Spurred on by a vision of the Shakers’ founding leader, Celia Rowlson-Hall masterminded the whirl of movement in Mona Fastvold’s feverish film

‘I’ll tell you something I’ve not told anyone,” says Celia Rowlson-Hall. “This might make me sound a little wild, but I don’t care.” The choreographer is recounting her experience on The Testament of Ann Lee, a fever dream of a film starring Amanda Seyfried as the leader of 18th-century Christian sect the Shakers, whose ecstatic prayer rituals could involve dancing for days. “The night before we started filming, I was sleeping and, literally, the ghost of Ann Lee was over my bed with angels around and she said: ‘Go forth!’” Rowlson-Hall laughs at herself for revealing this. “Was that my imagination allowing myself to go forth? Maybe, probably,” she smiles. “It was so intense that I will never forget it.”

In Mona Fastvold’s film, we see Lee, a blacksmith’s daughter from Manchester, having vivid religious visions that trigger her evangelism. Much like creative visions, I say. Maybe in a different time Lee would have been an artist? “She was an artist, without a doubt,” says Rowlson-Hall. To be an artist, she continues, “you have to believe in more than just what you see in front of you. It’s a concoction of faith and drive, a little delusion and a lot of energy. Like gunpowder.” Lee definitely had those qualities, leading the Shakers to the US, preaching piety, pacifism, celibacy and the confession of sins, and inspiring devotion as well as ire.