Performances of Sacred Places

This is the first book to explore the notion of sacred places from the perspective of performance studies and presents both practice-as-research accounts alongside theoretical analysis. It is multidisciplinary, bringing together religious studies, philosophy and anthropological approaches under the umbrella of performance studies. By focusing on practice and performance rather than theology it also expands the notion of sacred places to non-religious contexts.

This new collection offers a multi-layered and contemporary approach to the question of sacred sites, their practices, politics and ecologies. The overarching critical framework of inquiry is performance studies, a multidisciplinary methodological perspective that stresses the importance of investigating the practices and actions through which things are conducted and processes activated. This is an innovative perspective that recognizes the value, function and role that practices and their materialities have in the constitution of special places, their developments in culture, and the politics in place for the conservation of their sense of specialness. 

The questions investigated are: what is a sacred place? Is a place inherently sacred or does it become sacred? Is it a paradigm, a real location, an imaginary place, a projected condition, a charged setting, an enhanced perception? What kind of practices and processes allow the emergence of a sacred place in human perception? And what is its function in contemporary societies?

The book is divided into three sections that evidence the three approaches that are generally engaged with and through which sacred places are defined, actualized and activated: Crossing, Breathing and Resisting. There is a strong field of international contributors including practitioners and academics working in the United Kingdom, the United States, Poland and Australia.

Primary interest will be students, academics and practitioners studying or working in theatre and performance studies; fine art; architecture; cultural and visual studies; geography; religious studies; and psychology.

Potential for classroom use, and very strong potential for inclusion on reading lists as a secondary text for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in fine art, live art, performance art, performance and theatre studies.

Dr Silvia Battista is a visual and performance artist/scholar, who has engaged, over the last twenty years, with a multidisciplinary set of artistic languages - performance, drawing, photography, video - and research methodologies - hermeneutics, phenomenology and semiotics. Her research lies in the intersection between visual art, performance, installation and improvisation, particularly in the study of meditative, contemplative and ecstatic practices/technologies employed for creative and epistemological purposes. She researches, teaches and publishes on contemporary performance and art, religion and spirituality involving audiences, readers and students to reflect on perception, ecology and our relation to inner and outer environments. She is the co-convenor of the research group Performance, Religion and Spiritualities of the International Federation of Theatre Research and her latest monograph Posthuman Spiritualities in Contemporary Performance: Politics, Ecologies and Perceptions was published in 2018 by Palgrave.