UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE White Soul/Forbidden Body: Dancing Christian From Ruth St. Denis to Pole Dancing for Jesus A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Critical Dance Studies by Lindsey Michelle Timmons Summers August 2014 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Jacqueline Shea Murphy, Chairperson Dr. Anthea Kraut Dr. Jennifer Hughes Copyright by Lindsey Michelle Timmons Summers 2014 The Dissertation of Lindsey Michelle Timmons Summers is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgments I owe my gratitude to many people and organizations for their support. The University of California’s Graduate Division offered fellowship and grant support, and the Graduate Student Association helped to fund multiple conference trips to present my research and ideas. I am thankful for the AAUW’s Dissertation Year Fellowship, which enabled me to fully dedicate my time and energy to completing this document. Also I am grateful to the CCI for a Creative Capacity Grant, to the Kappa Alpha Foundation for several supporting grants and scholarships, and to the Sacred Dance Guild for a scholarship enabling me to attend their festival. Finally, a big thank you to the Department of Dance at the UC Riverside who enabled my completion of this document through a BYPED grant and multiple other levels of support. I am indebted to many participants in this study who made this research possible. These include Kathryn Mihelick and Andrea Shearer, Wendy Morell and all of the members of the Sacred Dance Guild, Carla DeSola, Marilyn Green and the Trinity Movement Choir, the staff and all of those associated with Ballet Magnificat!, and the directors and members of Omega Liturgical Dance East and West. I am also thankful for the archival help of many including those at the New York Library for the Performing Arts, and especially David Stiver at the Graduate Theological Union’s special collections, and the manuscripts curator, Roland Goodbody, at the University of New Hampshire. I would like to also thank many colleagues and advisors who contributed their intellectual time and energy to this project. These include those in the UCR Dance Department, such as Priya Srinivasan, Linda Tomko, Marta Savigliano, and Jens iv Giersdorf, who were all fundamental to my development in this field. Also, my peers in the UCR critical dance studies program and from NYU’s performance studies program whose thoughtful ideas and feedback were integral to this project’s creation. And to the Mellon Dance Studies seminar participants who helped to shape my thinking on sacred dance in the field of the humanities and fine arts. Two groups I would like to recognize that are fundamental to the completion of this project are my dissertation committee and my writing group. To Jacqueline Shea Murphy, thank you for your supportiveness and dedication to helping me figure out my ideas and put them into writing. And to Jennifer Hughes and Anthea Kraut, thank you for your tireless support and advocacy for my project. Finally, to my writing group, Hannah Schwadron, Rachel Carrico, and J Dellecave – I could not have gotten through this time in my life without people like you believing in me, encouraging me, and struggling through the trenches with me in this frustrating yet rewarding process. Finally, I would like to recognize the unspoken heroes of this project – my family. This project is dedicated to my parents. To my mom, who modeled a working women in academia who could have it all – writing dissertations and teaching classes, while pulling her kids out of the university fountains! To my dad, who has always been my hero, who taught me how to challenge everyone and everything, play devil’s advocate, and made me believe in my ability to achieve great things. And finally, most of all I would like to thank my husband. Cameron, I cannot begin to outline all of the ways you have supported and loved me throughout the years. You are my sounding board, my best friend, and the love of my life. Thank you for traveling with me on this journey. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION White Soul/Forbidden Body: Dancing Christian From Ruth St. Denis to Pole Dancing for Jesus by Lindsey Michelle Timmons Summers Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Critical Dance Studies University of California, Riverside, August 2014 Dr. Jacqueline Shea Murphy, Chairperson The Western Christian tradition, particularly in the U.S. Protestantized religious landscape, has often denied dance as a legitimate form of worship, and many view Christianity and dance to be contradictory pursuits. White Soul/Forbidden Body: Dancing Christian From Ruth St. Denis to Pole Dancing for Jesus builds upon this tension in order to understand the strategies and tactics that Christian dancers in the U.S. employ to negotiate the power structures that function to forbid dancing bodies from occupying Christian spaces. This dissertation theorizes this tension as rooted in the politics of white Christian embodiment, which is created through the practice of constructing a