Embodied Performance

Mutuality, Embrace and the Letter to Rome

By Sarah Agnew

(Cascade, 2020)

Embodied Performance presents a methodology by which performer-interpreters can bring their intuitive interpretations to the scholarly conversations about biblical compositions. It may not be comfortable, for scholarship is out of practice in listening to emotion and intuition. It may not be the only way to bring the fullness of human meaning making into scholarly discussions. It is a beginning, as Sarah Agnew, storyteller and scholar, places herself as the subject and object under examination, observing her practice as a biblical storyteller making meaning through embodied performance, and develops a coherent method rigorously tested with an Embodied Performance Analysis of Romans. Follow Sarah’s story as she searches within Biblical Performance Criticism for such a method, before determining the need to strike out in a new direction from within an already innovative field. All biblical scholars are complex human beings, making meaning through their embodiment, their emotions, their embeddedness in community. Embodied Performance Analysis offers a way to attend to and incorporate the full range of human meaning making in our engagement with biblical compositions, for richer discussion closer to the intent of the compositions themselves.

See her performance of Romans here: https://youtu.be/yFoL1iy7kOM

Performance Criticism, Cognition, and Embodiment

A Dialog between Performance Criticism, Cognitive Linguistics, and Islands, Islanders, and Scripture

Papers given at SBL 2023 in San Antonio

The human body is a significant link between ancient and modern performances of biblical traditions. Across time and cultures, readers, lectors, and performers of biblical texts gesture and use other signals with eyes, face, hands, arms, and legs that audiences blend with the sounds they hear to make meaning. In this joint session co-sponsored by Performance Criticism of the Bible and Other Ancient Texts, Cognitive Linguistics in Biblical Interpretation, and the Islands, Islanders, and Scriptures, three invited papers will explore how the human body and embodied cognition may provide a basis for comparing ancient and modern performances.

Click on the links below to watch the presentations on Vimeo:

Peter S. Perry, A Performance Criticism Point of View on Performance and Embodiment

Beth Currier, A Cognitive Linguistics Point of View on Performance and Embodiment

Althea Spencer-Miller, An Islander Point of View on Performance and Embodiment

Networking on Orality, Memory, Performance and Other Related Disciplines

2021 SBL Annual Meeting in San Antonio

Theme: The Bible, Performance, and Social Location

We explored the impact of social and cultural location on the process of meaning-making when a text is performed by various bodies in space and time. Questions we considered included: "How does the body and voice of an interpreter impact the interpretation in performance?” and “How might performance open up conversations in class, in worship gatherings, and in research about the role of social location (in the ancient world and today) in our understanding and use of Scripture?”

You can watch the large group presentations and discussions:

https://vimeo.com/650347645