Browsing by Subject "performance"

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    “Mountains, rivers, and the whole earth”: Koan interpretations of female zen practitioners
    (Religions, 2018-04-11) Van Overmeire, B
    © 2018 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Though recent years have seen a critical reappraisal of Buddhist texts from the angle of performance and gender studies, examinations of Zen Buddhist encounter dialogues (better known under their edited form as “koan”) within this framework are rare. In this article, I first use Rebecca Schneider’s notion of “reenactment” to characterize interpretative strategies developed by contemporary female Zen practitioners to contest the androcentrism found in koan commentary. Drawing on The Hidden Lamp (2013), I suggest that there are two ways of reading encounter dialogues. One of these, the “grasping way,” tends to be confrontational and full of masculine and martial imagery. The other, the “granting way,” foregrounds the (female) body and the family as sites of transmission, stressing connection instead of opposition. I then argue that these “granting” readings of encounter dialogues gesture towards a Zen lineage that is universal, extended to everyone, even to the non-human.
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    Portal Obscura: Ecology Incarnate
    (2024) Piper, Julia Martina

    Human-caused environmental destruction is the result of a life rhythm that requires numbing to ecological impact. Through my Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis Thesis, I have developed my dance practice, begun a community practice, and curated a performance, portal obscura, all investigating ecological relations through dance. Ecological relation is defined as focusing attention on the relations between living creatures (flora, fauna, fungi, and bacteria) and their environment (including land, air, water, and objects). I propose an ecological dance aesthetic that moves with an expanded sense of time, space, and selfhood while interweaving worlds of reality and imagination. Through this research project, I developed a dance practice that honed my awareness and sensation of self and ecological relationality. I shared my practice in a solo performance, portal obscura, where I invited the audience to traverse the performance space and interact with poetry and sculptures devised to enhance the ecological awareness of situating, observing, and relating. I stress that noticing connections and making communities across differences are essential first steps to a less human-centric environmental ethic.

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    ‘Who Were the Maccabees?’ The Maccabean Martyrs and Performances of Christian Difference
    (2020-01-31) Wright Knust, Jennifer
    Jennifer Knust surveys the gradual canonisation of the Maccabean martyrs within a collection of Christian sacred texts. The eventual adoption of these martyrs as proto-Christian models of faith were clearly the result of a complex but now lost process of reconfiguration and appropriation. This march forward of a Christian Maccabean cult also coincides with a post-Julian consolidation of Christian ascendancy that began during Julian’s reign and was then further advanced during the ramping up of Christianisation following his death. The introduction of the Christian cult of the Maccabean martyrs can be interpreted both as an anti-Jewish Christian response to changing circumstances under Julian and as evidence that the traditions associated with the Maccabees endured as a continuing site of Christian-Jewish interaction even as these same martyrs were spiritualised. The fourth-century re-signification of these martyrs as Christian participated in what Andrew Jacobs describes as the ‘historicisation’ of the Jew, a process that renders living Jews merely ‘historical’ by transferring the Jew or the Jew’s remains into an embodied, living Christian past. Once the martyrs were detached from earlier commemorative contexts, they served to buttress particular, disputed formulations of Christian rather than Jewish identity. According to Knust, the reverberations of this process reach beyond their initial settings and Christian anti-Judaism, rhetorical or real, and have persisted within ongoing and contested histories of difference.