particular relationship between the body and the soul. I argue that dance gives these dancers, who are primarily white women, the opportunity to creatively inhabit Christian power structures that privilege certain forms of embodiment over others. Through dance, this women are able to engender small pockets of religious leadership that allow them and others to experience religion through the body and vi explore dance’s spiritual, meaning-making capacities. Methodologically, I rely on ethnography, archival research, and performance analysis in order to explore the multiple locations where Christian dance emerges in the U.S. – sanctuaries, dance fitness classes, dance studios, stages, etc. The chapters are organized around the dancers’ use of embodied strategies such a “high art” framing, confrontations with the aging body, the rhetoric of health, the invocation of humor, and the development of community. By analyzing the contemporary and historical politics of Christian sacred dance, this dissertation research sheds new light on the neglected topic of dance as religious embodiment. While debates are ongoing about dance’s appropriateness as a sacred art form, Christian dance continues not only to exist, but it also plays an integral role in understanding the relationship between bodily practice and religious identity formation. This research, therefore, models a critical, interdisciplinary approach essential to those who study dance history and theory as it intersects with American religion, critical race theory, and women’s studies. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: White Women, Dancing Religious Leadership 1 Cartesian Dualism and Christian Dance Historiographies 5 Passing and Confessing 17 Embodiment 31 Strategies and Tactics 40 I ART: MODERN DANCE/SACRED DANCE 48 Reading the Christian Back into the Modern 51 Psychological or Universal Themes? 51 Spiritual-Not-Sexual 61 De-Universalizing Expressive Theory 66 Christian Sacred Dance Pioneers 74 Always Margaret 75 The Mother of Liturgical Dance 81 A Liturgical Dance Advocate 94 Conclusion 101 II AGING: BLUE-HAIRED BUTOH, BUDDING BALLERINAS 103 Blue-Haired Butoh 108 The Laban Movement Choir Model 111 Butoh, Aging, and Christian Sacred Dance 121 Female Sexuality and the Aging Body 129 Budding Ballerinas 132 Testifying 145 Parables 151 The Story Ballet 155 Conclusion 160 III HEALTH: YOUR BODY IS A TEMPLE 164 Dance, Fitness, and Christianity in the U.S. 165 Pole Dancing for Jesus 175 The Perfectible Body 179 Healthy Sexuality 189 The Politics of Empowerment 198 viii IV HUMOR: WHITE AND UPTIGHT 205 A Theory of White Patriarchal Stiffness 205 “Primitive” vs. “Civilized” 207 Natural Women, Built Men 217 Homosexuality and the “Loose” 222 Latent Humor and a Body Manifest 225 Manly Men at the Sacred Dance Guild Men’s Forum 231 Stephen Colbert, Liturgical Dancer 240 Doug Adams: Unstiffing the Stiff 264 Epilogue: Community – An Encounter with Embodied Prayer 275 The Shadow of the Theological Soul 276 Techniques of the Body as Disciplinary Apparatus 283 Church Community and the Imagining of Collectivity 290 Bibliography 303 ix Introduction: White Women, Dancing Religious Leadership In Livermore, California, after participating in an annual Good Friday worship service, anti-nuclear activists dance a circle dance in front of the guarded gates of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory before peacefully crossing the gated line to be arrested by awaiting police. Online, a viral video of the comedian Stephen Colbert circulates as a liturgical dance spoof of his Vatican II upbringing in South Carolina. In Holland, Michigan, participants in the Sacred Dance Guild Festival contemplatively dance through a lumiere labyrinth made of cloth in the gym of Hope College. In Jackson, Mississippi, hundreds of aspiring ballerinas gather during the sweltering summer months to learn the art of Christian ballet from the company members and directors of Ballet Magnificat! In New York City, members of the Trinity Movement Choir and Sacred Dance Guild join together at the Trinity Church on Wall Street to learn and perform a butoh-inspired piece to the Aldous Huxley quote: “There are things that are known and things that are unknown. In between there are the doors.” In a basement near Akron, Ohio, liturgical dance advocate Kathryn Mihelick shows old videos of Leaven Dance Company performing in a nearby Catholic parish before the practice was disallowed. In the quaint town of Spring, Texas, the national media swarms to report on Crystal Deans, who is offering a Pole Dancing for Jesus class for local churchgoing ladies. These diverse geographies of Christian dance practice in the current U.S. religious landscape exemplify the tremendous breadth and variety of contemporary dancers who claim dance as a method for Christian worship, prayer, and contemplation. These dancers 1 range in terms of age, race, gender, class, denominational affiliation, political identification, technical dance training and approach, but all of them are working in some manner against the predominate, public conception in the U.S.