Dance in between ritual and liturgy

Abstract

This article deals with recent writings on dance and theology by Riyako Cecilia Hikota and the authors of Heike Walz's Dance as Third Space (2022). It suggests, based on the writings of Vincent Lloyd, Sarah Coakley and recent discussions on theory and practice in the Nordic context, that the field of Dance and Theology needs a more rigorous understanding of practice. The article proposes a theoretical framework and Lloyd's distinctions between ritual and liturgy as a way to understand the gap between practice and norms, which is often missing in theological discussions. It then proceeds to exemplifying this by going into dialogue with Hikota’s criticism of the current use of the term “perichōrēsis” in theological discussions aiming at promoting dance.

In the beginning,

it was completely Silent.

And in the beginning, there was the Word.

The Word started to resonate … 

Davar, Davar, Davar … 

It vibrated into the Silence … 

God said the words, and it became as God had said:

darkness and light, space and time.

Life and creatures.

And God said, Human.

So we came to be with everything else that exists.

And it became evening and night, June 6th 2022, in Karlstad, in Sweden and everywhere else.

Let us now listen to the church bells that remind us of the sound vibrating into the silence:

Logos, Logos, Logos … 

And we stood there, some seated on the church benches or chairs, others standing with their feet on the ground, and others still at home, in front of their screens. And we could sense how the sound of the bells vibrated in our ears, in our bones and through our bodies … filling up the whole space, resonating with all of matter.

This is how the Mass on the second day of Pentecost started in what also was the celebration of 30 years of dancing in the Church of Sweden.¹ Participants had gathered from the different congregations of the diocese, from across the country, even from Denmark, Norway and Finland. Some people in the room had never danced in a church in their whole life. There were people there who had brought the tradition of “Sacred Dances” to the Church of Sweden many years ago.² Some people in the room chose to participate actively through their bodily movements in the choreography that was to unfold. Others participated by playing instruments for the newly composed music that was created for the danced Mass named “Den Stora Berättelsen”.³ Others again participated by sensing the movements in their bodies and perceiving the vibrations in their cells, even though they may have remained sitting in silence and stillness throughout the Mass. Time after time, I have heard participants in congregational practices where dancing is part of the worship service express how deeply touched they have been by what they experienced. It is not always that the participants – even when asked – are able to express these experiences in words.⁴ Political theologian Vincent Lloyd states that: “The job of theologians is to take meaning from liturgy.”⁵ Unfortunately, there is very little explicit Christian theological reflection which is able to do this without doing violence to the lived experiences of dancers and the phenomena of dancing.⁶ An exception is Systematic theologian Karen Baker-Fletcher's Dancing with God: The Trinity from a Womanist Perspective (2006).⁷ Her work uses the metaphor of dance to describe different ways that humans and creation can relate to God.⁸ In contrast to many other theologians who, according to Riyako Cecilia Hikota, only play with the metaphor of dance, Baker-Fletcher engages in her theological reflections with real dance performances.⁹ Still, in Baker-Fletcher's work, she seems to move very smoothly from a dialogue between practice and theory to the language of praxis.¹⁰ She writes:

Praxis integrates faith seeking understanding with the practice of faith. Much understanding about the Christian message comes not only through reading and hearing the Christian message, but also through living it. Living the Christian message cannot be separated from hearing and reading it.¹¹

In the emerging field of Dance and Theology – a field that spans over both practical and systematic theology – the language of Lived Religion or Lived Theology has become increasingly popular for bringing what Baker-Fletcher writes about into theological scholarship.¹² Scholar of music and movement Stephanie Schroedter, further argues that when the field of Dance Studies turns to bodily knowledge and praxeology, the “boundaries” between theory and practice are blurred.¹³ On the one hand, there is a need to break with the old paradigms of understanding theology mainly as texts and articulated dogma. On the other hand, Lloyd argues that in order for theology to be a rigorous scholarly activity, a distinction between practice and norms needs to be maintained.¹⁴ Such is not always the case when people turn to the theoretical framework of Lived Theology.

Lloyd states that the dualistic separations into practice and belief, reason and faith, worldly and secular, transcendence and immanence all drive the supersessionist logic of a secular age.¹⁵ He specifies this claim by writing:

To want to make the world either rigid and rational or fluid and faithful is to forget what the world is: textured, messy, viscous, difficult. It is to focus on the world we might wish for, not the one we have – and so to authorize violence against the world.¹⁶

In a similar way, I do not want to plot body against spirit or emotions against reason, as so often is done in discourse about understanding and appreciating dance.¹⁷ If we want to understand the messiness, what is needed instead are tools for our scholarship that do not authorise violence against bodies nor spiritual experiences. Here I agree with Hikota that theology which uses dance language to reflect about our visions of God, creation and humanity, needs to engage as well with actual practices of dance. At the same time, Lloyd's distinctions between ritual and liturgy as a way to understand the gap between practice and norms, are something I miss in the field of Dance and Theology. It is towards opening a theoretical framework addressing these challenges, that this article aims.

