Performance, Religion, and Spirituality

Front Matter

Alexandra Mackenzie Johns — 2026-04-28

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Sense of Caste as Sense of Ritual

Neeraja Sasikumar — 2026-04-28

The paper explores the interplay of performance and caste in the ritual festival of Thirayattam in Kerala in South India. This day-long festival features the performances of Thirayattam, in which Dalit (“lower caste”), performers transform and dance as deities in a state of possession trance. In events of the festival, there is ritual action that signal inversion of caste and elevation of status of the Dalit performer. This paper looks at the process of ritualization in Thirayattam, with framework of ritual as practice propounded by Catherine Bell. It takes a close look at the production of ritual environment through strategic action of participants of the ritual complex. The paper studies specific ritual activities to argue that interaction of ritual participants with the space structures the ritual environment in Thirayattam as sacred, pure and hierarchical. The paper argues that the strategic action involved in ritualization builds an implicit disposition of caste-affirmation.

The Emergence of Pop-Masses

Sander Jensen Schipper — 2026-04-28

Since 2017, the Church of Norway has introduced new theatrical strategies and embraced spectacular aesthetics in its masses. Introduced initially through “carnival services,” these practices have since expanded into what I have termed “pop-masses”, which incorporate elements from popular culture to create events blending sacred and secular themes. Through case studies of Harry Potter-masses and Les Misérables-mass, this article explores how these liturgical innovations challenge traditional minimalist aesthetics in Norwegian Lutheranism and foster new modes of theological engagement.

Beginning with carnival services, I will examine how these new pop-masses have become significant events in Lutheran congregations in Norway's largest cities: Oslo and Bergen. Through this analysis, I aim to shed light on the development of a new dramaturgical approach within the Norwegian Church that integrates popular aesthetics into religious rituals.

Hope Springs Eternal

Heather Kelley — 2026-04-28

Columbia Cemetery is the oldest cemetery in Boulder, Colorado, receiving its first interment in 1870. It is also a hub for live performance, hosting at least two significant promenade productions in recent years. In this paper, I explore Monica Weller’s 2020 MFA Dance thesis project, The Liminal Heart, and Historic Boulder’s 2022 edition of Meet the Spirits, both performed on the grounds of the cemetery in the month of October. In The Liminal Heart, Weller and her fellow dancers offer a devastatingly personal meditation on grief and loss, inspired by the untimely death of Weller’s husband; the performance featured a collective memorial audience members were invited to contribute to, and—for many—marked the first live performance they’d attended since the appearance of COVID-19. Meet the Spirits, by contrast, is a biennial dramatization of some of Columbia Cemetery’s most famous occupants, played by amateur actors, and timed to coincide with Halloween. Equal parts historical interpretation and family-friendly haunted trail, the popular event serves as a fundraiser for a local historic preservation organization, and seeks to draw attention to their ongoing preservation of the cemetery.

While very different in tone, The Liminal Heart and Meet the Spirits share surprisingly similar objectives: to rebrand the cemetery as a vibrant and welcoming communal space for the living, and to nudge the living and the dead into closer contact and more meaningful conversation with each other. In this article, I argue that both performances transform a static, sporadically visited cemetery into a dynamic, living memorial and meeting space, posing interesting questions about if and how we may ethically and lovingly (re)animate our dead.

Rethinking Religiosity

Anna Vostruhová — 2026-04-28

In international comparison, Czech society emerges as strongly secularized. While we can discuss whether this could be the result of a too narrow conception of measuring religiosity, it can also be taken as a fact that we intend to use positively. This article presents new tools for the detection of religiosity focused on spiritual and transcendental dimensions. Therefore, it is an advantage to verify them on a population in which a significant part declares secularized attitudes, without, however, an empirically-based finding that its needs of spirituality or some transcendental overlap have been lost.

Czech society was led to brutal atheism in the time of the totalitarian system. For a part of society this concept works as a simple label or short-cut. In the post-secular era, however, in addition to traditional religiosity, growth in various areas of civil spirituality or transcendence, which we conditionally refer to as "lived", plays an important role. Their measurement is the focus of our article, which brings a number of positive experiences from the pilot verification of the new instrument on a representative sample of the Czech public (N=811). The constituted scales show very good consistency and reliability. Extending the measurement of religiosity to other dimensions offers the possibility of a more subtle typology, which leaves the original one-dimensional axis of "religion – atheism" as obsolete and opens the way to a more differentiated approach to religion as a multidimensional continuum, which is more fittingly indicative of the post-secular religious practice in society. Although it is primarily an exploratory and methodologically oriented research, the content consistency of the typology is also confirmed by the correlations with other indicators of relevant values and attitudes.

Sacred Music as a Form of Resistance

Maria Teresa Pizzulli — 2026-04-28

This article examines women’s sacred musical composition from the Protestant Reformation to the present as a form of performative resistance that challenges theological, artistic, and social hierarchies. Through analysis of key figures, from Elisabeth Cruciger to contemporary artists such as Lauren Daigle, we explore how women’s sacred performance creates transformative ritual languages that mediate between individual and collective divine experience. The study reveals how women in different global contexts, from the Corn Ditties of enslaved American communities to contemporary gospel, use sacred performance to build cultural counter-narratives that resist marginalisation and create new spiritual epistemologies. Drawing on performance studies, ritual theory, and feminist musicology, this research demonstrates that women’s sacred music functions both as devotional practice and as sociopolitical intervention, transforming traditional liturgical spaces into places of empowerment and theological re-imagination.

Passion Day

Enza De Francisci — 2026-04-28

This project presentation is based on the translation resources I developed as part of the University of Glasgow’s Impact Development and Evaluation Fund around Passion Day. Passion Day in Naro (Agrigento, Sicily) is an all-day event which re-enacts the Sacred Representations (now UNESCO-protected) — from Christ’s condemnation to death to his resurrection. The event is hosted at the former monastery of St Agustine’s church which is transformed into a large open-air theatre. A number of local theatre companies from all around Sicily are invited to participate in the event. In 2025 14 companies (over 400 actors) took part. Each company performs a scene from the Passion of Christ (14 scenes in total). The script is adapted from Adam’s Ransom (1750), also known as The Martyrdom of Jesus Christ, which was written by the Sicilian playwright, Orioles Philip.

Reopening the Conversation

Alexandra Mackenzie Johns — 2026-04-28