Dancing to Transform

How Concert Dance Becomes Religious in American Christianity

Emily Wright

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781789382839
• eBook ISBN: 9781789383287
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

In response to a scarcity of writings on the intersections between dance and Christianity, Dancing to Transform examines the religious lives of American Christians who, despite the historically tenuous place of dance within Christianity, are also professional dancers. Emily Wright details how these dancing Christians transform what they perceive as secular professional by transforming concert dance into different kinds of religious practices in order to express individual and communal religious identities. Through a multi-site, qualitative study of four professional dance companies, Wright explores how religious and artistic commitments, everyday lived experience and varied performance contexts influence and shape the approaches of Christian professional dancers to creating, transforming and performing dance. Subsequently, this book provides readers with a greater awareness and appreciation for the complex interactions between American Christianity and dance. This study, in turn, delivers audiences a richer, more nuanced picture of the complex histories of these Christian, dancing communities and offers more fruitful readings of their choreographic productions.

1

Making Christian Movements: Differentiation and Adaptation in Christianity from the Patristic Era to the Middle Ages

I’m standing with the members of a newly formed dance ministry ensemble facing an audience of familiar faces in the casual, auditorium-style sanctuary of my church. The chairs have been shifted to create space in front of the stage for our special presentation. Our group wears loose black pants and long-sleeved blouses with wide collars. Although the costumes feel dowdy to me, our ministry team leader assures us that they look nice and, more importantly, they are modest which is essential for dancing in church. I focus my gaze up and beyond the congregation as the music of a well-known worship song begins. I’m used to orienting my focus this way from my modern dance training. In those instances, focusing beyond the onlookers serves to imbue the dancing with a sense of earnestness and reverence for the art of dance (and to keep young dancers from becoming distracted by family members in the audience). In this case, our focus serves to convey to the congregation that we are not here to entertain them. Instead, our focus invites congregants to look with and through us, past our dancing bodies toward God, the receiver of our devotion. As the lyrics to the song begin, I stretch my arms wide, palms open and extended. I circle my arms and head in coordination with the words “let us sing.” I bend deeply from the waist, inclining my upper body forward on “mountains bow down.” As I launch myself into the air, I sense the unyielding concrete beneath thin, industrial carpet. Performing this dance will give me my first case of shin splints. After the service, many congregants will approach our team to tell us how our dancing “ministered to them,” enabling them to envision more expansive possibilities for their own worship. These comments confirm for me that our dancing was successful. At the same time, I wonder about my own experience of the dance. Focused as I was on counts, phrasing, unison, I didn’t feel the qualities of expansive, open-hearted abandon I sometimes feel in congregational worship. Shouldn’t my dancing feel like worship for me too?

For scholars shaped by post-Enlightenment conceptions of religion as belief in theological truth claims, it can be difficult to grasp the notion of a religion constituted by practice. Yet, for the first 300 years of Christianity, no systematic theology existed. Communities of believers were diverse and widely scattered; they often met in private homes that restricted the size of their gatherings while offering new opportunities for women’s participation and leadership. Many early Christians also lived in urban environments beset by food insecurity, fear of violence, and contagious plagues. Further, as Margaret Miles reminds us, early Christians

[…] largely shared the worldview and social world of their neighbors. Polarizations of “Christian” and “pagan” obscure the fact that Christians were Romans. They participated fully in Roman culture and economic life; they were susceptible, like their neighbors, to epidemic disease and the anxieties and excitements of city life.

(2005: 10)

Participation in practices – rather than belief systems – gave early Christians an effective means to collectively perceive themselves as a dwelling for the Incarnation, the mystery of a God who becomes a bodily self, thereby transforming them into bodily selves who are united with God, the “Body of Christ.”¹ At the same time, the role of dance (when, where, why, and how) in Christian practice was continually contested by church leaders who at once recognized the efficacy of bodily movement to generate strong religious communities and also feared the potential power of those movements to disrupt the very structures they helped to create. Despite a dearth of descriptions, a picture emerges of early Christianity as an eclectic assemblage of movement patterns adapted from Greco-Roman and Jewish traditions, including ecstatic dances, choral dances, and circle dances.

