Dancing to Transform: How Concert Dance Becomes Religious in American Christianity

By Emily Wright

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: May 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781789383287

Emily Wright

Dr Emily Wright is the course director of the bachelor of design at Swinburne University of Technology. She lectures in communication design and design strategy. Her research focuses on packaging design, co-creation and design education. Her design practice career spans over 25 years with work in branding, packaging, publishing and web design in the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico and Australia. She holds a bachelor of science from the University of Cincinnati and a master’s and Ph.D. from Swinburne University. Contact: School of Design and Architecture, Swinburne University of Technology, 1 Alfred Street, Hawthorn, VIC 3122, Australia.

Book preview

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Dancing to Transform

Dancing to Transform

____________________________________________

How Concert Dance Becomes Religious in American Christianity

Emily Wright

First published in the UK in 2021 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2021 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2021 Intellect Ltd

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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

Acknowledgments

This book has been years in the making, and there are many people who have contributed to its realization. My parents Jay and Beverley Henderson first introduced me to both the worlds of dance and Christianity, and I cannot imagine my journey without their influence.

My appreciation of dance was shaped by the dedicated instruction of Irena Linn. Leann Dickson, Marc Arentsen, Lauri Worrill-Biggs, and Amy McIntosh deepened my understanding and introduced me to the complicated world of Christian dance. Thank you for your commitment to my education and training.

I am deeply grateful for the mentorship I received in the dance and religious studies departments at Arizona State University and for the encouragement of Mary Fitzgerald, Karen Schupp, Tisa Wenger, Tracy Fessenden, and, especially, Naomi Jackson, who first inspired me to explore dance and Christianity as a scholar.

The research that informed this book took place during my doctoral studies at Texas Woman’s University. I am indebted to Linda Caldwell, Claire Sahlin and Rosemary Candelario for their rigorous engagement with my writing and to my colleagues A’Keitha Carey, Ali Duffy, Merry Lynn Morris, Melonie Murray, Anisha Rajesh, and Mila Thigpen for their friendship and support.

This book would not have been possible without the generous contributions of my participants, including Kathy Thibodeaux, Randall Flinn, Elizabeth Dishman, and Karin Stevens. Thank you for your willingness to share this journey with me.

The readers and editors at Intellect Press, especially Helen Gannon and Mareike Wehner, have strengthened this manuscript in numerous ways. Thank you as well to the photographers who contributed images for the text and to my sister, Lydia Henderson, for creating the image for the cover design.

It is a great pleasure to acknowledge the critical contributions of Kimerer LaMothe. I first encountered LaMothe’s work during my studies at ASU, and her scholarship revolutionized the way I thought about dance and Christianity. She has since become a mentor and a friend. I am deeply grateful for her generosity as a scholar, her critical readings of my work, and her advice as I navigated this project.

The companionship of family and friends sustained me throughout the writing process. Thank you to Naphtali Beyleveld, Rachel Bomgaars, Miriam Lamar, Andrea Thornton, Keri Wright, and Grey Zachary. Megan Voos, talking to you was my writing reward. Thank you for being my carrot. To my students who inspired and challenged me, this book is for you.

Finally, to my husband Joshua and my sons, Benjamin and William, thank you for your patience, your encouragement, your enthusiasm, and your love. I am so glad that we belong to each other.

Introduction

Despite a distance of more than 30 years, the sensations arise easily, as if hovering just beneath the surface of my skin. My heart pounds and my mouth is dry. My stomach sinks as realization and dread wash over me. The music plays softly, and I recognize its tone and cadence as my cue to move. Hesitantly, I rise from my seat. My cheeks burn with embarrassment. I feel as if every eye is fastened on me, so I keep my gaze forward and down. Yet, as I begin to move, relief courses through me. I reach the front of the sanctuary and pause uncertainly. A small group has clustered in front of the stage, huddled in twos and threes. There are muffled sobs and the murmur of whispered prayers. An older woman catches my eye and smiles warmly at me. I promptly burst into tears. As she pats my back comfortingly, I sob out my sorrow and relief, familiar words of repentance and redemption on my lips.

