Dancing as Transformational Knowing in Christian Faith: “Revelations” with Fourfold Knowing Event by James E. Loder

This paper is specific for responding to the theme: "The embodied artist; the artist as text"

In recent years, various scholars have investigated the incorporation of dances and movements in Christian worship, past and present, arguing that dance has always been one of the significant elements in Christian liturgy. Nevertheless, the research has mainly focused on worship and liturgical dances. Some of them focus on arguing for the importance of dance in worship and liturgical practices through biblical, theological, and historical evidence. Some of them focus on discussing the types and forms of dance used in liturgy. These studies analyze or construct models to interpret Christian Dance practices. Some scholars argue that dances can be understood as symbolic movements, that offer Christians an embodied experience in the Christian community and the congregation. Nevertheless, less attention is paid to analyzing the implication of dance in Christian religious practices from a theological perspective. How can dance, an embodied aesthetic art form, provide a theological knowing experience? How can dance contribute to spiritual transformation in the Christian faith? Although there exist papers that argue for a relationship between dancing and the relationality of humans, researchers are still largely working on a coherent account of how dance deepens spirituality and strengthens relationality among humans.

As an initial attempt to fill this research gap, this paper conducts a case analysis of dance from the theoretical apparatus of James E. Loder's relational theology, demonstrating that dance indeed enriches the process of theological knowing. “Revelations”, a choreographic masterpiece created by American choreographer Alvin Ailey in the early 1960s, serves as the study case for this investigation. It was said to be one of the most significant dance pieces emblematic of the black culture in the America of the 1960s. In this piece, there are a lot of Christian elements. Various scholars have investigated how this dance piece reflects the Christian faith in black culture, suggesting that the dance presents spiritual liberation from the context of American black people in the 1960s. “Revelations” also involves communication and interaction among various elements, like dancers’ bodies, audiences, environment, cultural ideology, and even the Divine Spirit, in an embodied and dynamic process.

Dance is a communicative activity with a complex web of interactions among different humans and non-human objects, such as dancers, audience, stage, music, choreographic ideas, and the wider culture. In this study, dancing in “Revelation” will be seen as an “assemblage” under New Materialism. New materialism is a cross-disciplinary framework being discussed recently, indicating a new understanding of matter compared to traditional materialism. New Materialism is a renewed and critical understanding of the ontology of matter, suggesting that matter is not static but “lively”, “active”, “dynamic”, and “agentive”. In new materialism, non-tangible objects can also be seen as containing the characteristics of matter, like movement, culture, and art. In new materialism, two main concepts will be mentioned in this research. The first one is “agency”. The second is “assemblage”. For agency, in New Materialism, the idea of agency can apply to a lot of non-human elements, which is different from the traditional understanding of agency in human subjectivity. The emphasis is on the dynamic and interacting relationship of different agencies in the world, including physical and non-physical objects. Human agency is only an integral part of various agencies. This interaction leads to the second concept, assemblage. Assemblage can be seen as a collective understanding of the interaction among different agents, in which assemblage indicates a distributed view of agency. The ideas of agency and assemblage in New Materialism show that human being, including their bodies matter, contains a relationality to interact with the environment and other beings, which transforms the understanding of the human being itself and other beings. Through the lens of New Materialism, in “Revelations”, the agency is distributed among and demonstrated by the various living and nonliving “actors” in the whole dance. All these agents, including dancers, audiences, stage, lighting, music, and the wider culture, form and negotiate an assemblage.

The dance “Revelation” is further examined under James E. Loder’s framework of Fourfold Knowing Event in theological knowing, which includes the four dimensions in theological knowing, the living world, the self, the void, and the Holy. Through interaction in these four dimensions, Loder suggested theological knowing is a transformational event in which humans transform the central value of the Christian faith with conviction. James’s framework shows a strong emphasis on relationality in different agencies, including object and non-object, the world, the human self, and the Divine. The idea of Loder shows a strong potential in having a dialogue with aesthetic art activity, which is an embodied, dynamic, and relational process, in demonstrating how art activity could contribute to theological knowing. Therefore, this paper is going to conduct a dialogue between the theological framework of the Fourfold Knowing Event and the dance content of “Revelation”. This research indicates that dancing in “Revelation” is a process of transformational knowing, which involves encountering the Holy Spirit with the Human spirit to overcome the ruptured understanding of the living world and the self. This research provides insights into enriching the understanding of the relationship between dancing with theological experience in the Christian faith. The research shows the contribution demonstrating how dancing is a significant and potential activity for experiencing transformation in the Christian faith. Through dance, Christians can potentially experience the relationalities among the various actors, including the self, other humans, the world, and God, and can thus experience spiritual transformation.