Who Tells the Story?

Challenging Audiences through Performer Embodiment

by U-Wen Low

Religions 14.8 (2023)

Visualising a character in a narrative is a highly individual act; cognitive narratology suggests that individuals may construct character models depending on the information (frames) available to them. However, many of these frames are formed from knowledge defined by positivist historical criticism, meaning that construction tends to follow broadly similar patterns. Performing and therefore embodying a character shifts the role of interpretation from audience to performer; an audience engages with the nuances of each performer’s embodiment of a character in a shared experience of a temporal performance event. This shift of interpretive responsibility to the performer allows them to challenge audiences in ways that an author may not be able to. Embodiment of a character through performance will inevitably challenge readers’ cognitive constructions of the same character to different degrees—for example, gender, ethnicity, bearing, tone, or even action may differ—potentially creating dissonance for audiences. This dissonance may help interpreters to discover their own assumptions about the performed texts, in doing so creating new avenues for interpretation. Such is the promise of performance: by viewing embodied narratives, audiences are challenged to view alternative interpretations and subsequently reconcile differences between their constructions and those of the performers.

Read the full article at the Religions Website

Not Just Looking the Part

Dress, performance and rhetorical action in the synoptic gospels

Paper by Erin Vearncombe , November 21, 2022

A joint session of Performance Criticism of the Bible and Other Ancient Media (PC-BOAT) and Rhetoric and Early Christianity

In the first century CE, Quintilian defined rhetoric as bene dicendi scientia, the “science of speaking well” (Inst. 2.15.34). “Speaking well,” or persuading others of what is good or right, involves much more than word choice; it is embodied action. This embodied action involves voice, movement and dress. Quintilian writes about dress as an active, if challenging, participant in speech. The speaker must take great care to use his dress properly, acting in awareness of the possible effects of dishevelled hair or a slipped fold of a cloak at different points of the speech (Inst. 11.3.137-49). Dress is, essentially, performative rhetoric, used as part of the body to make or break arguments, to not just enhance but enact persuasion, to achieve specific results. In the context of the oral/scribal and intensely visual cultures of Judaism and early Christianity, dress often plays a key role in persuasive action. As dress functioned differently on and with bodies in the ancient Mediterranean than it does on contemporary bodies, the integration of dress theory with our interpretation of key writings and artefacts creates new epistemic space where performance criticism and rhetorical criticism profitably meet. This paper specifically examines the prevalence of dress in the rhetorical activities of Jesus in the synoptic gospels. Dress in these contexts functions in concrete, material terms, not as metaphor or symbol pointing to other meaning. Dress is itself active in challenge-riposte exchanges in the synoptics and in strategic teaching moments as well. It is an essential component of Jesus’ construction of the body of the student. Well beyond “looking the part,” dress is performative partner, part of the embodied action of rhetoric in these writings.

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Performing Philemon: A rhetoric of accommodation or of crypto-revolution?

Paper by Marlon Winedt Nov 21, 2022

The joint session of Performance Criticism of the Bible and Other Ancient Texts (PC-BOAT) and Rhetoric and Early Christianity at the 2022 SBL Annual Meeting.

The letter of Philemon can be analyzed from different rhetorical perspectives. There are important points of contention: the nature of the relationship between Onesimus and Philemon, Paul and Onesimus and the latter's position as to the Christian faith. This paper intends to give some performance clues to the text of Philemon based on two particular rhetorical perspectives of the text, informed by an Afro-Caribbean theological perspective where notions of creole identity and emancipation play an important role. Semantic, rhetorical, and “spatial” units for performance will be illustrated. The presentation will be accompanied by a live performance of parts of the letter, showing alternate performance choices based on these two different rhetorical perspectives.

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The Rhetoric of the Canon

Obadiah and Jonah

Paper and Performance by Cliff Barbarick, November 19, 2022

Performance Criticism of the Bible and Other Ancient Media (PC-BOAT)

Recent interpretation of the Book of the Twelve has enriched our understanding of each individual prophetic book by recognizing it as a part of a larger composition. Using performance criticism, this presentation builds on those insights, moving beyond identifying linguistic, stylistic, or thematic links across the Book of the Twelve in order to explore the rhetorical impact that the arrangement of the books has on an audience. Specifically, by performing Obadiah and Jonah in their canonical order, the presentation will invite a present-day audience to experience how these two prophetic books interact with one another to shape an audience's attitudes toward and engagement with the "other" perceived as the enemy.

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Understanding the Bible as a Scripture in History, Culture, and Religion

by James W. Watts

(Wiley, 2021)

James W. Watts describes how Jews and Christians ritualize the Bible by interpreting it, by expressing it in recitations, music, art, and film, and by venerating the physical scroll and book. The first two sections of the book are organized around the Torah and the Gospels—which have been the focus of Jewish and Christian ritualization of scriptures from ancient to modern times—and treat the history of other biblical books in relation to these two central blocks of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. In addition to analyzing the semantic contents of all the Bible’s books as persuasive rhetoric, Watts describes their ritualization in the iconic and expressive dimensions in the centuries since they began to function as a scripture, as well as in their origins in ancient Judaism and Christianity. The third section on the cultural history and scriptural function of modern bibles concludes by discussing their influence today and the controversies they have fueled about history, science, race, and gender.