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1
Prologue
Performing religion
I write this book because I see and hear the sacred all around me as a performer interested in religion and culture. Often I find this reality for me, and many others, is not a topic of discussion in theatre and performance studies, or even religious studies. While performance studies in religion is a growing field, and reviving discussion about religion in culture, I wanted to explore what I saw was missing is much of the literature that dealt with this topic. That is, examining how profoundly religion and values affect everything we do in life, not just rituals or acts that are considered obviously religious. We are always performing our religion, and that performance simply is amplified in theatrical performance. As a scholar, I knew theatre, dance, and the arts had attracted the attention of Rudolph Otto, Geradiaus Van Der Lieuw, Emile Durkheim, and then especially Martin Buber and Paul Tillich.1 Other scholarship seemed overly focused on specific non-Western cultures; while such focus may be necessary to avoid sweeping generalizations about religion, ritual, and theatre, the tendency may be to avoid discussion about how one might study religion and culture as a whole. Yet in a global, multicultural age, there seems to be a need to consider religion as performance, and reexamine the place of the arts and spirituality in a society, and especially Western society.
In making this statement, I have a broad interpretation of religion as one’s highest values and vision of a sacred reality that may or may not be tied to an organized religious tradition. Defining religion as dogma or belief alone seems far too narrow, given how people actually live. To my knowledge, no one has developed an all-encompassing definition of religion, and scholars like William Cantwell Smith, and Jonathan Z. Smith, and Tomoka Masuzawa even suggest it is a problematic term. However, I found my study of performance aided me in understanding how people act on what they value most, and how this is related to what many people would define as religion. In fact, some of the more effective textbooks I used in teaching about World Religions leaned toward anthropological and phenomenological methods, because these approaches considered how people actually practiced their most treasured values, and this then allowed for discussion of religion and culture.
I do have perhaps a unique perspective as a performer and researcher, and in keeping with feminist methodologies, recognize how my own story affects my view of academics. In sum, my fascination with the link between the performing arts and religion started in college, when a dance professor read a section from Rudolph Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, on a child spinning and dancing and thereby experiencing the numinous. I had long known that feeling myself when I danced, but would also experience it at times when watching a good performance. My favorite had always been Shakespeare, and I was eager to learn more about his dramas in my English classes. Sadly, I was not able to do so in the theatre department, as the classes were largely about dance and acting technique. Instead, I double-majored in English and Religion, while spending some significant time in dance and theatre classes. There, I found students and faculty suspicious of religion, and the standard line was that arts flourished once the Church no longer sponsored them. Religion was presented as the confining, censoring enemy of the arts, even though this was not true worldwide, or necessarily in modern culture. Ironically, it was the Religion department that let me explore my interests, and especially through the study of Judaism and mysticism.
Years later I attained a doctorate in Religion and the Arts combined with major methodologies in History of Religions from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. Exploring religion and spirituality through the arts was for the most part considered normal at GTU and in the San Francisco Bay area community. Perhaps because there was more exposure to a variety of religions, there was more understanding that it did not stop at a church or synagogue door. It made much sense to me from a Jewish perspective, where religion is not confined to a sanctuary but lived in society. As I began to teach classes on world religions, I also found the perspective extremely helpful for students, who were less concerned about what others believe and more interested in how people practice their religion.
After graduation, and attempting to find a teaching position, I soon discovered that GTU was a special place, and encountered many schools and departments that still tended to narrowly define religion as Bible and Theology, or universities that saw no need to teach about religion as an academic topic. Theatre departments were more open to World Dance and Theatre classes, and also performance studies, but religion was discussed in relation to Asian, Native American, or African traditions. My ability to deal with the Arts and Religion was not seen as a welcome addition to a department, or misunderstood as aesthetics or art history. I also encountered dance scholars who were angry that I conducted interdisciplinary scholarship, though they never really told me what prompted their hostility. In all, I found the attitude severely limited the discussion of religion and culture, as well as critical thinking about the practice of sacred values.
Thankfully, I was able to incorporate my training in performance studies in religion and the arts into classes I taught in various World Religions and even New Testament courses. I also developed and taught a course entitled Performance and Religion, which included ritual, theatre, and film study. Reviewing materials for the course, I found many in the theatre community unable to understand religion as a part of culture, and the tendency was to look only at what could decidedly be called “religion” as part of stage production. The approach avoided what seemed obvious to me, having studied anthropological and ethnographic approaches to religion; loosely paraphrasing Clifford Geertz’s definition, if religion is a set of symbols, transmitting a set of values, those symbols might be found in the various forms they take in culture. Perhaps it was too many years of studying dance in Judaism, or even stories, but it just seemed obvious to me that you didn’t need The Book of Mormon to have a play about religion. Performance studies, especially those of Richard Schechner, were much better at recognizing this reality than many theatre textbooks, but most of the film studies were very direct at explaining various approaches to understanding that culture is imbued with sets of value. Most referred to Tillich to explain religion as a part of culture, and in what ways it might be possible to examine this relationship.
Culture, spirituality, and history
In sharing my story, I mean to illustrate why I question how religious scholarship is presented in the University and in the classroom. I do not think theology is the sole focus of religion, and because it involves culture and values, it should be a subject of University study. Furthermore, it is a subject that may prove highly relevant to students, if related to today’s increasingly complex world, a world where individuals may pick and choose their sacred values, adopt a new religion, or create a practice outside the bounds of an organized religion. Given my experience as a performing artist as well as religious scholar, I also find great significance in the classic work of Paul Tillich on art, religion, and culture, and find it highly relevant for the study of religion in a multicultural age. The discussion is one that was perhaps lost in a post-modernist need to particularize the discussion of religion and culture so that the conversation seems to be fragmented and lost in the details.
