by Lucy O'Brien
To suit the mood, all the male dancers were kitted out in long tartan kilts. This audacious look became one of the most enduring images of the show. “That was the other high point for me,” recalls Raistalla. “Performing ‘Music’ in Celtic skirts. It was supposed to be all boys. I could pull off the boy roles really well, so Madonna threw me in too. I felt we exchanged well when we were dancing together. My energy bounces back and forth and in and out, like hers. The times we shared onstage, we were connected.”
At the end of the show, while performing “Papa Don’t Preach,” Madonna wore black T-shirts with various “Do It Better” lines, referencing the famous ITALIANS DO IT BETTER T-shirt from the 1987 “Papa Don’t Preach” video. One night, it was KABBALISTS DO IT BETTER, while on other nights it was BRITS or IRISH. Her message was all-inclusive and declarative. As the final notes of “Holiday” rang out, projected behind her on the giant screens were the words REINVENT YOURSELF.
The tour was a major undertaking, with fifty-six shows in twenty cities. It became the highest-grossing concert tour of the year, with estimated takings of $124.5 million. Reviews were favorable: USA Today, for instance, praised it as “splashy and stylish” with (thank God) “sexy but age-appropriate costumes,” while Washington Post writer David Segal confessed to being “entertained into submission.” Although Madonna’s showbiz hybrid of Broadway, Cirque du Soleil, military drills, and rock concert left him reeling, he couldn’t help admiring it: “Here’s the weird part: It’s not a mess,” he wrote. “It’s actually kind of amazing. Pretentious and annoyingly preachy at moments, yes. Strangely devoid of titillation and almost tame by the standards of her naughty-naughty phase, sure. But measured in verve, nerve and technical wizardry, it’s hard to leave this epic extravaganza feeling anything less than awe.” For fans, too, the show was a favorite. “Because it was a greatest hits, everyone knew the songs and everyone in the auditorium was singing along. With Drowned World, you sometimes felt detached, but with this, everyone felt part of it,” recalls fan Dan Holden. “It was very uplifting.”
Despite the plaudits, however, ReInvention somehow slipped beneath the mass-media radar. Although it eventually became the year’s bestselling tour, Madonna had to promote hard, particularly in the United States, to sell out the shows. Part of the problem was the vastly inflated ticket price—in the United States, for instance, she was charging up to $300 a seat. Also, many people underwhelmed by American Life saw it as a bid to shore up sagging album sales with “a quick-buck oldies tour.” Although musically it had a retro feel, ReInvention showed how Madonna had entered a new phase with her utilization of visual art. In plundering her back catalogue, she began to do the one thing she professes never to do: reflect. The seeds of this had already been sown in a little-known fine-art installation that had a brief run in New York in 2003.
X-STaTIC PRO=CeSS is one of Madonna’s most fascinating projects. In a series of photographs, shot in 2002 with Stephen Klein, Madonna deconstructed her own myth to devastating effect. She was a mature woman growing tired of posing for glorified fashion shoots, and she had a critical distance from all those pristine pop-culture images she had created. “I’m not interested in going to a fashion shoot and just trying on a bunch of clothes,” she told W magazine. “I can’t tell you how boring it is posing for pictures. It’s so boring. If I don’t feel like I’m creating something that means something, I don’t want to do it.”
Madonna had always admired avant-garde fashion photographer Stephen Klein, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. Klein’s approach combined a sense of surrealism with the erotic. He and Madonna had worked together on various shoots and formed a rapport. After lengthy e-mail exchanges, they came up with the idea of “the process,” because Madonna sometimes felt that her most interesting thoughts occurred during rehearsal rather than in the final piece. Their proposal for the X-STaTIC PRO=CeSS exhibit was “a performer in her rehearsal space where she creates and brings her ideas to life or death.” Like many photographers before him, Klein used Madonna as his muse.