For this, I proceed in the following manner. First, I give an introduction to the emerging field of Dance and Theology, while surfacing challenges found in current discussions. Secondly, I present the theoretical framework and key concepts that guide my inquiry. After that, I engage with Hikota’s criticism of the current use of the term “perichōrēsis” in theological discussions aimed at promoting dance. I deepen her argumentation by providing examples from dance practices and the insights from Lloyd's distinction between ritual and liturgy. The aim is to present a theoretical framework for Dance and Theology which is able to take meaning from liturgy without neglecting the lived experiences of dance.

Introduction

The emerging field of Dance and Theology consists of both historical and current accounts of the importance of dance in the Christian traditions of the Latin West.¹⁸ We now know that dance was among the practices of the Early Church.¹⁹ We know of the resistance towards specific ways of dancing and the apparent acceptance of others.²⁰ We further know about the wide variety of dance practices that were part of the liturgies and para-liturgies of the medieval period.²¹ With the further work of religious studies scholar Heike Walz's Dance as Third Space (2022) and Riyako Cecilia Hikota’s two articles in Open Theology reflecting on the use of the term “perichōrēsis” in theological texts, there is now also a dialogue not only about the acceptance or rejection of dance practices, but on how actual practices of dancing could inform theological reflection.²²

In much of the older theological scholarship on dance, clear distinctions were made between what was seen as sacred and profane dancing or heavenly and worldly dance.²³ In more recent scholarship focusing on Lived Religion perspectives on dance, the turn to practice approach has instead aimed at questioning the former ways of dichotomizing between body and spirit, mind and emotions.²⁴ However, in several chapters of Heike Walz's Dance as Third Space (2022), where the authors write extensively about different practices of dance in churches and the possible knowledge claims of dance, the material never moves into informing the reader about theology.²⁵

Furthermore, along the lines of Geir Afdal’s article “Two Concepts of Practice and Theology” (2021), I find that the current “turn to practice” in Theology often leaves the meaning and theorizing of practice implicit. Instead of religious and theological studies elaborating with what he calls a weak understanding of practice, he suggests turning to a strong conception of practice. He states that in weak theories of practice, “practice is understood as the doing mode of phenomena,”²⁶ while theory would be the thinking or reasoning mode of phenomena.²⁷ In the chapters of Walz's book, what is often the case is that descriptions of dance are brought in, as if these represent the actual dancing. Or then, a science paradigm is brought in to explain the dancing.²⁸ In both cases, the leading paradigm seems to be that there is a need to “bridge the gap” between the two separated spheres of practice (dance) and theory in order to gain real knowledge. This way of understanding practice is, according to Afdal, often associated with the secular mindset of having “pure” domains of different types of knowledge and social settings that has been criticized by Latour and others.²⁹

In contrast to the weak way of speaking about and understanding practice, Afdal suggests strong concepts of practice where society is understood as a nexus of practices. He writes: “The main mode of existence is not cognition or experience, but involvement in the sense of action and inter-action”³⁰ that pre-exists before individual humans do anything. A second aspect of this “radical relational social ontology”³¹ is that everything is constantly in motion. So, if one wants to analyze the social, this needs to be done in a “doing mode”. Afdal’s conclusion is that if we understand religion as practice, theology needs to turn empirical. He even goes one step further, arguing that we need to think of theology as a social science.³² It is at this point that my view of theology differs from Afdal. Like Coakley, I see that theology needs to be in dialogue with and become informed by the social sciences. In systematic theology, both art and ethnographic/empirical materials bring important insights to, and may need to create interruptions of the often hegemonic theological reflections and historical discussions that tradition carries with it.³³ However, I do not want to reduce theology to a social science. With Coakley and Lloyd, I am concerned with the ordinary lives of people. However:

Turning to the ordinary is not as easy as the pragmatist makes it out to seem. In fact, it is impossible. The image of the ordinary as jagged, chaotic, and unsystematic is a representation of what cannot be represented.³⁴

Lloyd argues that when the pragmatist approach wants to make us think that the enchantment of the ordinary can be broken down to an imagined disenchanted plane, the theologian often wants to lure us into an enchantment that draws us away from the place of the ordinary. In both options – either practice is plotted against theory or theory against practice – the gap between practice and norms collapses. Against such strategies, Lloyd suggests that the gap between practice and norms needs to be kept intact – even when this means that our articulations of the world always fail. It is only in this gap that political critique and informed actions can take place.³⁵ Lloyd encourages us to stay in the gap between practice and norms. Such is the space where I imagine the field of Dance and Theology needs to learn to exist.

Theoretical framework and key concepts

In this section I describe my understanding of key concepts like practice, ritual, liturgy and intelligence. Just like Afdal, Lloyd brings up the centrality of practices if we want to understand the ordinary. He speaks about the importance of moving away from ontology and towards describing and naming the practices of people. Current theological discourse is filled with use of terms like “tradition” and “liturgy”. However, proponents of this language often operate with ontological claims aiming at moving towards a specific kind of political change in society, instead of rigorously distinguishing and individuating the workings of social practices and norms by carefully analyzing what is actually done.³⁶ This is why Lloyd calls for making a distinction between ritual and liturgy.