Christianity has been a presence in my life as far as my memory goes. My parents converted to evangelicalism during its resurgence in the 1970s. Although my family’s financial and emotional instability meant that we frequently changed churches, I recognized familiar patterns among the various congregations we were a part of: a literalist interpretation of the bible, an emphasis on supernatural phenomena, praise music that blurs the boundaries between entertainment and worship, and a casual, come-as-you-are atmosphere. As the oldest of five children in a white, working-class family with histories of mental illness, addiction, and abuse, I was attracted to the sense of clarity and stability that Christianity seemed to offer. I often felt ashamed, overwhelmed, and isolated by my chaotic home life. Christianity gave me an intelligible framework to explain my suffering and provided relief through ongoing practices of self-reflection, repentance, and trust in a personal God. The regular rhythms of weekly church attendance, the ordered structure of the service, and the clear messages of right and wrong provided a useful container for my confusing (and often painful) childhood.

My experiences with dance served a similar function in my formative years. I began taking lessons in modern technique at the age of 8. My teacher was a former student of German expressionist dancer and choreographer Mary Wigman and American modern dance icon Martha Graham. A strict disciplinarian, she cultivated an atmosphere of rigor and reverence for dance. There was little variation in her classes, even as I advanced through the ranks of students: We began class by dancing away from the barre, an improvisational ritual often accompanied by a verbal prompt and music piped from an ancient record player in the corner. Then, we progressed through a series of floor, standing, and traveling exercises based on Graham technique. Class concluded with a respectful gesture of gratitude to our teacher.

While the ordered patterns that dance and Christianity generated in my childhood continued to compel me through my adolescence and young adulthood, I also glimpsed moments of individual expressivity that prefigured the ways in which my future self would diverge from these structures. My dance teacher always emphasized that dancers are creators as well as performers. Each year, my fellow students and I learned new approaches to making dances and presented our original compositions at a formal in-studio showing. At 9, I made my first dance using a self-selected series of action words. Push. I sink into a deep knee bend, shifting from side to side as my hands extend downward, following the path of gravity. Pull. I swoop in a circle and swing my arms back, gathering my energy for a slide to the floor. I hop up again. Melt. I thrust my torso forward as I slide face-first to the ground. At 12, I composed a dance inspired by a mask study. I glued green tulle streamers and plastic daisies to a silver hockey mask. The effect of this arrangement was unsettling, at once pastoral and other-worldly. The mask invited me to delight in these contrasts. I twirl in a circle, reveling in the sensation of my Medusa-like tresses fanning out around me. I crouch and spring, tilting my head up to offer the audience the best view of my mask. I curl to the ground, resolving into a watchful sleep. At 14, I collaborated with my classmates to create an ensemble work for our spring concert. My teacher brought a bolt of golden yellow fabric to the studio and cut it into different sizes and shapes so that each dancer had a distinct swatch to work with. One dancer winds her section into a rope that she twists around her body. Another holds her small scrap to her face in a gesture that suggests a handkerchief wiping away tears. I wrap my portion around me like a shawl, imagining myself as a pilgrim on a long journey. Our solos alternate with a unified walking pattern that winds through the space. As we walk, we gaze straight ahead, confronting our futures with the earnest solemnity of youth.

I distanced myself from my troubled family by becoming more involved in church, particularly the youth ministry.¹ During this phase of my upbringing, youth group gave me a sense of belonging I was unable to find elsewhere.² Our weekly meetings were an amplified version of a general church service. I stood swaying to the rhythm of upbeat praise music, my face lifted, arms out-stretched, as if reaching to embrace the connection I longed for.³ Then, I sat to listen to a sermon explicitly created for this teenaged audience. I sometimes experienced the shift from singing to sitting as abrupt, although the worship leaders did their best to soften the transition with a slower song and a quiet prayer. Nevertheless, I felt myself move from active to passive, from giver of praise to receiver of message.

