Paper for Professor Spolsky’s class

“Shakespeare in Performance”

Bar Ilan University, Israel

Winter semester 2005-2006

Bibliodrama as embodied knowledge and performance

 

Introduction to Bibliodrama

Bibliodrama[1] is an improvisational theatre technique for the study of (primarily) biblical narrative, invented and promulgated by Dr Peter Pitzele, an American teacher and writer.  Invited in 1984 to teach a class at the Jewish Theological Seminary, he decided to utilize his PhD in English literature and his training as a clinical psychodramatist, and asked the students to take the part of Moses, answering Pitzele’s questions as if they were in Moses’ shoes. Thus the technique was born, and continued with a success that astonished Pitzele himself.

Pitzele discovered that what had taken place was akin in many ways to the midrashic process –  “…an immensely long tradition of commentary, storytelling, and imaginative interpretation of the Bible…that sought to fill in the gaps in the narrative… Without knowing it I had stumbled into a conversation with the Bible that had been going on for thousands of years….”[2]

The Bibliodramatic process involves participants sitting in a circle, studying a story from the Bible, and then being “interrogated” by the facilitator with questions of a factual or emotional nature, the answers to which do not appear in the text. The participants must answer as the characters. Thus for example, if the story being studied is the Cain and Abel story, on the verse (Genesis 4:3)

And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering to the Lord

the facilitator might ask, “Cain, no one has ever brought an offering to God before – what prompted you to do this? What is your motivation?” Later, when Cain’s offering is rejected, the facilitator might ask, “Cain, how do you feel now toward your brother?”

Questions may be posed not only to major characters but also to minor ones who are not given a voice (such as Cain’s wife) or are not even extant in the text (Abraham’s mother), to animals, and even to objects, requiring further reaches of the imagination.

 

Bibliodrama as embodied knowledge

In recent decades, scholars have spoken of “embodied” knowledge. Julia Walker for example writes, “By ‘meaning’ I do not mean a significance that is registered within the conceptual bandwidth of the brain. Rather, I mean a ‘significance that is registered within the body’s viscera, as emotional or experiential ‘knowledge’.[3] Dwight Conquergood notes that bodily knowledge can be “represented—made present—only through action, enactment, or performance.” [4]  Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty considers enactment as first and foremost a form of intentionality, one that is not cognitive and thus not prefaced by the thought, “I think that.” Rather, to engage bodily requires the exploration of bodily “I can”s, the guiding of the self toward ‘the intersensory unity of a ‘world’”.[5]

Lesa Lockford and Ronald J. Pelias, in exploring what occurs in improvisational theatre, suggest the term “bodily poeticizing” to explain how the performer’s body is a site of knowing. His or her aesthetic engagement and judgment is located in a corporeal presence, and there is performance-derived knowledge, which is no less real just because it lives in the body and not the mind.[6]

What makes improvised moments so potentially dynamic are the surprises that may arise from performers’ choices, from unpremeditated and apparently unbidden directions, which may move the scene in extraordinary and unpredictable ways. This is an act of bodily poeticizing.[7] Performers sometimes cannot explain their choices – they say, “It just felt right.”[8] The actors have moved beyond a constricted intellectual plane to respond in immediacy and trust the intuitive; and the “felt experience” rises into action in unexpected ways. [9]

This is true of Bibliodrama too, even if the latter by and large involves less movement and generation of original ideas than in ordinary improvisational theatre. Even in the simplest form of Bibliodramatic play, where the students sit for the entire time and simply respond, in character, to questions (or to other “characters”, giving rise to a spontaneous dialogue) the learning is embodied. Participants – some more, some less, depending on their personalities – are brought by their imaginations to be emotionally invested in what they are saying. The expression of emotions in character affects one’s actual emotional state; that is to say, they reach beyond a purely intellectual knowledge into the realm of the “viscera” as Walker puts it. This is true even though the participant is fully aware that this is a “performance” [10] – providing yet another refutation of J.L. Austin’s famous premise that a “performative utterance will…be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage”[11] (here there is no stage, but Austin would still no doubt classify the statements as void, since they are “fictitious”.)