Russell Re Manning provides an excellent explanation of Tillich’s early ideas about relating an individual’s experience to culture. He explains that Tillich perceived that “if culture as a whole is the expression of the totality of humanity’s creative self-interpretation, it is in art that the character of this self-interpretative activity becomes most clearly visible.” However, individuals are neither separate from culture, nor purely shaped by culture. So their “self-interpretation… inevitably embodies a response to the existential predicament of finitude,” and “art expresses the meaning of its particular culture or situation… art, in this interpretation, is indeed revelatory of its era” and “enables existential meaningfulness to be grasped.” Art aids in exploring what is truly important, and Re Manning explains that Tillich will later call these interpretations ‘ultimate concern’ or what matters most. In a secular if not pluralistic age, ultimate concern is a way of discussing religion while recognizing its place in culture outside the sanctuary, or even as a part of life for those with no religious traditions.2
In theory, there are numerous problems with Tillich’s concept of ultimate concerns, some of which I discuss in the first chapter. The same may be said of Tillich’s ideas on art, and Re Manning considers how he was elitist regarding types of art he qualified as religious in meaning or content. In a post-modern, pluralistic, and diverse society, it seems impossible to determine whether or not a painting or performance carries profound meaning for an individual, or even a culture a whole. And in fact, society may consist of many cultures interacting together, with even many cultures existing within one religion. However, the idea of ultimate concern and the revelatory nature of art makes great sense to students I’ve taught. Religion as ultimate concern allowed them to view theology in a new way, understanding that what you care about most was de facto your God or about your God. For atheists and students from non-theistic backgrounds, the concept made sense in terms of understanding their ethical principles as their “religion.” For all students, the concept also allowed them to study non-theistic traditions as religious practices, especially Buddhism and Chinese religions. More importantly, it created for them a concrete view of religion as a part of culture, and religion as a life practice rather than a dogma or creed. When it came to art, they also could relate well to Tillich’s basic ideas, as everyone had an experience of a performance, music, a painting, or a story that affected them or “spoke to them” greatly.
I find it important for religious and theatre studies to make sense to students and the public at large, and not be a dead and lifeless study without relevance for living in the modern world. So I have been less critical of modernists such as Tillich and Jewish thinker Martin Buber, whose theories are explored in this study. I find them actually much more helpful in dealing with the topic of religion and performance in culture than many post-modernist philosophic studies that seemed overly concerned with power and structure. For example, Judith Butler is an excellent scholar with keen insights on performance, but her best known theories presume entrapment of individuals in social structures. Post-colonial scholars are critical of this view, as it assumes no human autonomy and makes little sense for dealing with art and religion as agents of change. Art is often about creating new forms that challenge standard notions of reality. Challenges to norms might also be a process actually built into a religion, as a means of including prophetic voices. In contrast to a purely philosophic post-modernist view, ritual, anthropological, ethnographic, and even ethical studies tend to be more comprehensive in consideration of the relationship between religion and the arts. Having long dealt with the relationship between religion and the arts, Wilson Yates offers five points of relationship that suggest a multifaceted approach is appropriate. These points occur “when art reveals the character of a historical faith,” “when art is prophetic in its judgment of idolatry and injustice,” and finally when art is “a means of expressing the holy.…”3 Obviously some of Yates’s points of intersection deal with Christian theological categories, yet in detailed discussion of these points he notes the need for not only defined religious history, but the power and effect of the values and symbols system of a religion on a culture, the life of the community, its mythology, and the perspective of individual artists. His examples in the visual arts range from several works of medieval Christian art to Rembrandt’s portrait of Lucretia from a Roman legend, numerous modern expressionist sculptures, and Marc Chagall’s seemingly secular painting The Poet with the Birds. Yates notes that this painting of a young man lying in a field and looking up at birds in a tree is one that reminds us that “his own Jewish Hasidic theology informs such a view with its accent on the presence of God in the world woven in an understanding of the mystery of creation and its endless possibilities for making us whole.”4
Yates’s comments were made for a lecture at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and he dealt primarily with works on display at the museum. While he reminds the audience of the power of art to evoke a religious response among viewers, even in the public sphere, his remarks also point out some of the problems with Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, a topic of discussion for some studies of religion and performance. Theatre, after all, is often performed in a public space, or at least in front of an audience. However, several scholars mention that he presumes that religion is irrational, while philosophy is rational. Furthermore, Habermas seems to be pre-occupied with theology, missing the fact that religion shapes an individual’s and community’s view of the world. Russell T. McCutcheon notes that in limiting “the scale by which one studies these religious things” to individuals’ beliefs, there is a failure to “understand individual and social religious life, religious associations, religious experiences,… as well as inherently the practices and engagements of historical and contextualized human beings.…”5 In sum, people are not disembodied religious minds. It is not only what people think or believe about religion that matters, but also how they live out their vision of the world.
Tillich and Buber consider the vision of religion in a culture, and their work may still prove useful for asking questions about the arts and sacred values. I recall them in this study, as they do have much to share about performance and religion on stage, especially from the spectator’s view. Additionally, though they are theologically based, they also consider the social sphere of religion. Thereby they are far less concerned with restricting definitions of religion, and much more concerned with spirituality. I realize that some scholars outside religious studies may be less familiar with the classic and important work of these two modern thinkers. Yet Tillich’s and Buber’s insights allow for a more complex, socially relevant study of religion and performance as an active and important part of culture and the arts in particular.
While my frustration with the lack of interdisciplinary study on religion, theatre, and society may be personal, a continued rigid division between disciplines may have major consequences for education. Universitie...
