Embodied Performance: Mutuality, Embrace, and the Letter to Rome

Embodied Performance presents a methodology by which performer-interpreters can bring their intuitive interpretations to the scholarly conversations about biblical compositions. It may not be comfortable, for scholarship is out of practice in listening to emotion and intuition. It may not be the only way to bring the fullness of human meaning making into scholarly discussions. It is a beginning, as Sarah Agnew, storyteller and scholar, places herself as the subject and object under examination, observing her practice as a biblical storyteller making meaning through embodied performance, and develops a coherent method rigorously tested with an Embodied Performance Analysis of Romans. Follow Sarah’s story as she searches within Biblical Performance Criticism for such a method, before determining the need to strike out in a new direction from within an already innovative field. All biblical scholars are complex human beings, making meaning through their embodiment, their emotions, their embeddedness in community. Embodied Performance Analysis offers a way to attend to and incorporate the full range of human meaning making in our engagement with biblical compositions, for richer discussion closer to the intent of the compositions themselves.

Sarah Agnew is a storyteller-poet-minister (Uniting Church in Australia), living on Kaurna Land (Adelaide, South Australia). Learning to live a playful, intuitive, contemplative life, Sarah's writing emerges from a growing stillness, deepening attention, inhabiting Sacred Presence. Find out more, including a blog and links to podcasts, videos, and scholarship, at sarahagnew.com.au