That such emotions are indeed embodied may be seen when participants bring to bear, for dramatic support to their words, inflections and volume of voice, the use of hands when speaking, and emphatic movements of the entire body which are not “acting” but real manifestations of a felt emotion. These physical motions in turn further deepen and embody their experience, even bringing them on occasion to the point of tears.[12]

Additionally, Pitzele encourages activities that are more explicitly embodied, borrowing techniques from forms of family therapy inspired by the plastic arts, to “sculpt” the Biblical scene. Here, the facilitator transforms into a director, and participants are asked to pose in ways that indicate the dynamics between the characters in the story – who stands next to whom? How do their bodies indicate their relationships?

Pitzele notes: “Once group members are on their feet, as opposed to voicing their roles from their seats, your task as director begins in earnest, for when people stand and move they begin to create a space for play, and you have in effect a stage… The whole body becomes an expressive element; any movement may take on meaning… All such sculptings are interpretative because in fact every arrangement of bodies in space… becomes a way of seeing the story.”[13]

 

Bibliodrama as performance 

In the following, I wish to suggest that Bibliodrama is a type of performance not previously examined in the literature of performance studies.

Let us begin with Richard Schechner’s useful concept of “restored behaviour.” For him, it is this element – and not, as might be thought, a display of skills to an audience – which comprises the main characteristic of performance.[14] It is “living behaviour treated as a film editor treats strips of film. These strips can be rearranged, reconstructed.”[15] Performers get in touch with, recover, remember or even invent the strips of behaviour.[16]

Schechner cites various types of performance, casting his net widely, “from shamanism, exorcism, and trance to ritual theater and aesthetic theater, from initiation rites to liminal social dramas, from psychoanalysis to newer therapies like psychodrama, transactional analysis and primal.”[17] We see that psychodrama, from which Bibliodrama derived, appears in this list; however, Bibliodrama differs from psychodrama in being significantly text-based. While in psychodrama, personal dramas are recalled and recreated/reenacted for therapeutic purposes, in Bibliodrama participants need, on the contrary, to forget – to put aside what they have been taught in the past about the narrative, and to rather invent, using their imagination and intuition, interpretations to fill the gaps in the text.

Richard Bauman notes that all performance involves a concept of doubleness according to which the actual execution of an action is placed in mental comparison with a potential, an ideal or a remembered original model of that action.[18] In this case however such comparison is impossible, indeed irrelevant. Participants, while trying to reconstruct, imaginatively, a partial narrative, are aware that what they perform may be nothing like what “actually happened”- which is lost to us. In essence, they perform themselves through the story, and in doing so, restore the strip of the story for this group at this moment.

Bibliodrama is unusual in that it deals with sacred text, yet is neither ritual nor sacred theatre and has playful elements not usually associated with the sacred. It is a form of “serious play,”[19] and as such, bears all the characteristics and paradoxes of play, whereby while on one level what occurs is very real, on another it is clear that, as Bateson says, “the messages or signals exchanged…are in a certain sense untrue or not meant.”[20]

Lying between improvisational theatre, psychodrama and text-study, Bibliodrama may perhaps most accurately be entitled an improvisational performance of a studied text. Lockford and Pelias inform us, “when used in devised plays to create texts, improvisation is meant to move actors toward revitalizing a scene, toward discovering the new, the interesting, and the apt, toward advancing the text beyond its point of origin.”[21]  This statement is true of Bibliodrama also, but, once again, with differences: The aim is not to “create texts” but to experience them; and furthermore, Bibliodrama is not done for the sake of an outside audience but for the group alone, who are simultaneously audience and actors. The “insiders” and “outsiders”, to use Schechner’s language,[22] are one and the same. Even the facilitator is not truly an outsider.

Schechner has drawn up a table including an incredibly wide range of actions under the title of “performance” – theatrical events (classic and experimental), rituals, initiations, sports, elections, trials, PhD orals, pilgrimages, inaugurations, wars, commercials, films, boxing matches, parades and town meetings.[23] Yet with all its diversity, the list does not contain anything quite like Bibliodrama, which is a performance that is never repeated, that requires no rehearsals[24], is based upon text study, and is a secular activity using sacred materials, taking place anywhere a circle of people may sit – from synagogue to salon to classroom.

