SEX, DESIRE, AND DISCIPLINE IN SHAKER LIFE

Sex is a drug. One that’s hard to live without. For the Shakers, an early American-settling religious sect that evolved out of the 18th century English Quaker community, sexual abstinence played a central role in one of the most creatively generative societies in the “New World.” A core belief of sex as the root of all evil was the point of separation of the Shakers from the Quakers. Shakers religious practice required celibacy to the point that even married couples had to abstain once inducted into the group. While this might sound grim to modern ears, it was this self denial that paved a unique path towards emotional, spiritual, and decorative balance, allowing the Shakers to siphon their creative force into art: dance, design, architecture, horticulture, and service. You could argue that sexual abstinence indirectly rid the community from anxieties and socializations that often staunch innovation and creative growth.

As Mona Fastvold’s latest film, The Testament of Ann Lee, attests, by stripping away sex from their lives, the Shakers reorganized the body and the built world at once, producing a culture where disciplines as different as choreography and furniture design follow the same rules of restraint, repetition, and balance. The material manifestation of this is now on view in the exhibition, A World in the Making: The Shakers, on at the ICA Philadelphia until August 9, 2026, which brings together historic Shaker objects with contemporary artworks to trace how the religion continues to shape design and artistic practice today.

The Shakers were revolutionary in their politics (to the point of petitioning not to fight during the Revolutionary War) and their sublimated sexual energy was part of that radicality. They prefigure James Baldwin’s assertion that sexual anxiety is at the root of American racism. In tandem with refusing to sexualize their fellow humans, they welcomed Black people among their ranks, and developed an early collaborative relationship with the Mahicans, from whom they learned a great deal of the crafts for which they are famous today, among them fine basketry. Their understanding of gender was advanced by today’s standards. They believed God to be both male and female, and that Christ would come again in the form of a woman. This was their ultimate recognition of balance, which flowed through their aesthetic leanings as well. Instead of focusing on the human urge to procreate or on what divides the sexes, the Shakers siphoned their collaborative power into art that made use of every member's unique skills, which stretched over design, architecture, horticulture, charity, and most interestingly in Fastvold’s film, dance.

Originally referred to pejoratively as the “Shaking Quakers,” they sought God’s presence through dance — a wildly divergent practice in 18th century England and America, where dance was at best a stiff, practiced, secular affair, and at worst a manifestation of demonic activity. For the Shakers, dance was the physical manifestation of their prayer. According to historical records, Shakers were so disruptive in their divine expressions that their meetings were frequently and violently broken up, both in England and after they crossed the Atlantic and settled in Niskayuna, New York. Fastvold’s film depicts their worship as raves and their dancing as both innocent and sensual. Interestingly, the film’s choreographer, Celia Rowlson-Hall, referred to the naivety of childhood in her sequences. “When you watch young kids playing and tackling each other, you recognize that is something they won't be able to do in a few years because it will mean something different by then,” Rowlson-Hall says. In refusing to engage in sex the Shakers were able to tap back into this abandon and interact with the beauty of the body in a wider way. “We went into this childlike space of how you interact with people's bodies, where the breast is equivalent to the knee.”

In their idiosyncratic worship, restraint met release. In her 1976 biography of Lee, Nardi Reeder Campion writes that, “Dancing…was useful in helping to sublimate sexual urges… During that rhythmic part of their worship, they gave vent to their inner turmoil.” As the sect grew and solidified, their dances became more practiced and rote, but dancing remained an expressive outlet for their interior worlds. Lee’s brother, struggling with the homoerotic urges he sees as sexual deviation, dances with agony, fear, self loathing, and eventually freedom. Lee herself, played by Amanda Seyfried, moves with absolute anguish. Forced into marriage by her father, Lee lost four children, either in difficult birthings or to sickness only a few years into their lives. "I thought a lot about her body and what kind of expression would come from a body going through those things and being in those physical and emotional states,” says Rowlson-Hall. Lee came to understand sex as the root of all pain as well as evil in part because of her personal sexual trauma. As her disgust in the act grew, her dependence on different sources of beauty deepened. Visual beauty became a path to heaven and Shaker’s prayer was intrinsically linked to it.

Prayer was physical for the Shakers. Their desire for divine closeness and beauty came through not only in dance, but in the products, furniture, and structures they designed. A life of efficiency, purpose and clarity was a holy one by their estimation. Sam Bader, production designer on The Testament of Ann Lee, followed this direction in his design for the film. “I let the reality of the Shakers speak through me as an instrument,” he says. “When we got into the world of the Shakers I leaned heavily into research. Rather than embellish for dramatic effect, I wanted the spaces to feel utilitarian.” Most of the scenes that took place in England were filmed in Hungary, with Bader referencing Charlie Bucket’s impoverished, bed-ridden grandparents from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory for the furnishings in the Lee family home in Manchester. The claustrophobia suggested by Lee’s family home underlines her earliest trauma: watching her parents have sex in their shared room. Once in America, many of the later interior scenes were filmed in extant Shaker buildings, like those in Hancock Shaker Village in the Berkshires.

A funeral scene at the end of the movie takes place in a newly built Shaker meeting house that depicts the biggest diversion from authentic Shaker life: a tree of life mural is painted on the main hall’s back wall, like a life size depiction of a Shaker gift drawing. “A tree is a life-giving force, but it also symbolizes the Garden of Eden. The duplicity of that symbol was hugely and deliberately part of our vocabulary,” says Bader. Again, we are brought back to the Shaker’s aversion to sex, which went hand in hand with their appreciation of the body as a tool for creation of other forms. Lee’s favorite refrain was, “Put your hands to work and give your hearts to God.” The body was cherished as a vessel for care and fruitful labor.

A World in the Making: The Shakers presents the fruits of this focus in the form of roughly 150 Shaker objects, displayed in conversation with newly commissioned works of art that respond to or follow in the Shaker spirit. The artist and photographer David Hartt’s work is included, along with works by the choreographer Reggie Wilson. Rowlson-Hall and Wilson are not the first choreographers to reference the Shaker spirit. The great American choreographer Martha Graham interpreted Shaker dance as precise, clean, and joyful in her 1944 work Appalachian Spring. Isamu Noguchi even incorporated a Shaker rocking chair into the original set.

The Shakers prayed in labor, designing, building, and enhancing the houses in which they lived, the tools with which they maintained their quality of life, the products with which they supported themselves, and, most famously, the furniture that has kept their spirit alive. They prayed in dance, they prayed in cooking, they prayed in cleaning. Their work remains as electrifying and desirable today as it was in the 18th and 19th centuries because it was infused with clarity and joy. Reeder Campion writes: “Mother Ann insisted joy was the elixir of life.” Several centuries of Shaker obsession would posit that she was correct.