Greco-Roman influences

Greco-Roman perspectives on bodies and bodily movement were complex and sometimes contradictory. Under the influence of philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, Greek and Roman intellectuals conceptualized the material world of the body as an imperfect reflection of it’s ideal, or true, essence as it exists in the immaterial as soul, mind, or reason.² In this configuration, the body is incidental (at best) or detrimental (at worst) to the realization of the ideal. Thus, the ideal body is one that is disciplined and controlled so as to inhibit distractions in the pursuit of the soul. Miles observes that this view of the body infused the earliest Christian writings, informing approaches “aimed not only at converting the mind to Christian beliefs, but also at Christianizing specific practices bodies hitherto understood as owned by the devil” (2005: 18). In other words, despite the implicit hierarchy of spiritual and physical realms, what Christian bodies did and how they did it was just as important, if not more so, than what Christians believed.

Despite disapproval from intellectual elites, ecstatic dances – which emphasized spontaneous movements intended to culminate in altered states of consciousness – were popular among the lower classes, especially those performed in celebration of the Greek god, Dionysus. Participants in these dances (predominantly women) would leave domestic cares behind and escape to the surrounding countryside, where they would dress in animal skins, toss their hair, and shout the name of Dionysus until they entered a “possession trance” (Ehrenreich 2007: 35). As citizens of religiously pluralistic ancient Rome, it is highly probable that early converts to Christianity had experienced the collective effervescence of ecstatic dance and understood on a visceral (if not conceptual) level its significance in personal and communal transformation.

While many early Christian theologians expressed concern that ecstatic dancing might devolve into idol worship, they tended to look favorably upon another popular Greek form, the choral dance. Choral dances emphasized the execution of ordered movements reflecting aesthetic values of “visual harmony, aural concord, rhythmic grace, creative spontaneity, and profound insight into the visible and invisible gods” (Miller 1986: 29). Many, including Plato, likened choral dances to the cosmic dance of the universe, a combination of circular and labyrinthine traveling patterns reflecting the revolutions of celestial bodies and the juxtapositions and intersections of the zodiac. Further, the commentaries of Church fathers suggest that “pagan” ecstatic dances could be effectively converted to Christian choral dances, as in this passage from second century Clemente of Alexandria:

Come, O madman, not leaning on the thyrsus, not crowned with ivy; throw away the mitre, throw away the fawn-skin; come to your senses […] This is the mountain beloved of God, not the subject of tragedies like Cithæron, but consecrated to the dramas of the truth – a mount of sobriety, shaded with forests of purity; and there revel on it not the Mænades […] but the daughters of God, the fair lambs, who celebrate the holy rites of the Word, raising a sober choral dance. The righteous are the chorus; the music is a hymn of the King of the universe […] If it is your wish, be also initiated; and you shall join the choir along with angels around the unbegotten and indestructible and the only true God, the Word of God, raising the hymn with us.

(Wilson 2017: n.pag., emphasis added)

Rather than intellectual assent to religious dogma or creeds, Clemente advocated for the reformulation of ecstatic dances into sober Christian choral dances as a means to declare affinity with and enact belief in Christianity.

Jewish influences

It seems likely that early Christians’ circle dances drew inspiration from similar Hebrew dances. While early Christians may have shared the worldviews and social world of their Greco-Roman neighbors, many were also Jews, and Judaism was (and continues to be) a significant conversation partner in Christianity’s process of self-definition. Early Jewish sensibilities demonstrated a sense of respect for the inherent goodness of the body and a confidence that the totality of human beings – body, mind, and spirit – reflect the wholeness of God (Ingber 2011: 8). While the Hebrew bible does include injunctions against dancing, especially when it leads to the worship of other gods,³ an appreciation for and celebration of the body is overwhelmingly reflected in the number and variety of dances that appear in ancient Hebrew texts.

There are at least eleven different words used in the Hebrew bible to describe a rich variety of activities, including processions, circle dances, ecstatic dances, celebratory dances, and dances to commemorate rites of passage, such as circumcision, marriage, and death (Oesterley 2002). For example, W.O.E. Oesterley observes that the words kārar, pāzaz, and rāqad used in 2 Samuel 14–16 indicate an exuberate whirling, leaping, and skipping dance performed by David and the Israelites as they process before the Ark of the Covenant (2002: 45–46). When translated literally, the words shachah and yadah, which are typically translated as “worship” and “praise” respectively, have kinesthetic meanings. Angela Yarber notes that the word yadah is more accurately translated as “to confess with outstretched arms” (2013: 3). The literal translation of shachah is even more striking. Yarber explains:

Shachah can be translated literally as “to bow, sink down, to depress, to bow down, to prostrate oneself, to worship, to adore.” The verb occurs in the Hithpael, the reflexive stem, which indicates that the action performed is reciprocated; as one bows down to God, God bows down in return.