Lloyd is critical towards both secular theorists of political ritual and theological enthusiasts of liturgy. Nobody can escape being part of a tradition, Lloyd argues. At the same time, he says that it is only when one recognizes how norms and practices create each other that there is room to question how one wants to navigate this fact, and that the bonds of a normative universe may be temporarily loosened. In contrast, when we are lured into simple dichotomies where modernity is portrayed as shallow and an enchanted past is idealized as deeply meaningful, we are brought into a supersessionist fantasy. Such a fantasy states that the ordinary is insignificant. This leaves us without the possibility of turning our attention towards the spaces and places where openings to something completely new arise.³⁷

Furthermore, Lloyd explains that rituals are community practices that reflect or grow out of social norms. They reinforce norms and are created to secure power.³⁸ This is why, he argues, Simone Weil refused to consummate her long flirtation with the Catholic church – she was aware of how susceptible she was to practices that reinforce the feelings of attachment to a social world. From the outside, ritual and liturgy may look identical, but only the latter has the capacity to stir the heart. Everything else is only a good feeling that arises when we are assured by the institutions that we are part of that we adhere to the ideals which that particular community ideology supports.³⁹

Many presentations of dance in religious studies and theological reflection, are caught up in the same setup as Lloyd has explained. Religious dance practices are often adhered to as rituals. However, instead of seeing that the ritual is there to consolidate a particular community ideology, ritual dance is described as a transformational practice.⁴⁰

In contrast to rituals, liturgy, Lloyd writes:

refers to moments when it is as if social norms do not hold sway, and these moments may inflect the social norms that do hold sway. Liturgy opens new possibilities, not by revealing an antinomian future, but by loosening the always already present pull that social norms have on us, thereby broadening our political imaginations.⁴¹

When speaking about liturgy, Lloyd describes a space that opens up where social norms are suspended. For only a short moment, the “need to do what one is supposed to do feels as if it no longer holds sway."⁴² This does not come from the fact that we step out of a tradition and are somehow free to do whatever we want to. Neither is it because we are now taking part in “alternative” practices that form new or different beliefs in us.⁴³ Instead, Lloyd envisions a gap between practice and norms that is not closed by participating in ritual, but rather explored as if there are no norms. Again, Lloyd finds support in Weil, who argues that the only way we can escape the grip of the social is to turn towards our intelligence. By “intelligence” Weil means our capacity for attention.⁴⁴ Lloyd explains:

Intelligence is not holding particular propositions to be true, or having particular capacities. It is also not a practice that is created or perpetuated by an institution. (…) Intelligence is “fed” by attention, and intelligence makes possible the grasping of truths otherwise indiscernible.⁴⁵

Stated in another way, practicing our attention by intensively focusing on something is a method which exhausts our expectations and mental possibilities until we let go and are suddenly gifted with the unexpected. Weil explains that at its highest form, practicing our attention is like prayer – a way to surrender our will to something other then the self.⁴⁶ When we do this – which Coakley names “contemplative practices” – what can be brought forth are new truths from outside of ourselves or doubts concerning the social order and self-deceptive tendencies that we otherwise are caught up in.⁴⁷ Without such openings the human condition would be to circle in endless loops of performativity.⁴⁸

Coakley describes contemplative practices in her Théologie totale, as committing ourselves “to the discipline of particular graced bodily practices which, over the long haul, afford certain distinctive ways of knowing."⁴⁹ She also brings up the fact that artwork may function in a similar way – opening us up to the unknown. Lloyd, on the other hand, does not specify his thoughts on this point, leaning instead on the writings of Weil, where both traditional school exercises as well as getting intensively caught up in artwork, qualify for the practices that train our intelligence.⁵⁰

Contrary to Coakley's use of contemplative practices to gain insight into doctrinal truths about God, Lloyd specifies that he is not suggesting that practicing attention brings access to transcendence. Instead he writes that attention promotes intelligence and increases our capacity for discernment. The truths that appear – that were invisible before – are not coming to us from some spiritual realm. They are “worldly” truths that were obscured for us by the social, by enchantment and by our lack of humility. Attention of this kind prepares us to see the world more clearly as it teaches us where our views of the world have gone astray.⁵¹

Both Coakley's and Lloyd's discussions open up for the possiblity of practices that train an embodied intelligence of discernment. This is not the same thing as saying that all knowledge is embodied.⁵² However, the way Ulla Schmidt speaks about knowledge production as being tied to our perceptual capacities and being something trained, opens up for a similar understanding. She writes: “perception is layered, and includes several ways of attending to, connecting with and being ‘in touch’ with reality.”⁵³ It is by harnessing different techniques for realizing this layeredness that our capacities for attention are awakened.⁵⁴ None of these authors bring forth dance as a practice which teaches specific kinds of attention.⁵⁵ However, Coakley does speak about the possibility that worship may affect us in this way.⁵⁶ In the following, I will argue that dance may sometimes be, but is not always, a practice which enables this intelligence for discernment.

The capacity for discernment is not only necessary for a theologian, it also goes far beyond what are often seen as traditional ways of doing academic work. Dancing and writing or reading do not oppose each other, neither is dancing used merely as a metaphor to enliven a theological discussion nor as exciting new empirical material to be analyzed.⁵⁷ Rather, when theology as a discipline has turned towards realising that the nexus of practices and lived experiences of people is at the root of its endeavours, the practitioners of theology will also realize that new skills are needed in order to take part in this kind of work. There is intelligence beyond reading and writing skills which can be practiced and from which insights can be drawn that bring our understanding of the world we live in into a new place.

