collections at Canterbury Shaker Village, told a sold-out crowd following a screening of the film at Red River Theatres last Saturday.
The movie takes artistic license with the history of the faith’s founding, wagering on a compressed timeline that, to the trained eyes of viewers involved with Shaker Village, yielded anachronisms. A historical musical, the film uses its soundtrack to reimagine Shaker hymns that weren’t created during Lee’s lifetime. Likewise, montages exalt the seamless joinery and methodical craftsmanship of Shaker woodworking, a minimal style of design that would have been in its infancy during Lee’s time.
These traits audiences associate with Shakerism are tools for immersing viewers in a different time and universe, said Wajda. They nod to Shakerism’s distinguishing characteristics, like the faith tradition’s view of labor as a form of worship: “Hands to work, hearts to God.”
The tent posts of Ann Lee’s message and Shaker tradition are accounted for; the movie’s creators fill in the open space.
“When we’re out of historical sequence and we see 19th-century Shaker material, culture, it’s her will, right? Or it’s God’s will through her,” Wajda said.
While Wajda helped the audience metabolize the movie, Renee Fox, collections manager at Shaker Village, made the connection from Ann Lee to Canterbury. As Fox put it, “Shirley can deal with dates and larger issues, but I deal with objects.”
The Shaker population in Canterbury peaked in the 1850s at 300 believers living, working and worshipping together on what is now a nearly 700-acre property.
Relics on exhibit include a piece of one of Lee’s dresses, a hitching post from Massachusetts that Lee and other elders used to tie up their horses and a piece of Lee’s apron, although Fox disclosed that “other villages have a piece of that apron, and they don’t match.”
Written artifacts offer a more certain connection to Lee: A Bible gifted to Canterbury Shaker Village’s missionary founders, Israel Chauncey and Ebenezer Cooley, and the Village’s oldest journal both start with the handwritten dates of Lee and her brother’s deaths.
“You know that was written at the time. You know it sounds like something someone’s remembering,” said Fox.
She described coming across a 20th-century book in Canterbury’s collection: “It just fell open to a passage about Mother Ann, and you could see it had been read over and over and over — the fingerprints and the slightly dirty pages. I’d like to just think that, like 175 years later, someone was still picking up a book and reading about Ann Lee.”
In the film, Lee is portrayed as a fearless preacher concerned with the dignity of every human being. She shames slave owners holding a public auction and, despite believing physical intimacy to be the root of humankind’s separation from God, she embraces the children of converts who join her sect.
Her contemporaries saw her as the second coming of Jesus Christ. More than 200 years after her death, scholars of the Shaker faith and strangers to it are meeting her in Hollywood’s different light.