(2013: 3)

The English translation of the words yadah as “praise” and shachah as “worship” obscures the bodily significance of these terms. Exegetical analysis reveals the kinesthetic meanings embedded in these words, thus demonstrating that the ancient Israelites understood worship as a collection of bodily movement patterns shared by human worshippers and God as a means to create and sustain life-enabling, reciprocal relationship.

The hymn of the dance

While early Christian dances were not distinctly different from the Jewish and Greco-Roman ones surrounding it, they were beginning to develop distinctly different theological meanings for Christian communities. This is exemplified in the intriguing account of the “hymn of the dance” a circular choral dance depicted in the apocryphal Acts of John. While canonical accounts portray this event as a shared meal followed by a symbolic rite,⁴ the Acts of John describes it as a transformative dance:

[Jesus] assembled us all and said, “Before I am delivered to [the Romans], let us sing a hymn to the Father […]” So he told us to form a circle, holding one another’s hands, and himself stood in the middle and said, “Answer ‘Amen’ to me.”

So he began to sing a hymn and to say, “Glory be to thee, Father.”

And we circled round him and answered him, “Amen.”

(cited in Bowe 1999: 83)

After the introductory prose that relates his instructions and an opening doxology, Jesus recites a series of antithetical parallelisms, such as “I will flee, and I will remain. I will adorn, and I will be adorned. I will unite, and I will be united” (1999: 85). After each invocation, his disciples reply, “Amen.” Barbara Bowe observes that this structure creates an “antiphonal echo [that] binds the voice of the leader with the voices of the respondents so that they merge into one voice” (1999: 92). As they create and become patterns of call and response, circling and encircled, Jesus and his followers cultivate sensory experiences of union (the disciples with one another) and communion (the disciples with Jesus).

In the midst of the hymn, Jesus exhorts his followers: “[The one] who does not dance does not know what happens” (1999: 85). In other words, it is the dancing that makes their union/communion possible and also enables the dancers to perceive it as it occurs. Those who join the dance create kinetic images that empower them to understand Jesus’ teachings, share in his experiences of suffering and triumph, and become his agents in the world. Although scholars believe that the hymn of the dance was widely circulated during the second and third centuries, the choral dance was eventually excluded from the canon in favor of the story recounting a communal meal. From that point on the Eucharist – a ceremonial blessing of bread and wine – became the centerpiece of Christian worship. However, the configuration of the circle and the call-and-response pattern continues to reappear in Christian worship (Methodist ring shout, Chapter 2) and, eventually, in contemporary Christian choreography (Ballet Magnificat! in Chapter 4 and Ad Deum Dance Company in Chapter 5).

The orans posture

Another example of Christian movement patterns emerging from the surrounding culture is the orans figure, an image that pervaded early Christian art. Reita Sutherland observes that images of (often veiled) female figures with raised hands appeared regularly across the ancient Mediterranean (2013: 22). For example, the Greek adorans was often associated with funerary rites, while the Roman pietas signified filial devotion (2013: 24). Early Christians associated their version, the orans figure, with the posture of Christ on the cross. Textual evidence confirms that variations of the orans posture were performed – as well as depicted – by early Christians (2013: 40). By adopting this posture during prayer, Christians enacted their radical claim in the life and death of the divine Christ. In so doing, they reoriented a religious ritual for the dead and reorganized filial devotion as subordinate to the central devotion one owed to God. At the same time, by enacting the paradoxical postures of divinity and humility, early Christians awakened patterns that could enable them to embrace the possibilities of persecution and martyrdom.

The Middle Ages: Dancing dominion and diversity

Dancing evolved over the course of the Middle Ages amid complex negotiations for religious and political power. These circumstances, initiated by the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine in the fourth century, had implications for where, how, and what forms of dance appeared as Christian. Jeanne Halgren Kilde observes that “Constantine’s conversion and granting of official status to Christianity imbued the religion with a new sociopolitical legitimacy and the emperor himself with a n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Making Christian Movements: Differentiation and Adaptation in Christianity from the Patristic Era to the Middle Ages
• 2. American Christianity from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century
• 3. Dancing as American and/or Christian in the Twentieth Century
• 4. “Let Us Praise His Name with Dancing”: Ballet Magnificat! and the Transformation of Concert into Church
• 5. Servant Artists: Ad Deum Dance Company and the Transformation of Suffering
• 6. Befriending the Both/And: Dishman + Co. Choreography and the Transformation of the Choreographic Process
• 7. Dancing Divine Love: Karin Stevens Dance and the Transformation of the Spiritual Journey
• Conclusion: Spiraling Outward in a Post-Christian World
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Backcover