The Embodied Artist and The Artist as Text

This session considers the embodied knowledge of the artist and artwork. Embodied art in papers presented include dance, theatre, and literature, with a discussion of theological and religious discovery inherent in the embodied act of creating art. Papers deal specifically with Cormac MacCarthy, Religion, and Theatre; Dancing as Transformational Knowing in Christian Faith; Queer Sacramentality in Paul Taylor’s "Beloved Renegade"; Embodied Knowledge and Tibetan Buddhist Tantric Dance (Cham);  Embodying the “Correspondent Subjective” within Religion and Literature. A small theatrical performance is included.    The first paper draws from the work of William Robert (Unbridled: Studying Religion in Performance), Cia Sautter (The Performance of Religion: Seeing the sacred in the Theatre), Mark C. Taylor (After God), Talal Asad (Formations of the Secular) and other scholars, this paper offers a firsthand record of the experience of adapting and directing the first staged adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's final novel Stella Maris. This adaptation also includes roughly 20 minutes of original film (in part inspired by McCarthy's penultimate novel The Passenger, which overlaps with Stella Maris) shot on location by the director (who is also the author and presenter of this paper) and a small team in Montana, Arizona, the Yukon, and the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota. Those in attendance will learn about how adapting, directing, and performing the play revealed powerful and subtle insights at the intersection of performance, philosophy, and religion.    The second paper investigates how the dance piece “Revelations,” a choreographic masterpiece created by American choreographer Alvin Ailey in the early 1960s, demonstrates a theological knowing process under the framework of the Fourfold Knowing Event by James E. Loder, a practical theologian. In this study, the dance “Revelations” is analyzed as an “assemblage” under New Materialism, which presented a distributed view of agency. From this, the relationality between the living and non-living actors, like dancers, audience, stage environment, music, and culture, also emerges. This paper argues that the dance performance in “Revelations” facilitates a theologically transformational knowing process that helps people encounter the Holy Spirit in the face of the void constituted by the conflict between the living world and the self. This paper thus seeks to enrich scholarship by probing the relationship between dance, an aesthetic art form, and theological knowing through the close study of a twentieth-century masterpiece.   The third paper looks at Tibetan Buddhist tantric ritual dances called *cham* to consider how they are co-realized through the interplay of dance manuals called *cham yig* and through the bodies of dancing monks to think about how physical acts of religious piety can be studied in a way that considers both written and embodied textual traditions. It argues that the dancing body becomes an implement that inscribes in space the text of ritual choreography, the language of the divinities.  How can contemporary theories and methods in the study of religion help us think about the body as a legitimate site of knowledge production and dissemination? How can we conduct social and cultural analyses not through disembodied intellectual knowledge but through the integration of embodied religious practices?   The fourth paper examines Paul Taylor’s "Beloved Renegade," a modern dance choreographed to the music of Francis Poulenc’s "Gloria." Even though the words and music are liturgical, Taylor’s choreography is based on the life of Walt Whitman, a poet who largely eschewed traditional religion. Building on this unexpected combination, this paper examines the conversation between the liturgical text/music and the choreography in this piece as an example of the Catholic sacramental imagination. The "queerness" of the piece transforms a prayer of praise and petition into a celebration of incarnational theology.   The final paper explores the implications of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s view that both scripture and literature can serve as mediums that deeply affect and orient readers’ postures of attention and their ways of navigating within a wider world of concern. Critiquing the bibliolatrous, Coleridge advocates for a projective method of reading that enables reciprocal exchange, one where subjective experience becomes objectively available through its correspondence with the figures of Scripture, and where objective truths can become subjectively realized. After focusing on how and why Coleridge’s model of scriptural reading works, I then consider what this model can illuminate about religion and literature more generally. A key consideration will be how the dynamics of Coleridge’s model relate to a broader trajectory of participatory ritual, scripture, and rhetoric that can traced back to debates concerning theurgy in Neoplatonism and forward to the possibilities that have emerged within various strands of contemporary Ecopoetics and Ecotheology.