Finally, making distinctions between ritual and liturgy in the way described by Lloyd also opens up the gap between practice and norms in a way that enables us to recognize that “the relationship between doctrine and liturgy is bidirectional, each influencing the other. But it is also asymmetric.”⁵⁸ Lloyd explains: “This is because the act of liturgy ‘is not reducible to conceptual propositions,’ it always retains an ‘ambiguity.’”⁵⁹. As theologians, our task is to live with this ambiguity. And it is towards such an understanding of perichōrēsis, that I now want to move.

Theologies of perichōrēsis

When it comes to theological writing on dance, Riyako Cecilia Hikota has recently brought forth the fact that, particularly in theological texts from the modern period, surprisingly many authors have turned to the use of dance as a metaphor for presenting different theological ideas.⁶⁰ Often this is built around the use of the Greek term “perichōrēsis”, both in a Trinitarian and Christological sense. Hikota is critical of many of these usages, as she argues that people have misunderstood the term.⁶¹ In particular, she condemns building a theology of dance on a Trinitarian concept because there is a risk of promoting pantheism or panentheism and obscuring the original meaning of perichōrēsis. She is also looking for a dialogue within theology where the embodied nature of dance is adopted more concretely, instead of dance mainly being referred to as a metaphor.⁶²

In this last section, I will present my remarks on these arguments in order to deepen the dialogue. First, Hikota states that St. Gregory of Nazianzus (330–390) used the verb perichōreō for the first time in a theological context.⁶³ She explains that the concept was then developed by St. Maximus the Confessor (580–662) in the seventh century. In both of these cases, the term was used in a Christological sense, which according to Hikato, is the best application of the idea regarding dancing. The primary implication is that as Christians, we do well in imagining Christ as our lover, partner and leader of the dance.

However, in using this image, Hikato seems to completely ignore the critical questions of desire and eros that lie implicit both in the traditions of Christianity that portray Christ as a lover and in the lived experiences of pouring ourselves out in dance as prayer.⁶⁴ To be in relationship with God through our embodied experiences of dance and prayer is very much in line with the more mystical traditions of Christianity.⁶⁵ As described by Weil and Lloyd, giving oneself to a practice of attention where the end result is a surrender to a force beyond ourselves is key to renewing our theological reflections. Such a practice both constitutes a form of intelligence needed for navigating the world we live in, and is at the core of what is described as liturgical transformation. Speaking thus, only about imagining Christ as partner and leader of the dance, while ignoring the aspect of desire imbedded in the forms such dancing may take, runs the risk of understanding all kinds of dancing with Christ in the same way.

To exemplify, Hikota speaks about Christ as the center of a cosmic dance, enabling human participation in their microcosmos with the bigger macrocosmos.⁶⁶ However, emphasizing ideas that state that generating embodied awareness through dance will lead to creating a harmonious relationship between humans and nature needs to be differentiated.⁶⁷ When the aspect of messiness embedded in desire and ordinary life, as well as the theological ideas of a need for Christ to purge our desires – through forming a new intelligence in us – is left out, the kind of dancing that emerges runs the risk of promoting specific forms of “pureness” in body or spirit.⁶⁸ In the traditions of dance and religion in the West, we can see the consequences of such forms of ritual dance both in the promotion of the “spiritual feminine” in Duncan dance in the Third Reich, and in the aspirations of romanticizing “pagan” elements of “spiritual awakening” by white bodies on stage.⁶⁹ The fact that dancers in churches have found inspiration from these kinds of rituals and report that harmonious dancing gives them pleasure, is not a sign that this is the kind of dancing that should be promoted by theological reflection.

Similarly, when dance groups that work with feminist theologies of solidarity⁷⁰ and black womanist traditions of dance and theology⁷¹ create rituals or liturgies that oppose patriarchal structures and supersessionist tendencies, these may “feel” very unpleasant, even violent. Yet, bringing up the sensory and emotional aspects of suffering, affliction and pain in dance rituals may bring healing and a vital element of authentic embodied prayer to the worship services.⁷² These may be rituals that secure power into the hands of marginalized voices – or, they could end up being practices that open up the space of liturgy, revealing and altering the norms of our churches and society. From all these cases we see that not all dances are created equally. These remarks bring me to the objections I would like to add to Hikota's remarks about a Trinitarian use of perichōrēsis.

She states that when reading St. John of Damascus (676–749), who in the seventh century extended the Christological usage of the word to the Trinitarian use, one needs to understand that it is not a dance within the Trinity that is explained. In the patristic literature, images are portrayed either of a celestial dance involving creatures in heaven or, then, an idea of the Trinity as dance.⁷³ I agree with Hikota that many metaphorical usages of the idea of dance seem to be at odds with the embodied experiences of dancing.⁷⁴ I am also wary about the use of certain Trinitarian renderings of perichōrēsis. However, my reasons for this seem to be different from Hikota. I imagine a theological journey between Scylla and Charybdis.

