God Is An Utter ****: The Interpretive Dance will open in Sydney this weekend to angry masses of Jesus’ disciples, hopes ‘interpreter’ Matthew Greigson. “By pitching this performance at just the right level of religious satire and outright blasphemy, I think I can raise the hackles of almost every religious group in this region, and be saturated in free publicity,” said Greigson yesterday, nailing up the windows of his house as his partner packed their bags.

“If everything goes to plan, the established Christian church groups and the usual fringe lay-congregations should be phoning in death threats and inciting disorder outside the theatre on Saturday night. I can hardly wait!”

Greigson is relying heavily on the sort of religious hysteria that has reaped untold attendance rewards for otherwise pedestrian ‘art’ pieces for some years, most recently a live television performance of Jerry Springer: The Opera on BBC2 in the United Kingdom on Saturday night. The broadcast gathered a record 47,000 complaints prior to the performance; necessary hype to generate a television audience of around 10% of the UK’s population and guarantee great returns on future theatrical performances of the fairly tedious production, once rumoured to be in dire financial difficulty. Righteous indignation over the televised opera which features Jesus as a gay nappy-fetishist has seen BBC2 controller Roly Keating and director of television Jana Bennett in police protection since Saturday.

Other examples of the Christian publicity machine in action include Andres Serrano’s 1997 exhibition of Piss Christ, a blurry, vague photograph of a crucifix suspended in orange fluid that most Australians would have been resoundingly unaware of except for the highly publicised physical attacks, threats and violence that accompany Christian outrage; and the early 1970s protest at the Mark Helinger Theatre of the performance of the Jesus Christ: Superstar, a musical that otherwise would have remained a cynical, clumsy concept album for a short time before collapsing under its own mediocrity.

“It’s a shame Griegson feels the need to do this,” said Pastor Neil Makin of the New Pentecostal Church of the Tinker’s Cuss in Drops. “We as New Christian Soldiers are happier spending our Saturday nights studying God’s word and preparing our minds for our memorial meeting on Sunday. Then this clown comes along and now we all have to go out and threaten and harass him to create an unjustified publicity shit-storm for his show.

“The crazy thing is, we haven’t seen the production and don’t want to. Interpretive dance? Come on. Andrew Lloyd Webber was bad enough,” he added, whilst posting the names, personal addresses and phone numbers of Griegson, his family and the Kilton Theatre trustees on the New Christian Soldier website.

Reviews of the Wednesday preview of God Is An Utter ****: The Interpretive Dance range from The Australian’s “Hypnotically dull” to the Artistic Review’s scathing “Greigson spends the better part of an hour wandering around a big-prop bible, pointing accusingly at it, before covering his chest in what appeared to be body lotion and crumbled tofu. The finale sees him windmill-arming about the stage until abruptly sitting bolt still until the audience eventually leaves: uncertainly, embarrassed and annoyed.”