ABSTRACT
‘Performance-ritual’
is performed ritual. It extends the
19th-20th century European explorations and expressions of ‘the spiritual’
through performance to include a feminist perspective, re-situating ‘ritual’ as
a contextualised, embodied and subjective process. The present approach to performance-ritual
emerges out of a need to re-imagine and express a sense of ‘divinity’ and a
religion which ‘fits’ the circumstances of a particular life. In this case, the exploration of embodied
spirituality is that of an ex-Christian woman, of Anglo-Celtic descent, living
in Australia at the beginning of the 21st century.
The outward form
of the text in which the spiritual search is housed is ‘performance-ritual’,
that is, performed ‘ritual’. This genre
has its ‘performance’ roots in the dance pioneers and its ‘ritual’ roots in the
Christian church. The content of this
performed text is influenced by an emerging ecofeminist consciousness. In this way, this thesis has a grassroots
inspiration as well as crossing academic areas of performance studies, ritual
studies, and feminist spirituality.
The project
begins by an examination of 20th century feminist and ecofeminist writing on
spirituality, which evokes the subjective, embodied and historically
contextualised, with particular focus on body and nature. Additional concepts of place, holding and
letting go are introduced. It then
overviews the emergence of spiritual naturalism in European ‘performance’ at
the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, especially in relation to women’s dance. Current academic debates on ritual, which
theorise it from an objective, disembodied and decontextualised standpoint are
introduced and challenged.
At this point
the particular performance-rituals are introduced under the overall heading
‘the spiralling journey of exorcism and ecstasy’. They include earlier work, such as, Dark Fire, For Eve, Fallen Totems and Leavetaking, as well as work performed
specifically for this thesis, Centre of
the Storm. These performance-rituals
are analysed, first, from a structrual and functional point of view, as
rituals. Secondly, they are analysed
from the standpoint of feminist and ecofeminist spirituality, the spiralling
journey of exorcism and ecstasy, highlighting themes of body and nature, and
the emerging themes of place, family, holding and letting go. Centre
of the Storm re-situates ‘ritual’ as a subjective, embodied and
contextualised performed event. It challenges ritual discourse to incorporate
‘spirit’, and feminist spirituality to incorporate the material world, through
‘place’, ‘family’, and the ritual actions of ‘holding’ and ‘letting go’.
Thesis address: handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/771
Thesis address: handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/771
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