On the one hand, we have a social Trinitarianism where the “mutual” indwelling within the Trinity is understood as a pattern stretching itself out into the whole cosmos. Everything is perceived as a mutual relationship between equal partners where the distinctions between God and creatures are erased. Along the line of Sarah Coakley’s work, I agree that there are severe problems with using the idea of the prototypical relationship within the Trinity as an easily accessible model for ecclesial, political and personal relations. An uncritical notion that what a church community needs to strive for is the harmonious relationships of all people, based on a utopian idea that this is what we are called to when we partake in the dance of the Trinity, is what I find problematic.⁷⁵ In the terminology of Lloyd, this would be the enchanting language of a theology which aligns practice and norm. Coakley calls it an idolatrous project.⁷⁶ More importantly though – returning to the relationship between desire and prayer – she writes:

Because we are embodied, created beings, we may indeed (through the graced aid of the Spirit) “imitate” Christ, the God/man; but we cannot without Christ’s mediation directly imitate the Trinity itself.⁷⁷

The question is thus, not so much about our ideas of the Trinity – a theme I think it wise for each theologian to not make too big and certain claims about. Instead, what is at stake is the question of what we as humans are called to do.

At the other end of this same dilemma, we may find the neo-platonic forms of theology that want to proclaim a vision where creation started from nothing, expanded into something and will once again return to a quiet stillness and the end of all striving and suffering. In Coakley’s account, this image, which is strongly linked to structure and order, both in the heavenly and worldly spheres, is the Christian community envisioned by St. Augustine.⁷⁸ In some theological accounts of dance, the striving to partake in the ongoing harmonious dance of the creatures in the cosmos is perceived as the point of liturgy.⁷⁹ This, I find, may have devastating consequences, and not only for the struggle to create perfect Christian communities. It can also draw people into a performance oriented and perfectionistic idea of “doing liturgy” in the right way – a striving towards skills and competences that are not rooted in loving service, but rather in practices of righteousness.⁸⁰

What I want to propose is neither of these two options. I perceive a chimaera of freedom and life force, but no real acknowledgement of the pain and suffering that human experiences also contain. It becomes a meek God who has lost the ability to establish justice.⁸¹ If dancing is allowed at all, it becomes only a beautiful practice with neither ritual nor liturgical possibilities.⁸²

Instead, I opt for two other possibilities. The first one is built on Coakley’s depictions of the Trinitarian ideas of St. Gregory of Nyssa. She explains that for him, the practice of prayer and contemplation ultimately leads to a loss of control and an over-flooding of our senses. She also explains that his vision of eschaton and potentially ongoing worship in heaven is ecstatic. The longing we sense in our bodies will not end. Instead, our desires will be transformed, and with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in our bodies, we will be able to contain more and more of this flood of life force.⁸³ In this kind of liturgical vision, there is, as I see it, room both for more ecstatic movements of dance and for stillness in the body and rapture of the mind. However, the progression is from the Spirit within us praying, not from our own efforts to enter into ecstasy. We may grow with Christ as our partner, which is a wild ride into unpredictability and noetic darkness.⁸⁴

Such a process can been exemplified by Mechthild von Magdeburg's (1207–1282) writings. Hikota also brings her up as an example of dancing with Christ, but she does not go into the details of the practice. Instead, the sexual images described are maintained as only words showing a dance leading to a spiritual intercourse with the divinity.⁸⁵ The idea of dance in Mechtild's works is often viewed as an image for something else, rather than an actual practice that she or the sisters reading her books would have engaged in. However, if we play with the idea that Mechtild described actual practices that she engaged in, a new possibility emerges.

In the dialogue between the soul of Mechtild and her beloved Christ, he states that the virtues have shown her how to dance. These maidens have given Mechtild dance steps to practice and she is encouraged to follow their lead. This could be imagined as a very rigorous set of steps for precise movements. In the framework presented by Lloyd, he speaks about Weil giving her attention to the rules of algebra as a practice that is easily misunderstood. Such devotion might actually look exactly like the legal framework of ritual – the willingness to give in to cohesion. However, when the movements are done out of love, this enables a transformation into liturgy. It is thus very important that we do not spiritualize the practices of dance, but keep them deeply connected to the deeply felt embodied sensations of desire. It is when a body is simultaneously connected to the spiritual and sexual source of desire – finding the pull of eros – that a path of transformation is opened. It is from such a place that I imagine Mechtild answering her beloved:

I cannot dance, Lord, unless you lead me. If you want me to leap with abandon, you must intone the song. Then I shall leap into love, from love into knowledge, from knowledge into enjoyment, and from enjoyment beyond all human sensations. There I want to remain, yet want also to circle higher still.⁸⁶

In the practice of dance where love is ignited, a space may appear where we are not caught in the duality of transcendence and immanence, but instead are Touched by Transcendence, as the title of Mayra Riviera’s important work opens up for.⁸⁷ What I want to suggest, with the example of Mechtild, is that we can see dancing here both as the practice that forms her attention and a liturgical event. Once her body has gained its full intelligence – by practicing dancing with the virtues and being led by the Spirit – she is also able to discern the calling of Christ, who takes her into a liturgical state. Furthermore, when drawn as a fully formed and embodied person into this dance, it is a place not beyond – into transcendence – but beyond the duality of transcendence and immanence.⁸⁸

