Performing the sacred archive: Discourses on reconstruction, documentation and biblical interpretation (2014) (original) (raw)

Biblical Performance Criticism: The Almost, But not Quite, Transubstantiation of Performance Studies into Religious Studies (2017)

The focus of the article is about how a queer theological gaze affects both place and per- formance. It suggests that, through ritualized practises, one might be able to reimagine meaning for spaces and the bodies that inhabit them. This investigation is a kind of queer prophetic imagination in action. The article starts with a historical look at bathhouses from the 1960s and 1970s, and their impact on homosexual identity, while linking key theological thinkers to spatial theorists who suggest that people’s behaviours create, maintain, or challenge conceived notions of space. The article includes an exegesis of scripture by imposing a rereading of the Sodom and Gomorrah narrative onto the 1970s gay bathhouse, and by that, suggesting that the ritualized act of queer sex has the possi- bility of creating a kind of queer, sacred space.

Dancing Theology - A Construction of a Pneumatology of The Body

2020

Dance is the language of the soul. Dance, as a theological source, can remind us of who we are in and with the living perichoresis of the Trinity. Dance, as embodied art, can provide us with a new way of viewing and discussing pneumatology and that we too, in our incarnate reality, participate in perichoresis. Within this work I seek to answer the questions of how dance is a source of theology, why a pneumatology of the body is significant, and how dance provides a framework for a pneumatology of the body. The creation of a pneumatology of the body is a rooting or re-membering of the Spirit and our own spirit in incarnational—skin and bones—reality that includes us in Trinitarian perichoresis. Pneumatology of the body is dancing with the Holy Spirit in our given time and space to retrieve the dignity of our embodied inspirited selves as made in the imago Dei. The gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit are not abstract concepts. Through dance as embodied art we can move from abstract, i...

Why Dance? Towards a Theory of Religion as Practice and Performance

Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 2005

This article engages the dancing and writing of the American modern dance pioneer, Isadora Duncan (1877-1927), and the phenomenology of religion and dance authored by the Dutch phenomenologist, theologian, and historian of religion, Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890-1950), in order to argue that "dance" is a valuable resource for developing theories and methods in the study of religion that move beyond belief-centered, text-driven approaches. By setting the work of Duncan and van der Leeuw in the context of the emergence of the field of religious studies, this article not only offers conceptual tools for appreciating dance as a medium of religious experience and expression, it also plots a trajectory for the development of a theory of religion as practice and performance. Such a theory will benefit scholars eager to attend more closely to the role of bodily being in the life of "religion."

Let the Bones Dance: Embodiment and the Body of Christ

An innovative work of embodiment theology, this book explores the disembodied ethos of Mainline Protestantism through an Incarnational framework. Three experiences that many women have--rape, pregnancy, and motherhood, are windows into more general characteristics of embodied life: tragedy, relationality, and ambiguity. The text explores how feeling as a radically physical mode can elicit body language that can create more space for bodies in both theology and practice. The second half of the book invites the church as the Body of Christ, toward a new vitality kindled by creating more space for bodies to testify to both the pain and the promise of human life.

Biblical Performance Criticism: The Almost, But Not Quite, Transubstantiation of Performance Studies into Religious Studies

2017

Citing this paper Please note that where the full-text provided on King's Research Portal is the Author Accepted Manuscript or Post-Print version this may differ from the final Published version. If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections.

Performing the Sacred: Christian Representation and the Arts Series, Studies in Religion and the Arts, Volume 20, Brill, 2023

2022

What does 'performance' mean in Christian culture? How is it connected to rituals, dramatic and visual arts, and the written word? Performing the Sacred: Christian Representation and the Arts explores both the meaning of re-presentation and the role of performance within the Christian tradition between arts and drama. The essays in this book demonstrate that the idea of performance was central to Christian theology and that—from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern era—it became a device through which people saw, prayed, preached, wrote, imagined, officiated rites, celebrated cults, and practiced devotions. Seen that performance is a habitus within Christianity, performing the sacred does not just mean representing it, but rather enacting it in a tangible, visible and involved way.

Dancing Faith: Narrative and Embodiment in American Evangelical Dance

In Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City, Judith Hamera explores concert dance and amateur practices in Los Angeles as sites of the confluence of gender, race, class, and culture in urban communities. Hamera asserts that aesthetics in general and dance techniques in particular can be framed as practices of everyday urban life that shape and are shaped by the processes of building dancing communities. In a similar fashion, scholars of American religion are exploring the ways in which religious communities employ narrative and embodied strategies as co-constructive and mutually dialogic producers of particular kinds of religious communities. This presentation gathers the strands of inquiry in dance and religious studies to explore the construction of meaning in American evangelical Christian dance communities. To that end, this presentation will examine the narrative and embodied strategies of a religious university dance ensemble to demonstrate the ways in which a community emerges from the convergence of narrative and embodied practices at the confluence of faith and art making. Finally, this presentation asks what this type of approach to studying dance does for the field: What kinds of meanings are produced/enabled through an inquiry that combines narrative and embodied approaches? What are the advantages and/or limitations to such an approach?

Dancers of Incarnation: From Embodied Prayer to Embodied Inquiry

Théologiques, 2017

In poetic, sensuous and visceral language this article explores how one liturgical dance artist, whose work as a dancer and educator was centered in dance and theology for decades was informed by an incarnational theology to break open a field of embodied inquiry now situated outside the field of theological studies. The article is in itself a dance consisting of five movements which trace the journey of a liturgical dance artist from theology to doxology, embodied prayer and embodied inquiry to dancing in nature as a cathedral. Here in creating and performing site-specific work in the natural world, all of living and being is an embodied expression of spirit. Attention is given to the Biblical foundation of bodily expression and wisdom, moving to the fields of arts-based research rooted in phenomenology and curriculum theory to open up an embodied and poetic scholarship. Here writing is artistic and scholarly, personal and universal, evoking a physicality through the senses where connections between the holy and ordinary are honoured. Dance, movement and the body are rooted in incarnational and poetic expression and represent a philosophy through the flesh where physicality and spirituality are deeply intertwined.

Mirrors of the Dance": Finding the Interplay Between the Static and the Dynamic in Biblical Ritual and Ancient Near Eastern Iconography

2012

Action is an important element in ritual and refers to the interplay of ritual objects/participants in space and time which results in the performance of the ritual itself (cf. Klingbeil2007:18). While both biblical ritual texts and ANE iconography depicting religious/ritual activities describe a dynamic, action-oriented reality, both are in fact static snapshots of an ancient reality or concept. Within the thematic framework of this particular session of the Ritual in the Biblical World consultation, this paper tries to look for an interface between ritual and iconographic studies by focusing upon the interaction between the dynamic and the static. The two key questions under discussion are: (1) How does a ritual text vis-a-vis an iconographic image reflect the interaction between the static and the dynamic? (2) Is there a hermeneutical overlap between the two fields that could mutually enhance the interpretive process(es)? The raw data used to interact with these questions is take...