While I now see many parallels between these experiences, as a child I recognized Christianity and dance as separate worlds with distinct concerns. I knew nothing of the history of antagonism between them. Although I did not notice that my church was filled with mostly white, middle-class families each Sunday, I tacitly understood that dance – as I practiced it – was an essentially female activity. I was a high school sophomore when the twin streams of dance and Christianity merged into a river of such force and momentum that its current would carry me well into adulthood. In the spring of 1996, my youth minister invited me to join a select team of high school students to travel to Tampico, Mexico for a short-term mission trip. Since only one team member was fluent in Spanish, we explored other possibilities for communicating. Our approach to evangelism centered around a dance theater presentation using music and movement to convey the gospel story. Although I was already recognized for my leadership and strong Christian commitment, my skill as a trained dancer distinguished me from my teammates. I had never seen concert dance explicitly incorporated in a Christian setting, yet I was doing it. My worlds of dance and Christianity united for the first time, and new possibilities for my life’s course seemed to unfold before me.

I redoubled my efforts to become a better dancer. I joined a newly formed dance ministry at my church. I sought additional training opportunities through a local Christian ballet studio to expand my technical range. I researched college dance programs, ultimately settling on a rigorous preprofessional program at a Christian university. As I studied with others engaged in the process of uniting Christianity and concert dance, I was also introduced to the tensions that surrounded this endeavor: Conversations about what we should wear to cover our (sometimes dangerous, sometimes vulnerable, mostly female) bodies while still allowing for instruction in proper technique or the presentation of aesthetically pleasing forms in performance; discussions about which movements were suitable for church services versus concert stages; and debates about which movement practices were appropriate for Christians to participate in (ballet – definitely; modern – yes, but only if the intention of the dance is clearly communicated; jazz and hip hop – sometimes yes, sometimes no; yoga – definitely not). Yet even in these early years, my confusion at the antipathy between Christianity and dance sometimes gave way to frustration, outrage, and despair. Eventually, my experiences compelled me to enroll in graduate school where I was able to gain a critical distance from Christian dance and, thereby, to reflect on the mutually generative impulses that constitute this complex subgroup of American Christianity.

Dancing | Christian

The impetus for this book grew out of my own struggles at the intersection of dance and Christianity. What does it mean to be a Christian dancer? Is there more than one way to be a dancing Christian? How is Christian dance different from other forms of western concert dance, especially since it seems to use similar movement vocabularies, training modalities, choreographic practices, and performance paradigms? In order to answer these questions, Dancing to Transform details a multisite, qualitative study of four professional dance companies that blend American Christianity with the codes and conventions of western concert dance: Ballet Magnificat! in Jackson, Mississippi; Ad Deum Dance Company in Houston, Texas; Dishman + Co. Choreography in Brooklyn, New York; and Karin Stevens Dance in Seattle, Washington.⁴ Despite popular assumptions to the contrary, dancing Christians employ complex and divergent approaches that stem from deeply felt, religious, and artistic commitments as well as every day, lived experiences.

In the west, the relationship between dance and religion is notoriously fraught. Dance tends to be associated with the body and is positioned in opposition to religion, which is associated with the spirit, or soul. This binary opposition infuses both the fields of dance and religious studies, delimiting the boundaries and delineating the methods by which both religion and dance are studied, as well as the relative values we ascribe to them. Those who attempt to combine them often inadvertently reinforce an oppositional relationship in which religion is constituted by belief and dance is the medium by which beliefs are represented or expressed.⁵

To navigate these tensions, Dancing to Transform employs Kimerer LaMothe’s vision of religion and dance as relational movement patterns that guide humans in rhythms of bodily becoming, complex arrangements of sensation and response that bodily selves enact as a means to cultivate relationships with resources that sustain bodily being and offer opportunities to enable ongoing development (2006, 2014, 2015, 2018). However, to understand the relevance of this framework for religion and dance, one must begin with the fundamental reorientation of human life that LaMothe’s philosophy offers. LaMothe avers that

[…] bodily movement is the source and telos of human life. Movement is what bodily selves are; not objects that move, but movement in themselves […] With every move bodily selves make, [they] create and become patterns of sensing and responding to other movements occurring in them, around them, and by way of them. Every movement a human makes actually makes her who she is, able to think and feel and act as she does, in relation to all that supports her bodily existence.