Finally, I also see another more subtle space for dancing. Hikota argues that there is no evidence for a Trinitarian discourse on perichōrēsis continuing into the medieval period. She states that when the Greek perichōrēsis was later translated into Latin, two different words were used to distinguish between its static and dynamic senses.⁸⁹ Also, Pater Fredrik Heiding expands on what happens to the Trinitarian dance after the shift to Latin. He states that the use of the term “circum-in-sedere” – “to sit in a circle” – was St. Thomas of Aquinas’ (1225-1274) preferred rendition. While at the same time, Bonaventure (1217/21-1274) was the author who chose the term “circum-in-cedere” – “a depiction of moving around”.⁹⁰ Both Heiding and Coakley turn to artwork in order to understand the relationship here in a deeper way. Coakley presents the circular frolicking of the hares and Heiding the more contained triskele symbol.⁹¹ In these images, just like in the interpretation presented by Hikota and Heiding, there is room for ongoing movement, and the ability to stay in relationship and communion while in stillness. The one does not exclude the other – there is space for both. One can argue that the Patristic sense of living in the ordinary as messy is not completely broken. Heiding also moves into the more mysterious aspect of Thomas Aquinas’ writing. Aquinas is, according to Heiding, not an author who leaves his theological thinking to dualities. We do not need to focus on the movement or the stillness, the heavenly or the worldly. Instead, by sensing into the space in between, the experience of being drawn into the divine dance can be something we perceive in our bodies.⁹² In this description of relating to the divine dance, I find a much more subtle practice which is equally important for our formation as worshipping beings in God's creation. This is not the ecstatic dance of Mechtild, nor the merely “happy” feeling of floating around in endless expansion. Instead, there might be a dynamic ease which is the practice of sensing the different layers and textures of being in touch. In the dance practices that I have taken part in, just like in the worship service “Den Stora Berättelsen”, there are moments when we just close our eyes and turn to a capacity akin to “perceive-perceive-at-flesh-inside”⁹³. This is the closest to a translation we can get of the Anlo-Ewe term “seselelame”, a perception formed differently than the system familiar from Western forms of education. Such further explorations will need to be the topic of another article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The mass can be watched in its entirety from here: Karlstad Stift, “Den Stora Berättelsen.”

2 In The Church of Sweden the tradition of dancing is called “Heliga Danser” and the term was coined by Maria Rönn, who, together with Marie-Louise von Malmborg, were the initiators of circle dancing in churches in Sweden. Rönn, “Dans”; Malmborg, “Min Väg Till Dansen.”

3 Eight musicians affiliated with Wermland Opera were playing the instruments. Anders Göranzon and Pär Jorsäter composed the music. The choreography was created by the minister Hans Kvarnström, together with the group of dancers that regularly meet in Karlstad to dance with him and Cecilia Hardestam. Karlstad Stift, “Dansa Tro.”

4 In 2014-2016, I conducted participatory ethnographic fieldwork in two different classes linked with the Church of Sweden where dancing, bodies and movement were central to how people were taught to be leaders in their local communities.

5 Lloyd, The Problem With Grace, 119.

6 Authors like Kimerer L. LaMothe and Laura S. Grillo tend to approach dance from the point of view of Religious Studies or Philosophy. Grillo, “African Rituals,”; Grillo, An Intimate Rebuke; LaMothe, Theory and Method; LaMothe, Nietzsche’s Dancers: Isadora Duncan. An exception to this could be LaMothe, “Enlivening Spirits: Shaker Dance,” 103–24.

7 See also: Marshall, Joining the Dance.

8 My definition of theology arises from the classic “knowledge of God” and aims at articulating language around our experiences of God. Borrowing from Coakley, I further add: “theology involves not merely the metaphysical task of adumbrating a vision of God, the world, and humanity, but simultaneously the epistemological task of cleansing, reordering, and redirecting the apparatuses of one’s own thinking, desiring, and seeing.” Coakley, God, Sexuality, 20.

9 Hikota, “Beyond Metaphor,” 50–63; Hikota, “The Christological Perichōrēsis,” 191–204; Hikota, “Dancing to the Rhythm,” 305–18.

10 She writes: "An adequate theology never concerns itself merely with theory, but integrated theory with practice. This integration is called 'praxis'". Baker-Fletcher, Dancing With God, 33.

11 Ibid., 34.

12 Tønnessen Schuff, “Dancing Faith: Contemporary Christian,” 529–549. The turn to praxis, or bringing theory and practice together, is not limited to Dance and Theology, but can be increasingly seen in both Systematic and Practical theology. See the special issue "Practice in Contemporary Theology and Religious Studies" of Studia Theologica – Nordic Journal of Theology, Volume 75, Issue 1 (2021); Tveitereid, The Wiley Blackwell Companion; Marsh, “Introduction – Lived Theology,” 1–20.

