Description:

By Yair Lipshitz, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Theatre Arts in Tel Aviv University

The talk will reflect on the possibilities and questions raised by the performative study of religion. Performance-oriented research may highlight ritual's somatic, material, spatial and temporal components, so that it becomes a site of acquiring and transmitting knowledge, while at the same time allowing for playful engagements with religious traditions. Such playfulness is physical inasmuch as it is intellectual, for it calls for the performer to embody and position herself vis-à-vis these traditions – a positioning that is always also political. Embodied performance enables a variety of relations with religious ritual: ranging from identification, commitment or faith to resistance, protest or irony, as well as ludic indeterminacies contained within one body at a particular moment. The main question that the talk will attempt at tackling is what are the relations between playfulness, knowledge, and belief.