The Embodied Artist and The Artist as Text

This 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 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.

Paul Taylor’s "Beloved Renegade" is 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.