The Élan Vital and Sacred Research: Questioning the Spiritual Imperative in Performance Studies

Abstract

In this essay I examine calls within the discipline of performance studies to understand the work of performance as spiritual or sacred. Using the concept of the élan vital, I explain how such calls are often lacking in explanatory power, negate the body, and are problematically conflated with virtue/moral behavior. I provide a sustained analysis of Norman Denzin's Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture to demonstrate this often problematic conflation. I then suggest how performance studies work that is informed by sacred and spiritual spaces as sites of study has more potential for reflexivity.

Keywords:

• Spirituality
• Sacred
• Religious
• Élan vital
• Auto-ethnography

Acknowledgements

I am particularly thankful to Jay Brower, Andrea Davis, Abigail Myers, Joshua Myers, Ron Pelias, Heidi Rose, Desiree Rowe, Nathan Stucky, John Warren, and the two anonymous reviewers for direction in this project and for reading/reviewing multiple drafts of this essay.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

W. Benjamin Myers

W. Benjamin Myers is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at University of South Carolina Upstate