Schechner, however, in a more recent article, authored with James Thompson, comes closer to describing Bibliodrama when speaking of “social theatre” whose primary interest is the process (as opposed to “aesthetic theatre” aimed at an end product for public viewing).[25] Social theatre, rising in popularity after the social upheavals of the sixties, is performative, that is to say “as likely to bring about as to describe”;[26] aesthetics is not the ruling objective.[27] While both types may have aesthetic and social aspects, they have “differences of purpose, audiences, venues, and production values.”[28]

Social theatre lies outside the realm of commerce. It takes place in diverse locations – from prisons, refugee camps, and hospitals to schools, orphanages, and homes for the elderly. Its participants are often underprivileged and marginalized, or even displaced individuals who have lost touch with a sense of groupness. Occurring in locations that are not usual theatre spaces, it turns nonperformers into performers.[29]

Social theatre draws on theory that pertains to the particular locations where the projects happen. So, for example, theatre in schools has used educational theories to interrogate its work; theatre for development has used development theory to guide its analysis; theatre in prisons has used different models of criminology or rehabilitation theory to explain its practice.[30]

Bibliodrama may therefore perhaps be defined as a specialized form of social theatre; with a social-therapeutic-intellectual agenda; one aimed not at socio-economic oppression but rather at healing a certain fragmentation and fracturing in contemporary society between self and group, and self and text. The Bibliodramatic act is not simply a performative act or one of “bodily poeticizing” as in improvisational-theatre; it is an interpretative act that connects the individual deeply – in the site of the body – to the broader community of those nurtured by the same sacred texts.

 

Performance of text

The fact that Bibliodrama is a performance based on a sacred text is particularly interesting. The Bible is a text that for the most part – and especially in traditional Judaism – has been studied rather than performed. Julia Walker has discussed the performance/literature split that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century.[31] Walker explains that when the new Critics attempt “to exclude performative modes of communication from their consideration, they nonetheless find that language alone cannot fully account for a work’s overall meaning.”[32]

Walker notes that the postmodernist turn to performance is a reaction to modernism’s repression of the performative dimensions of language.[33] It seems as if Bibliodrama in a similar fashion serves to draw out of the Bible, a highly “gapped” text replete with narratives, its innate performative meanings that have historically been relegated to an inconsequential place compared to intellectual study and interpretation. In bringing bodies into the picture, Bibliodrama enables interpretations to arise through intuition and sedimentation that might otherwise be inaccessible to the students or need to be taught to them from the (often oblique) midrashic corpus.

Walker moreover writes that “performance has often been the avant-garde’s favorite mode of resisting the status quo.”[34] Bibliodrama also resists the established status quo by transferring the authority for interpretation from the classic interpreters or the teacher to the group, making it more pluralistic and egalitarian. For this reason, more conservative participants sometimes resist Bibliodrama as being irreverent to this text.

Yet there is something strongly Jewish about Bibliodrama, making as it does the ancient text contemporary. The closest thing to Bibliodrama is the proceedings at the Passover Seder, when the story of the Exodus is revived and – to some extent – relived, in order to fulfil the rabbinical injunction “In every generation, a person must see him or herself as if s/he left Egypt.” Unfortunately, the exposition in the Hagadda often swamps the hoped for reliving of the Exodus, transforming the evening into one full of intellectual discursive activity. There are, nonetheless, some households (especially those with young children, or from particular ethnic groups) who reenact the story, putting on plays or jumping over water according to custom. There is certainly a Bibliodramatic element to this evening like no other.