(2014: 59, emphasis added)

From this position, bodily selves are, in one sense, always already participating in rhythms of bodily becoming as we enact movement patterns that animate, develop, and sustain our bodily being. At the same time, bodily becoming offers new perspectives on activities generally identified as either dance or religion. LaMothe explains:

This capacity to create and become patterns of relational bodily movement is what every dance tradition or technique, as well as any religious belief, prayer, or ritual, exercises or entrains. Said otherwise, to dance is to participate consciously in the rhythms of bodily becoming. Religion, in turn, represents a particular collection of movement patterns that humans have discovered, created, and passed on for their ability to help one another create life-enabling relationships with sources of power – sources that their practice of bodily movement patterns enables them to perceive as real.

(2018: 6, original emphasis)

This framing has several important implications for Dancing to Transform. First, it offers a way to see the antagonism between dance and Christianity as evidence of a shared project that involves mobilizing movement patterns in order to engage our senses and make desired realities real. Second, it illuminates the ways in which dancing becomes Christian – and, inversely, how Christianity becomes dance – insofar as they each enable bodily selves to enact and participate in processes of transformation.⁶ In this way, transformation occurs when the movements bodily selves make effect shifts in their sensory awareness that offer new opportunities for their ongoing participation in dance and/or Christianity.

By employing the lens of bodily becoming to historical Christianity, Dancing to Transform offers a vision of all Christians as dancing Christians. Its analysis includes many practices that the dancing Christians in this book might not themselves characterize as dance. At the same time, it also focuses on patterns Christians identify as dance to explore the particular capacities of these movements to effect specific kinds of transformation. Finally, this analysis offers practitioners and scholars possibilities to participate in rhythms of bodily becoming by cultivating a sensory awareness of movements (both danced and religious) that create and sustain life-enabling relationships and expand capacities for ongoing kinetic creativity.

Methodology

For the cases in this book, I combine approaches from dance philosophy, ethnography, narrative analysis, and arts-based qualitative inquiry with choreographic analysis as a means to explore transformation from multiple points of entry. Over the course of five years, as I conducted participant-observations and ethnographic interviews with artistic directors, choreographers, and company members who self-identify as Christian from a range of geographic locations and theological perspectives,⁷ I sensed that something distinctively different was occurring in professional contexts that current scholarship fails to address (Kieswetter 2012 and Summers 2014). In my initial analysis, I saw connections with the sociological categories of believing, behaving, and belonging: In religious contexts, believing indicates participants’ religious ideas; behaving refers to their religious commitments; belonging points to their religious affiliations (Butler Bass 2012: 47–48). These categories suggested a range of questions: What do dancing Christians believe about the body? About dance? About religion? How do dancing Christians behave? What kinds of training, rehearsal, and performance processes do they employ? What kinds of religious behaviors do they incorporate into the studio and the stage? What kinds of dances do they make? And, finally, how do dancing Christians belong? What contributes to a sense of individual and/or community identity? How do they see themselves in the world? In relationship to other non-Christian dancers? To other nondancing Christians? These categories seemed to line up with the narratives, embodied actions, and choreographies that were coming through in the data.

As I deepened my attention to the phenomenon of transformation, however, the limitations of this approach emerged. Dancing Christians do more than represent their beliefs through movements of behaving and belonging. Instead, they cultivate movements that invite certain patterns of thinking, feeling, and action, and preclude others. In other words, dancing is the activity that instantiates particular expressions of Christianity and approaches to dance that these dancing Christians create. Thus, in addition to its significance as a theoretical orientation, LaMothe’s scholarship also serves as a methodological approach to the study of transformation. She recommends an ecokinetic approach to the analysis of bodily movement that engages the following processes: (1) Identify movement patterns; (2) Discern sensory education; (3) Evaluate effects; and (4) Assess impact of transformation on rhythms of bodily becoming (2014: 67–69).

As an example, at the outset of this introduction, I related an experiential account from my childhood of a Christian altar call.⁸ In this account, I describe this religious experience as a collection of movement patterns, or kinetic images. My pounding heart, dry mouth, and swirling belly – accompanied by my perceptions of the preacher’s warning tone and the affecting music – educated my senses to perceive these sensations as a conviction of sin. These patterns confirmed the messages