Keralee Froebel became entranced by the Lady of Guadalupe in the early 90s while living in Santa Fe down the block from the Santuario de Guadalupe, the oldest such shrine in the country. “I feel like there’s a distinct energy to the Virgin Mary,” says the Pilsen artist. “I really connected with her.” On a 1991 trip to Mexico City, she joined the thousands of pilgrims visiting the Basilica de Guadalupe, built on the spot where the virgin allegedly appeared to an Indian peasant and left her image emblazoned on his cape. “They have this huge church with the cape [on display], and they have six moving walkways below it,” says Froebel. “The people start to go to it, to see it–they’re on their knees, crawling, from a half mile away.”
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The devotion of the believer is only part of the inspiration for Froebel’s raucous six-year-old Christmas pageant, which this year goes by the name Shamanic Nativity Trance: Jesuspalooza. Equal parts drama, slapstick, satire, and musical, the multimedia spectacle uses video, a ragtag script, and the collective imagination of its volunteer cast to tell–extremely loosely–the story of the virgin birth.
She staged her first pageant, Way Down in the Laundry Room, one night in 1998 in the unusually large laundry room of her apartment building. Featuring a cast of about a dozen, including several of the JC Superstar musicians, the show utilized “lots of hay,” Christmas lights, a plastic camel, and a video of a live birth to mark the moment Jesus was born. The audience sat on old car seats, the floor, and the washers and dryers.
