Mass Performance: How Material Liturgies Enact the Spiritual

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Please see the Introduction for definitions of performative theory, performative action, and performative speech. The term embodied is used extensively in performance studies to talk about practices that express ideas through physical forms. These might highlight practices that involve all the senses and a deep awareness of the self in response to the senses. It has been used as the opposite to approaches that emphasize only cognitive thought as a way to explain or find meaning. This idea that belief can be part of an embodied practice is linked to the work of both performance scholars and philosophers who are interested in the performative and in physical practices. Paul Connerton explains embodied practice: "It is through the essentially embodied nature of our social existence, and through the incorporated practices based upon these embodyings, that these oppositional terms provide us with metaphors by which we think and live." Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 74. Connerton uses the term "incorporating practice" to discuss conscious behavior that is spatially located and framed by social and communal structures. Thus, the "incorporating practice" performs embodied knowledge in real time (73). These theories are valuable in the study of performance practices because, as Aaron Turner explains, "[e]mbodiment seems to shift the study of society and culture to an examination of processes at work in everyday experience and interaction." Aaron Turner, "Embodied Ethnography: Doing Culture," Social Anthropology 8 (2000): 51–60 (53). Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue (London: John Calder, 1987), 51–52. For a detailed examination of the impact of architecture post–Vatican II, see Steven J. Schloeder, Architecture in Communion: Implementing the Second Vatican Council through Liturgy and Architecture (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1998). Other Christian denominations have also undergone significant changes in liturgical practice since the 1960s; however, the same defined moment in time offered by the Vatican II Council does not exist in Protestant or Orthodox Churches. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 57. The nature of embodied performance means that it is impossible to assign actions solely to one part of the body, as the whole body is involved in singing, praying, or listening, but this list demonstrates many types of work that are part of the liturgy. James F. White, Roman Catholic Worship: Trent to Today (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 2003), 114. My emphasis. Rowan Williams, "The Nature of a Sacrament," in On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 197–208 (quotation on page. 205). Williams, "The Nature of a Sacrament," 206. All biblical quotations are taken from the New Jerusalem Bible (NJB). For more on the interplay of the presentational reality, social reality, and dramatic fiction of a theatrical event, see Gay McAuley, "The Spectator in the Space," in her Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 235–77. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009), 17. Saba Mahmood, "Agency, Performativity, and the Feminist Subject," in Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler, edited by Ellen T. Armour and Susan M. St. Ville (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 177–221 (quotation on page 180). Mahmood, "Agency," 186. "The speaker attempts to get the hearer to do something," and, "The speaker brings about changes in the world through his utterances, so the world changes to match the propositional content, solely in the virtue of the successful performance of the utterance." John R. Searle, "Speech Acts, Mind and Social Reality," in Speech Acts, Mind and Social Reality, edited by Günther Grewendorf and Georg Meggle (London: Kluwer, 2002), 3–16 (quotation on page 5). Please see the introduction for a longer explanation. This is what is said in English. My Czech hosts' translation of what was said in Czech was very similar. Photograph taken by Megan Macdonald, 2005. The Beranek is a custom only carried out in the Czech Republic and is allowed by the Roman Catholic Church. The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy makes provision for such deviation. Trevor A. Hart, "Introduction: Art, Performance and the Practice of Christian Faith," in Faithful Performances: Enacting Christian Tradition, edited by Trevor A. Hart and Stephen R. Guthrie (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007), 1–9 (4). Additional informationNotes on contributorsMegan Macdonald Megan Macdonald has taught drama, theater, and performance studies in the United Kingdom and Canada. She did her doctoral work in performance studies and theology at Queen Mary, University of London.

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