“Madonna’s always been more of a performance artist to me,” he said. “So I created a landscape for her to respond to, using things she’s explored in the past, like the wedding dress, the pole, fire, death, the bed, religion.” During a break in her recording of the American Life album, they had a marathon ten-hour photo and filming session. In the bare surroundings of an anonymous studio, some key themes emerged: first, there was the coyote, a feral, prairie wolf with wild eyes. In ancient mythology, the wolf is a symbol of evil, the chaotic and destructive potential of the Universe. This theme was developed in the accompanying “Beast Within” video piece, where Madonna recites apocalyptic words inspired by the Book of Revelations: “…As for the murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolators, and all liars/Their lot shall be in the lake that burns with fire,” she intones.
Madonna uses the elemental force of fire in vivid piece of deconstruction. A pristine white wedding dress, like the one in the “Like a Virgin” video, sits on a tailor’s dummy. In a series of images, we see the dress devoured by flames until there is nothing left but charred, blackened pieces of lace. Over forty pages in this five-hundred-page work are devoted to the dress on fire. Copyright on the entire exhibit is credited to Boy Toy Inc., a tongue-in-cheek reference to the 80s persona that she cheerfully destroyed. In fact, the triptych of albums,
Ray of Light, Music, and American Life, are all about her systematically dismantling images that no longer served her—the virgin/whore tease, the fame-hungry star, the blond ambition virago. “I’m not a pop star, I’m a performance artist,” she once said haughtily to a TV interviewer. With this exhibit, she stripped away the pop glitz to reveal the real performer underneath.
We see Madonna wearing an off-white leotard and fishnet tights, holding ballet and yoga poses. There is something Puritan yet faintly erotic about her outfit. She poses with her head down on a bare bed, her hair riven with plain brown hair grips. There is a sense of austerity, of solitary confinement and anguish. In other shots, her knees are bandaged, her tights laddered, and her leotard torn, showing the exhaustion of constant rehearsal. And there’s the vaudeville: Madonna as a circus contortionist, legs behind her head and blue high heels on her feet.
In these pictures, the emphasis is on her body, not her face. Klein has created a painterly impression, like a mangled Degas. Most striking of all are her “queen” images. Here she is wearing a jeweled mask, a dark red damask crinoline, and an ornate headdress. Her face implacable behind an animal-like mask, she looks part Elizabethan, part magical high priestess. Like the ladies of the Renaissance court, with rotting faces beneath their white lead powder, this image is magnificently decrepit. I can show you what lies beneath this glittering showbiz exterior, she seems to say, I can show you what is corrupted.
Madonna’s session with Klein ended up as a short exhibition at the Deitch Projects in SoHo, in the spring of 2003. The gallery was transformed into a dark, blue-lit postindustrial theater by Klein and designers from the architecture firm LOT/EK. Images of the bed, the queen, and the coyote became photographic animations valued at up to $65,000 a piece. And many of the pictures ended up in a $350 limited-edition art book made up of delicate tissue-like pages in a slip case.
Originally a one-off, X-STaTIC PRO=CeSS provided inspiration for the ReInvention show, and as the tour progressed throughout 2004, Madonna and Klein added to the exhibition. It was shown in London and Berlin after the tour ended, and then again two years later, in augmented form, in Japan. It is an installation that keeps on mutating. It’s Madonna’s pure artistic license, and an indication of where her creative heart lies. For her, this started off as an anti-fashion shoot.
“I can enjoy fashion—sometimes,” she said. “Some of my very good friends are designers. Jean-Paul Gaultier is a real artist. And I can see the beauty and the art that is involved with couture and design…. But with everything going on in the world right now, I just feel we are
too preoccupied with the wrong things. I’m just not that interested anymore in fashion per se…. Now, actresses look like models and models become actresses. Yuck. Who has any individuality?” Away from the commercial bottom line, this was her opportunity to explore the avant-garde within herself. “This is the inner landscape of a performance artist. And I think, if you look at the pictures, they’re not even in the most flattering positions, you know? It’s not about that.”
With her work, Madonna registered a deep change in herself, one prompted by having a family. This was apparent to all those who came in contact with her. “She was much calmer as a person on the Drowned World tour, but before the ReInvention tour, she was a completely different person again,” says choreographer Alex Magno. “She was very calm and peaceful, just not the same. She was tamed, not a wild beast anymore.”
