Issue #13
Fall/Winter 1996-97
Body/Belief
Spirituality, religion, and ritual all bring up complex relationships to embodiment and to dance. This issue, guest edited by Audrey Kindred and Peter Larose, examines the notion of "belief" on multiple registers — from devotion to the discipline of dance, to wrestling with organized religion. Contributors range from practitioners examining the close connection between dance and ritual across various cultural traditions, to performative texts that inhabit fervent religious rhetoric of the growing Christian right, to more ethereal examinations of the way embodiment opens up pathways to belief that elude conventional forms of articulation and codification.
Editorial team
Contributing Editor
Peter Larose - Audrey Kindred
Advertising
Julie Atlas Muz
Assistant Editor
Anya Pryor - Jaime Ortega
Articles
Why I Practice Yoga
I am a dancer and a choreographer. In 1987 I quit a ten-year yoga practice in order, I said, to deepen my dancing. My dancing would henceforth be my sole...
The Joy of the Sensuous
Since I retired from Judson Church I am somewhat bi-coastal and spend part of the year in California. When I am in New York City I spend much of my...
Yes It Did Hurt and No I Can’t Tell You What They Mean
I got my first tattoo in 1983 in Ballston Spa, New York, at South Paw Studios, from a biker dude with one eye; both the dude and the studio have...
Marks on the Wall
Nothing explains the way things happen science included, and the lack of language for a body expressing itself as it grows bigger bulging in places soft in others sometimes hard...
Gluttony
The word obscene in Latin is ob , meaning on or to, and scaena , stage. To be obscene is literally to be on stage. A band of heretics, performers...
Devadasi in the Living Room
Four-year old eyes up too late, lying on pillows on the floor (Jesus) smoke and candles and boogying bodies (is just) as the child, the angel at the feast (alright)...
Two Life Stories
Content warning: This essay utilizes racial slurs. I grew up in Israel in the 1940s and 1950s as a child of the single Jewish Yemenite family in a neighborhood of...
Circular Dance
Christian Shakers. Whirling Dervishes. Brazilian Candomble, Haitian Voodun, and Indian Devadasi dancers. These religious expressions, and many more, vividly display a connection between dance and the spirit. From here my...
Some Call It A Wedding
My papers face the sky as I squeeze my brain to think like a computer. Moths caress my face and legs, and the air is cool enough that my sweat...
Remembering Robert Dunn
Movement Research's next issue, Performance Journal # 14. will recognize the legacy of Robert Dunn, the musician, composer, teacher and choreographer who died on July 5th at the age of...
Stepping Out
It was a cold Sunday morning in January 1994 when I first walked into Judson Church. It was the first time I had ever attended a church service for any...
Three Stories
The Great Harlot Who Sits On Many Waters This happened when I was very small. I was riding in a car with just my mother. I was curled close enough...
Me, God, Atheism, Dance and the Goddess
I was born in San Francisco in 1963 I spent my first ten years in Berkeley and Canada. My parents were semi-hippies. We used to collect lichens to dye home-spun...
Understanding Flesh and the High Cost of Bad Theology
Among liberal Christians it's conventional to pit a full-blooded, life-affirming Jesus (Gregory Peck, say) against a repressed, rage-filled Saul/Paul (Charles Laughton, Peter Lorre). Seminarians will even speculate about how differently...
Embodied Spirituality and The Seriousness of Play: A Different Way To Enter Scripture
Note: The text was organized in a “cross” (+) shape in the original publication. Play is not just fun; it draws from all of experience, both contemporary and stored in...
Puta Santisima (The Holy Whore)
Jesus and Lazarus: Resurrecting Body and Belief
If you are an Orthodox Jew, homosexuality (at least among males) is not an option. The laws of Moses utterly forbid, under penalty of death, sex between men. If you...
Take Me Up
A church is an empty space. Behind the ceilings are pockets of more space. Above the floor of Judson, about 60 dancing feet high, is the pastor's attic. It's a...
In The House Of God
I stole candy as a kid and shoved it in, inhaled it and later aspirin and then finally smoke, a long hard cool thirty a day. And I believed that...
Dancing from the Spirit
As dancers, the body is, in a very real and certain sense, the most important aspect of our being. The body is our tool, our means of expression, our vehicle...
The Soul as Eye, as Organ
It is sin breaking, igniting the ghost in skin, the line of your jaw, a ravel of sheets, chambers of dust spinning. You are asleep still and under needles of...
Modern Sports Culture and an Eastern View about the Body
This text is adapted from a keynote address presented on May 9th, 1996, to the Twelfth International Congress on Sports Sciences for Students at the Hungarian University of Physical Education....
Visceral Politics
Belief is a blinding light. It is my impetus to act —to fight, sing, dance, scream— to use my body to its fullest, even at the risk of dissolution, because...
Hum and Murmur
Observing Tibetan Buddhism from my living room. I charged him money and let him in, and he set up his altar in my living room. When I returned seven weeks...
See you In Church
In 1982 Cynthia Hedstrom phoned me in Milan and offered me a job lighting dance for the Danspace Project in the freshly reconstructed St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery. It was one of...
Body and Spirit: Alive and Well at St. Marks’s
Sitting diagonally on the shady corner of 2nd Avenue and 10th Street, St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery is the eminence grise of the East Village. In shifting weather the old fieldstone walls...
Not being Jewish, and All
This is the village I never grew up in. These are the dances we never danced. These are the songs we never sang. Well, to be honest, where I grew...
Drawing the Distinctions: Performer and Priest
As one who has been both a dancer and a minister, I have often been fascinated by the parallels and tensions between performance and religious ritual. As a performer, I...
‘Ti Jorge’ (Uncle Jorge)
Ti Jorge is a performance piece whose main character's persona was created primarily through non-fictional accounts based on the decade prior to the 1974 Portuguese Revolution, when the country was...
Why I go to see the band Crash Worship once a year, no matter what.
cuz it's punk and pagan at the same time. cuz it's guaranteed that the situation will be beyond my control cuz of the potential sex and the potential violence ("Theater...
Something Is Happening, Or You Wouldn’t Repeat It
What am I repeating? In the instant what is the repetition? That I'm still breathing. Once into the process of living you repeat things. In repetition, there is something which...
Dance: A Body with a Mind of Its Own
I am a physical performer of improvisation theater. As both an actor and dancer, I weave images through movement, language and vocalization. I enter the performing arena with no pre-arranged...
Alice
I try to break with fairy tales excised like a sore every nesting need dressed up as love good verbs aside, monsters exist for a little girl awakening the silence...