With all its similarity to midrash, perhaps an activity such as Bibliodrama, with its dialogical, democratic methodology, granting equal voice no matter what the participant’s background,[35] could only have arisen in the modern period. Its emphasis on the self suits the times – today many students are anxious to find “themselves” within the ancient texts which otherwise seem defunct or alienating. Yet Bibliodrama simultaneously liberates the individual from the narrowness of the self, providing an opportunity to experience “me behaving as if I am someone else” for the time being[36], or rather, an experience of that state between “me” and “not me” which Winnicott notes characterizes play.[37]

 

Embodied pedagogy

All of the above indicates that Bibliodrama is a technique it would be well to introduce into the classroom, a place where the potentials for embodied knowledge are not yet fully realized. Sally Harrison-Pepper writes, “Far too often our students come to us as passive learners, trained to submit to what Paulo Freire has called the ‘banking’ model of education, in which instructors place their knowledge into supposedly empty student receptacles.”[38] This is a waste of educational potential, because “students’ bodies contain vital tools for learning, and experiential activities simply help students to use their bodies and minds in meaningful and memorable ways.”[39]

Harrison-Pepper utilized her performance background to create a series of classroom techniques she calls “dramas of persuasion,” generating kinetic experiences of abstract concepts.  Thus, readings in feminist theory were accompanied by improvisational exercises around issues of power and gender; readings on play were followed by a workshop in which students actually played. Students reported: “[The workshops] let us experience by doing rather than experience by being told how it happens.”[40] Even those initially suspicious of or even resistant to an experiential component in classroom work eventually become engaged in and moved by the process;[41] the students’ non-theatre background, far from an impediment, possibly even enhanced their ability to conceive of things in unique and provocative ways.[42]

Bibliodrama too may be introduced into groups that are initially hesitant and suspicious, and the vast majority of them will take to it very quickly.[43] The technique may serve to embody any narrative text, not just the Bible; and, since the students do not need to leave their seats, this may be achieved without requiring the kind of energy and rehearsal (or indeed audience) that theatrical dramatization entails.

 

Conclusion

Bibliodrama holds the potential to fulfill a number of important functions in society. Within the classroom, it is a fairly trouble-free way to embody knowledge. Outside of the classroom, what with television replacing community rituals such as story-telling around the fire, perhaps Bibliodrama can become a new form of story- telling – an unfolding story, old yet new, told by an entire group.[44] Furthermore, in an age of suspicion against organized religion, Bibliodrama may serve to create a sacred space that is meaningful and transcendent yet at the same time non-threatening and playful.

And lastly, for those invested in keeping tradition alive, Bibliodrama serves to maintain the relevance of the texts by harnessing the dynamism of the ever-changing self. In this it accords with the rabbinic expostulation on the verse in Deuteronomy (32:47):

“For it is not an empty thing for [from] you – and if it is empty, it is from you, for you do not invest (yourselves) in it.”[45]

Bibliography

 

Austin, J.L., How to Do Things with Words, 2^nd ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, editors. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962.

 

Bateson, Gregory, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” (1955) reprinted in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York, 1972, 177-193.

 

Carlson, Marvin, Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2^nd edition. New York: Routledge, 1996.

 

Fiebach, Joachim, “Dimensions of Theatricality in Africa,” Research in African Literatures 30.4 (1999) 186-201.

 

Harrison-Pepper, Sally. “Dramas of Persuasion: Performance Studies and Interdisciplinary Education.” Theatre Topics, 9.2 (1999) 141-156

 

Lockford, Lesa and Pelias, Ronald J. “Bodily Poeticizing in Theatrical Improvisation: A Typology of Performative Knowledge,” Theatre Topics 14.2 (2004) 431-443

 

Pitzele, Peter, Scripture Windows: Towards a Practice of Bibliodrama. Torah Aura Productions, 1998.

 

Schechner, Richard, “Collective Reflexivity: Restoration of Behavior,” in A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology, ed. Jay Ruby, Philadelphia, 1982. 39-81.

 

Schechner, Richard, “Magnitudes of Performance,” in Performance Theory, New York: Routledge, 2^nd ed. 1988, 251-288.

 

Schechner, Richard and Thompson, James, “Why ‘Social Theatre’?” The Drama Review, 48,3 (Fall 2004) 11-16.

 

Walker, Julia, “Why Performance? Why Now? Textuality and the Rearticulation of Human Presence,” Yale Journal of Criticism, 16, 1 (2003) 149-175.