Between Dancing and Writing: The Practice of Religious Studies

Conclusion to Part Two: Can Dance be Religion?

229 Conclusion to Part Two Can Dance Be Religion? For scholars interested in the study of dance and religion, van der Leeuw’s phenomenological method, his theory of religion, and his five structures characterizing appearances of religion and dance provide a rich if challenging inheritance. To sift through the value of this work and some of its implications, I revisit the question van der Leeuw poses at the beginning of Sacred and Profane Beauty. He asks: Can dance be a holy act? Is dance something for which scholars of religion should develop theoretical and methodological approaches? At first glance, it seems that van der Leeuw would respond with a hearty “Yes!” He identifies numerous instances in which something appears to him as appearing to someone as having meaning as both religion and dance—as beautiful movement and an expression of dislocating power. Such moments, he implies, demand attention for what they tell scholars about religion and not only about dance. On second glance, however, van der Leeuw seems less optimistic. He rejects the idea that any general theory of such moments is possible . Such coincidences arise as singular events occurring in a complex , multi-layered relationship between a phenomenologist and that which appears. Any coincidence of dance and religion represents an appearance of meaning. It will not appear in the form of a historical fact, nor in the form of a dogmatic judgment; it will and can appear only as a moment in the lived experience of an individual person who is open to such a possibility. Given this singularity, van der Leeuw suggests that it is impossible to derive any stable account of when or why a coincidence of religion and dance appears. Moreover, as van der Leeuw insists, any moment of unity that does appear is itself fragmentary and ephemeral. A coincidence of religion and dance appears only to someone who perceives the relationship between religion and dance as a problem in the first place—someone in transition, someone raised and educated to perceive of dance and religion as occupying conflicting spheres of human life. It appears only to a person educated to believe in reading and writing. Correlatively, any appearance of unity is always already a moment in the web of structural relations that enable “unity” to appear—a web that includes the shapes of transition, enmity, moments, harmony, etc. The degree to which this situation holds for dance in contrast to other moments of cultural life is distinct because, as van der Leeuw notes, dance is the art that has suffered most at the hands of Christian and Western authorities. Drama, visual art, architecture, music, poetry, and literature have never experienced the degree and range of antipathy that dancing has. Only dance fills out all five of van der Leeuw’s structures. Even so, the fact that dance has suffered so, ironically enough, van der Leeuw interprets as evidence of his point that phenomenologically speaking, every act of dancing, in so far as its medium is bodily movement, enacts and expresses a unity of life. How that “unity” is conceived, composed, inflected, and interpreted is different and fleeting in every case. Yet dance inevitably animates the relatedness of dimensions of life that “religion” works to distinguish as sacred and profane: the body that will be resurrected can prance seductively. Resistance by religious authorities to dancing implies that dancing represents a threat to their ability to distinguish “religion” from the rest of life as a “last word.” This diagnosis carries a paradoxical implication : only by crafting theories that insist upon an irreconcilable dif230 Between Dancing and Writing ference between dance and religion can scholars guarantee the possibility that they will be able to perceive the coincidence of religion and dance. What distinguishes dance from religion is its ability to enact a unity of bodily and cultural life that extends to include all moments of “religion” and “dance.” Summarizing with regard to art in general, van der Leeuw writes, a “complete unity of religion and art is neither conceivable nor desirable ” (S 332; W 460). It is not conceivable because concepts of unity and disunity arise hand in hand; it is not desirable because such a unity would deny the difference between religion and art that enables art to serve as a critical perspective on the study and practice of religion —especially in its consciousness of dance. When a coincidence does appear, it does so only...