Whether this was due to Guy Ritchie is a moot point. “Guy’s a very manly man. Whenever he comes around she completely crumbles, she loves him so much,” her dancer Raistalla told me. “She’s such a boss, but when he’s there she turns into a little kitten. It’s funny to see.” Keeping her family together is a key priority for Madonna. “Rocco and Lola were around a lot of the time. She let us hang out with them in rehearsals and play with them at her house.” In turn, Madonna kept an eye on her dancers. “She’s very motherly; I thought she took good care of us,” recalls Raistalla. “I got injured a couple of times—she was on top of it, making sure we were healthy, that we saw doctors. She took us to see other artists who might inspire us, like the French pianist Katia Labèque.” Madonna also wasn’t averse to teaching them a little Kabbalah. “She was like a mother in that she was into our self-improvement. She introduced us to Kabbalah. I absorbed it, I liked the sessions, and I wanted to explore it. But in the end I didn’t continue with it, because Kabbalah can be very confusing and mind-wrecking if you take it too far.”
By then, Madonna had been studying Kabbalah for eight years. What began as tentative quest prior to the Ray of Light album developed into a full commitment to the Kabbalah Center and its teachings. As she pursued her spiritual interests, more and more fans began to follow suit, becoming part of a popularization of this ancient philosophy. Dating back to first century A.D. in Palestine, it essentially transcribes the way the Universe works. It is encapsulated in the Zohar, the primary text of Kabbalah, which was said to be “written in black fire on white fire” and revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai. Within the text are the seventy-two Hebrew names of God, an arrangement and rearrangement of twenty-two letters coded within the first books of the Bible. There is the surface meaning of the words and stories, but concealed within are hidden messages of divinity that keen students can understand only through dedicated prayer and meditation. Scholars and rabbis have been cracking the code for centuries. Modern Kabbalists refer to this code as a kind of DNA for the Universe. For Madonna, who loves the power of words, and who used layered meanings of the Catholic liturgy on her Like a Prayer album, this was irresistible.
Kabbalah has a rich history, one that emerged in its modern form in twelfth-century Provence, with the doctrine of the sephiroth, the ten emanations of God. They are represented as branches on a tree, parts of the body, or steps from earthly chaos to the spiritual world. One of the major Kabbalists from this period was Abraham Abulafia (1240–95), among the first to create the written letter combinations of the Kabbalah, as keys to altered states of consciousness. Later, in the thirteenth century, a Spanish Jew called Moses de Leon published the Sepher ha Zohar, or Book of Splendor, which became the key text of Judaic Kabbalah. By the eighteenth century, though, Kabbalah went into decline, with many Jews dismissing it as mere superstition.
CONCURRENT WITH the development of Jewish Kabbalah was a liberal, humanist interpretation that flowered during the Renaissance, becoming a major influence on European occult philosophers and magicians. The Kabbalah that Madonna adheres to is firmly rooted in the Judaic Old Testament. Although it went into decline for a while, there was a revival in the late 1960s, along with the wider trend for spiritual exploration. Kabbalah received a commercial boost when New Yorker Karen Berg and an orthodox Hasidic Jew called Shraga Feivel Gruberger came up with a new, modern interpretation of the ancient system. When they met, she was a secretary in his insurance firm and both were married to other people. She didn’t see him again until eight years later when, as a young divorcée, she found herself “strangely flustered” when asking him about his Kabbalah studies.
By 1971, Gruberger had left his wife and children, reinvented himself as Dr. Philip Berg, and married Karen. She referred to their affair as the working of a higher power. It was revealed to her in a dream that her job was to wrest this centuries-old tradition from the mantle of Jewish men over forty and make it accessible to all. “I insisted that this wisdom be made available to the peoples: to everyone, of any age, gender or religious belief…. I said, ‘If I can understand it, then anyone can,’” Karen declared.