13 Schroedter, “Intertwinements,” 72–3.

14 "What I am suggesting is a picture of the plane of norms parallel to the plane of practice. Each plane is textured with ridges and grooves. The two planes are suspended at a distance from each other. The ridges and grooves on each are aligned, though not perfectly. Practices give rise to norms, norms give rise to practices: the two planes are held together. But norms always misrepresent practices, and practices always fail to match norms: the two planes are held apart. At some moments, it seems like the gap narrows: it appears that what one does is just the thing to do. At other moments, it seems like the gap widens: failures make it seem as though practices and norms could never match. Both are illusions; both obscure the space in between, the middle: this is the constitutive gap, the place where ordinary life is lived." Lloyd, The Problem With Grace, 212.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., 13.

17 LaMothe, Between Dancing and Writing; LaMothe, Nietzsche’s Dancers: Isadora Duncan; Schnütgen, “Dance and Gender,” 157; Dance as Third Space; Walz, “Dance as Third Space,” 27–68.

18 For the most extensive historical overview: Dickason, Ringleaders of Redemption, and a more theological discussion: Hellsten, Bone and Marrow.

19 Melody Gabrielle Beard-Shouse, “The Circle Dance”; Yingling, “Singing With the Savior” 255-79; Dilley, “Christus Saltans,” 237–53; Schlapbach, “Dancing With Gods,” 213–35; Klinghardt, “Ritual Dynamics of Inspiration,” 139-61.

20 Miller Renberg and Phillis, Cursed Carolers in Context, 186; Miller Renberg, Women, Dance.

21 Knäble, Eine Tanzende Kirche; Knäble, “Canons & Choreographies,” 139–54; Hellsten, “The Liminal Space,” 1–32.

22 Dance as Third Space; Hikota, “Beyond Metaphor: The Trinitarian,” 50–63; Hikota, “The Christological Perichōrēsis,” 191–204.

23 Rahner, Man At Play; LaMothe, Theory and Method.

24 McGuire, “Embodied Practices: Negotiation and Resistance,” 187–200; Tønnessen Schuff, “Dancing Faith: Contemporary Christian,” 529–49.

25 Suchner, “Dancing From Doing Theology,” 319–34; Schnütgen, “Dance and Gender,” 155–74.

26 Afdal, “Two Concepts,” 8.

27 A similar tendency can be seen in LaMoth's Between Dancing and Writing, which seems to have enchanted many authors within Dance and Theology.

28 In contrast, inspired by the liturgical theologians of the 70’s and 80’s and the Patristic statement lex orandi est lex crede, Lloyd seems to move towards a sacramental idea where sign and signifier, symbol, images and mystery are all held together. Lloyd, The Problem With Grace, 110, 118–119; Schmemann, For the Life, 135–151.

29 Afdal, “Two Concepts,” 6–29; Tveitereid, The Wiley Blackwell Companion.

30 Afdal, “Two Concepts,” 11.

31 Ibid., 11.

32 Ibid.

33 Coakley, God, Sexuality.

34 Lloyd, The Problem With Grace, 205.

35 Ibid., 117–121.

36 Ibid., 3–4.

37 Ibid., 110–120.

38 Ibid., 110, 119.

39 Ibid., 121–3.

40 Walz, “Dance as Third Space,” 27–68; Schnütgen, “Dance and Gender,” 155–74; Scharf da Silva, “Beyond the Gaps,” 269–87.

41 Lloyd, The Problem With Grace, 110.

42 Ibid., 121.

43 Neither liturgy as feeling nor liturgy as ritual are viable options. Ibid., 119.

44 Ibid., 120–124.

45 Ibid., 123.

46 Weil, Waiting for God, 227.

47 Lloyd, The Problem With Grace; Coakley, God, Sexuality; Coakley, “Spiritual Perception,” 153–76.

48 Coakley, God, Sexuality, 65, 78–92.

49 Ibid., 19.

50 Lloyd, The Problem With Grace, 123–126.

51 Ibid., 123. Such arguments are not foreign to Coakley's current work on racism: Coakley, “Spiritual Perception,” 153–76.

52 Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh, 640.

53 Ibid., 34.

54 Kotva, “Attention.”

55 However, such suggestions have been made in Hellsten, “A Contemplative Practice,” 117–34, and the production of Lindfors, Ljus Är Trädet Rotat.

56 Coakley, The New Asceticism, 124.

57 Ulla Schmidt writes that all knowledge is embodied and that “Practicing becomes a way of thinking and knowing, not just raw material for 'thinking done elsewhere'". Schmidt, “Practicing as Knowing,” 37.

58 Lloyd, The Problem With Grace, 119.

59 Ibid., 119.

60 In Hikota, “Beyond Metaphor,” 50–63, her main focus is on works by modern theologians, starting with C. S. Lewis and Paul S. Fiddes. However, she also mentions the development of relational views on the Trinity, which she attributes to Jürgen Moltmann (1926–) and, at a later point, Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988). Later on she turns to the feminist and liberation theologians that seem to be the main target of her text: Patricia Wilson-Kastner (1944–1998), Catherine Mowry LaCugna (1952–1997), Leonardo Boff (1938–), Elizabeth A. Johnson (1941–) and Karen Baker-Fletcher.

