In Praise of Empty Churches

Reviews in Religion & Theology, 2017

This study uses theological and philosophical thinking along side theatre and performance studies to investigate sacred theatre and latterly sacred performance. The study looks to theatres origins in an attempt to extrapolate that which constitutes the sacred and following from René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred (1979), looks for the origin of this ‘desire for being’. Man’s nature as physical (body/mind) and metaphysical (soul/spirit) alongside the impact this has on theatre and performance is explored; with the study attempting to outline the significance of man’s two/three part nature and the manifestation of this desire for a fullness of being in theatre and performance of a sacred nature. The study focuses on the quintessential ingredient of theatre and performance: the relationship between actor or performer and audience and identifies the actor and performer as a priest, an intercessor for the audience. By acknowledging the transformative power of this relationship and assessing its importance for the sacred the study dissects and identifies sacred theatre as a means to presence a fullness of being and sacred performance as an introversion of this desire for fullness in an embodied absence. One that signals towards an emptiness or void as a means to allow the audience to explore their nature and experience the sacred. Various examples of contemporary performance are used to evidence and critique the investigation and the study concludes by assessing to what extent theatre and performance laicise the sacred; asking what is required of an audience to access the sacred without the presence of an actor or performer as priest.

Performing the Secular, 2017

In the early modern era, performance provided an instrument for the scrutiny of religious authenticity, as confessional instruments were deployed to test for proofs of piety. The condition of the soul (or as the secularist might prefer it, the 'conscience') could be read via a semiotics of the body, with its rich syntax and vocabulary of expressive gesture and demeanor. Of course, it had long been presumed that religious convictions would necessarily make themselves manifest through embodied performance: that is in itself no new phenomenon. Yet consequent to the Reformation, there is a distinct traffic between secular and religious domains with regard to considerations about persuasions and performance. By the seventeenth century acting theory begins to be established, and arises in complex ways from the theological debates of the previous centuries. There is, moreover, an emerging sense of 'nation' as a geographical locus of a set of beliefs and practices. This paper considers the processes within theological and philosophical debates about belief; and how they intersect with new European conceptions of locality. Secularism is, in ways, an attempt to generate an authentic personhood that can reconcile questions of geography and conviction. Somewhat ironically, secularism itself becomes subject to the codes governing performance and authenticity in ways not wholly dissimilar to those that had marked the sincerity of the believer. The implications of this complex of beliefs and practices become profound across the following centuries. The revitalized significance of this 'territorialisation' of faiths and the staging of secularism surely has significance for our understanding of the recent displacement and geographic relocation of vast communities. But let us begin our enquiry by looking at the early modern emergence of a set of persuasions. Hamlet is depending on a set of givens when he asserts: "I have that within which passes show" (Act I Sc ii: 85). The Cartesian modeling of the dual person in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is here hypothesized as a split between inside and outside. During the dangerous years of religious crisis, it became natural to consider the inside as a site of authentic and enclaved truths, while the manifest outside (with its address to an other) is necessarily faux. Within these discursive habits, how might faith be staged? Could it be represented through an idiom of theatrics, drawn on to represent a 'true belief?' Should the outside be relied upon to represent the inside? And would the same instruments be deployed in the staging of secularism? In exploring this riddle, my paper considers a pair of weighty terms that begin to define an emerging set of discourses that cross between religious and secular domains of representation. Sincerity and hypocrisy, are dynamic and productive ideas that cross back and forth, drawing the secular and the sacred realms closer together. More specifically, the early modern history of performance makes evident a doubling of discourses across theatre arts and religious piety. My discussions will explore the ways in which such conceptual

Religious Studies Review, 2014

This presentation originally included 15-minutes of video footage excerpting conversations with three female seminary students/performers preparing to act in a production of Space for God, a series of dramatic monologues which focus on the challenges and joys of Christian calling. The conversations are part of a research project on the effect of performance on spiritual formation. The names of the participants have been changed and all descriptions of their experiences have been included with full permission.

The focus of the article is about how a queer theological gaze affects both place and per- formance. It suggests that, through ritualized practises, one might be able to reimagine meaning for spaces and the bodies that inhabit them. This investigation is a kind of queer prophetic imagination in action. The article starts with a historical look at bathhouses from the 1960s and 1970s, and their impact on homosexual identity, while linking key theological thinkers to spatial theorists who suggest that people’s behaviours create, maintain, or challenge conceived notions of space. The article includes an exegesis of scripture by imposing a rereading of the Sodom and Gomorrah narrative onto the 1970s gay bathhouse, and by that, suggesting that the ritualized act of queer sex has the possi- bility of creating a kind of queer, sacred space.

Theatre Journal, 2018

2022

What does 'performance' mean in Christian culture? How is it connected to rituals, dramatic and visual arts, and the written word? Performing the Sacred: Christian Representation and the Arts explores both the meaning of re-presentation and the role of performance within the Christian tradition between arts and drama. The essays in this book demonstrate that the idea of performance was central to Christian theology and that—from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern era—it became a device through which people saw, prayed, preached, wrote, imagined, officiated rites, celebrated cults, and practiced devotions. Seen that performance is a habitus within Christianity, performing the sacred does not just mean representing it, but rather enacting it in a tangible, visible and involved way.

2006