Embodied Performance

Mutuality, Embrace, and the Letter to Rome

Sarah Agnew

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781725257849, 9781725257856
• eBook ISBN: 9781725257863
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Embodied Performance presents a methodology by which performer-interpreters can bring their intuitive interpretations to the scholarly conversations about biblical compositions. It may not be comfortable, for scholarship is out of practice in listening to emotion and intuition. It may not be the only way to bring the fullness of human meaning making into scholarly discussions. It is a beginning, as Sarah Agnew, storyteller and scholar, places herself as the subject and object under examination, observing her practice as a biblical storyteller making meaning through embodied performance, and develops a coherent method rigorously tested with an Embodied Performance Analysis of Romans. Follow Sarah's story as she searches within Biblical Performance Criticism for such a method, before determining the need to strike out in a new direction from within an already innovative field. All biblical scholars are complex human beings, making meaning through their embodiment, their emotions, their embeddedness in community. Embodied Performance Analysis offers a way to attend to and incorporate the full range of human meaning making in our engagement with biblical compositions, for richer discussion closer to the intent of the compositions themselves.

1

Performance Interpretation

The Search for Method

The Beginning of the Story

As I regularly performed compositions from the Bible for various gatherings in the church, I had noticed that by embodying and performing the Bible, I was discerning meaning intuitively, physically, emotionally. This felt to me a richer process than the biblical scholarship I encountered that attempted a disembodied rationality to claim enduring meaning in the text. Surely the field of biblical studies could benefit from such holistic meaning-making and interpretations of compositions which are again widely acknowledged to be intended for holistic reception and interpretation?

In order to bring such insights as I was discovering, from performance into scholarship, I felt I needed a methodology to ensure accountability, integrity, and repeatability between performance-interpreter practitioners. Biblical Performance Criticism (BPC) was becoming an established approach, so I initially looked there for a methodology. But I found something else; BPC described itself as a paradigm shift that sought to identify and understand the oral and performed origins of biblical writings, using performance today to help re-enact original performance situations.1

In Chapters 2 and 3, I will describe what I found in BPC, and how I develop certain features and explore some of the questions raised by its practitioners, with the Embodied Performance method. For example, Rhoads asks how performance might “bring to the fore the emotive dimensions of meaning and persuasion? And how can we integrate critical thinking as a means to assess appropriate emotional responses?”2 Embodied Performance Analysis (EPA) will directly engage with such questions. Another question from Rhoads is, “As scholars who are also critics of performance, what categories/criteria might we develop as a basis to reflect upon and to critique performance as interpretation?”3 EPA may also reframe these emerging questions. For example, the Embodied Performance method will move beyond critiquing performance to instead use performance to “critique,” or interpret, biblical compositions.

I observe in Narrative Criticism what I term the “storyteller’s Biblical Performance Criticism.” My own beginning in this scholarly project began with Narrative. After conducting a Narrative Analysis of Esther 4, I posed questions of the text in preparation for performance.4 I noted the way movement helps establish proximity and identify voices as Hatach crosses the courtyard between Esther and Mordecai (Est 4:8–16), somewhat disappearing as a mediator as the narrator ceases to mention him and the performer represents only Esther and Mordecai, to give the audience the sense of the two speaking face to face, rather than through a third party.5 Elsewhere, I have written on reception theory and audience studies in reflection on my practice as a storyteller, articulating the influence of audiences on my performance choices: children influencing the omission of the harsher lines in a story of slave trade, or a twentieth-century song shaping reception of a Psalm of exile for an audience for whom the song is cultural capital.6 I also began to write reflections identifying choices I had made in particular performances of biblical portions for worship gatherings before or as a sermon.7

This self-reflection on my storytelling practice helped me to articulate my experience. My body was showing me meaning in a composition as I inhabited it. My emotions were showing me meaning as I chose songs to sing. My audiences were showing me meaning as I sought to enable their reception of biblical compositions, the sacred writings of our community of faith. It was time to further examine my practice as a storyteller and more fully understand the way in which I was working as a “performer-interpreter,” developing understanding of the meaning of biblical compositions as I mediated them for reception in live, embodied performance.

The Setting

In order to carry out this exploration of my practice as a storyteller or performer-interpreter (as I will now describe myself, bringing together the roles of storyteller and scholar), and to develop a methodology that would bring insights from performed interpretations for audiences today into scholarship, I identified Scotland as an ideal location. Scotland has a vibrant culture of appreciation for and encouragement of the art and craft of oral storytelling.8 Developing a new methodology was one element of the overall development of my own professional art and craft as a performer, and being situated within such a storytelling e...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Prelude
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Performance Interpretation
• Chapter 2: The Search Begins
• Chapter 3: The Search Continues
• Chapter 4: A New Beginning
• Chapter 5: Performance Interpretation of Romans
• Chapter 6: Critical Reflection
• Chapter 7: A Story of Mutual Indwelling
• Appendix A
• Bibliography