61 She writes: “In terms of the exact meaning of the Greek word, the noun perichōrēsis comes from the verb perichōreō, which is compounded from two words: the preposition peri (πϵρί), which usually means 'around' but here adds the idea of reciprocity, and the verb chōreō (χωρέω), which can be translated as 'to cede a place to' or 'to make a room for something,' as this verb is directly related to the noun chōra (χώρα), which means 'space.' Just as space can be perceived in two opposite ways – both as something extending or spreading and as something receiving or containing – the verb chōreō (χωρέω) also functions in two ways. Accordingly, the word perichōrēsis has both a static sense and a dynamic one: in the former sense, the word is translated as 'coinherence' or 'mutual indwelling,' and in the latter sense, it is translated as 'interpenetration.'” Ibid., 52

62 Ibid.; Hikota, “The Christological Perichōrēsis,” 191–204.

63 She explains: “The Christological usage of the word tried to express that, in Christ, the human nature is united to the divine nature without confusion in a reciprocal communication.“ (“Beyond Metaphor and Dance,” 51–52), and continues “if we read the cited texts closely, they are actually speaking either about the celestial dance involving creatures in heaven or about the mystic’s spiritual dance with the Triune God, rather than the divine dance within the Trinity itself. (We have to distinguish between the idea of the Trinity as dance or dance within the Trinity and that of Christ or God as dancer, for which we have many historical examples.)” Ibid., 52.

64 In her second article on this topic, Hikato sites St. Maximus the Confessor: “Revelation is the inexpressible interpenetration [perichōrēsis (πϵριχώρησις)] of the believer with (or toward, προς) the object of belief and takes place according to each believer’s degree of faith. Through that interpenetration the believer finally returns to his origin. The return is the fulfilment of desire. Fulfilment of desire is ever-active repose in the object of desire. Such repose is eternal uninterrupted enjoyment of this object. Enjoyment of this kind entails participation in supranatural divine realities. This participation consists in the participant becoming like that in which he participates.“ (“The Christological Perichōrēsis,” 197). However, she does not expand on the themes of desire and deification process described in this section.

65 Dickason, Ringleaders of Redemption, 141–74; Hellsten, Bone and Marrow, 227–30; Hamburger, Nuns as Artists.

66 Hikota, “The Christological Perichōrēsis,” 197–200.

67 Hikota's main source of inspiration is LaMoth's idea of an ecokinetic knowledge.

68 On purging of desire see: Coakley, God, Sexuality.

69 Schwan, “Ethos Formula,” 23–39; Schwan, “Theologies of Modern Dance,” 75–8; Hellsten, “Dance as an Agency,” 55–76; Drury, “The Double Life,” 338–89; Karina, Marion, Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern.

70 Beckman, “Sophia: Symbol of Christian,” 32–54; Edgardh, Sofia – Den Vishet; Edgardh, Feminism Och Liturgi; Méndez Montoya, “Flesh, Body, and Embodiment,” 291–304.

71 Baker-Fletcher, Dancing With God.

72 Méndez Montoya, “Flesh, Body, and Embodiment,” 291–304.

73 Hikota, “Beyond Metaphor,” 52.

74 This has been expanded in Brown, God and Grace.

75 Coakley, God, Sexuality, xiv, 27–8, 270–72, 301–3. I am not stating that this is an accurate reading of LaCuna and the other “social” Trinitarians depicted by Coakley and Hikota. Investigation of what the various theologians chosen by Hikota may have actually meant with their writing is beyond the scope of this text.

76 Ibid., 309.

77 Ibid., 309.

78 Ibid., 268–95.

79 Tronca, “Spectacula Turpitudinum Christian Schemata,”. In part this seems also to be the main conclusion of Dickason, Ringleaders of Redemption.

80 Lloyd identifies the two poles of making liturgy: either a free floating affective state or a legalistic structure. Lloyd, The Problem With Grace.

81 Again, I am not stating that this is an accurate reading of LaCuna and the other “social” Trinitarians depicted by Hikota. Particularly the work of Baker-Fletcher, Dancing With God and Holmes, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices, open up different vistas.

82 Lloyd, The Problem With Grace, 116–21.

83 Coakley, God, Sexuality, 281–88, 294–95.

84 Coakley has more to say about this in relation to the writing of Pseudo Dionysius. Ibid., 311–22. However, the length of this paper prevents me from expanding further on those aspects.

85 Hikota, “The Christological Perichōrēsis,” 194.

86 Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light, I, 44. The translation is taken from Magdeburg, The Flowing Light, 59.

87 Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence.

88 Bornemark, Kroppslighetens Mystik.

89 Hikota, “Beyond Metaphor,” 52.

90 Heiding, Lek För Guds Skull, 173.

91 Coakley, God, Sexuality, 252–53; Heiding, “Hur Olika Är Gudomspersonerna?” 27.

92 In the dance class Kropp & Rörelse it was an ongoing practice that we moved freely in space, finding the in betweens of each situation. Another practice that we took part in and which speaks to this description is when we mimicked each others movements and practices, sensing with and side by side with the other person. Ibid., 25–9.

93 Geurts, Culture and the Senses.