Soon after their marriage, they set up a learning center in Tel Aviv, followed by one in New York. Karen trademarked the name “Kabbalah Center,” and it grew rapidly, so that by 2006 there were fifty-one centers worldwide and 3.5 million converts. It now boasts a range of celebrity A-listers from Lindsay Lohan and Demi Moore to Michael Jackson, the Beckhams, and Britney Spears. Like Hinduism in the 1970s and Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism in the 1980s, Kabbalah was the new system of belief for spiritually hungry stars. It has been given a twenty-first century spin, with scientific-sounding buzz-phrases like “spiritual DNA” and “technology for the soul,” designed to reassure young skeptics. This is what drew Guy Ritchie, a committed Darwinist, to Kabbalah. “It’s challenging. It’s like a physics lesson, the bridge between science and spirituality,” said Madonna. Though he was cynical at first, she persuaded Guy to come to a class, and he began to study it further. “I think he was kind of embarrassed, [as] he doesn’t want to subscribe to anything that’s perceived as being religious…. But the bottom line is that it’s very scientific, and that’s what appeals to Guy.”
The Kabbalah headquarters in London reflects its elevated status. Based in Stratford Place in the West End, it is a large building with deep pile carpets, shining pastel-pink chandeliers, and luscious flowers in strategically placed vases. This contrasts with the more basic, homey surroundings of the Beverly Hills HQ, one of the oldest centers. Though the decor is different, the philosophy is the same worldwide. I went to an open-day early in 2006, and browsed at the bookstore. With such a rich, varied tradition of writing on Kabbalah, I expected to find an array of different texts. Instead, there were about fifteen titles, all beautifully produced and all written by either Rav, Michael, Yehuda, or Karen Berg. Hmm. Judging by their bookstore, it would be hard to counter the suggestion that Kabbalah Center is a family cult and “Kabbalah Lite.” While Madonna prides herself on her intellectual rigor, it’s strange that the version she opted for ignores all other scholarly writing on the subject.
Still, there were some engaging talks at the London center. I found out about Kabbalistic astrology (“tuning into the energy of the cosmos”), Kabbalah and health (“cancer is a confusion of the body”), and its perspective on women. While much of the center’s transformative theology is persuasive and positive (Yehuda Berg’s The 72 Names of God being a key text), its attitude toward women is less enlightened. Nestling amid the feminist sound bites of Karen Berg’s God Wears Lipstick are some reactionary ideas. “Men and women are two entities,” said speaker Ruth Nahmias. “A man is the channel of energy, the woman is the vessel…like an electric lightbulb, he is the plus, she is the minus. It’s like pouring water into a cup, she reveals the light.” In this determinist universe, men are the active force, women the passive.
Some women in the workshop began to demur: What about lesbians? What about single career-women? Then, when Ms. Nahmias declared, “I don’t want you to be feminist,” several openly walked out. This perhaps wasn’t the smartest way to attract independent twen
ty-first-century women. On one level, Karen Berg’s assertion that she wrested a four-thousand-year-old philosophy from the hands of a male elite and made it accessible to women contradicts her deeply traditional view of women’s “special spiritual role.”
It is ironic that Madonna, seen as one of the strongest women of modern times, gravitates toward Kabbalah. She rejected Catholicism for its patriarchal rigidity, only to adopt a system that echoes the fundaments of Old Testament Christianity in its polarizing of men and women. In the Bible, conception is an act of magic—the Son of God is born without sex taking place, therefore the ideal woman is one who doesn’t have sex. Women were seen as earthly creatures with base instincts, while only men had the potential to perceive the higher planes. In Kabbalah, the emphasis is on transcending the “garbage,” the earthiness of life. “Intent on journeying from a lower to a higher level of being,” the Kabbalist needs to reach a state of “purification.” The notion of clean clothes without matching a pure soul within echoes the very Jansenist Catholicism that inspired Madonna’s mother. Maybe that is what was behind Madonna’s spiritual search—and, on a more base level, her demand for a new toilet seat to be installed at each venue she visited on her 2006 Confessions tour.
More progressive is the Kabbalah Center’s Spirituality for Kids foundation, which works in schools and youth and community centers to help children develop into “strong, clear, happy human beings.” This is the area of the Kabbalah Center where Madonna has most focused her energies. It’s not surprising that she has donated all her profits from her children’s books to the foundation. The idea for the books first emerged in the early 90s, when her American publisher Nicholas Callaway watched Madonna read one of his books, Miss Spider’s Tea Party, for MTV, to promote her album Bedtime Stories. The audience of feisty teenagers were spellbound. “I thought then that she had an uncanny ability to tell a story,” said Callaway, “and that’s when I first suggested to her that she might make a terrific children’s book author.”