January 16 - 19, 2024, William Robert of Syracuse University lead the CSWR Embodied Wisdom Workshop: Studying Religion in Play. The workshop explored the study of religion through the embodied performance of Euripides’s Bakkhai, combining analytical and performative techniques to transform participants' understanding of religion.
CSWR: What inspired the conception of the Embodied Wisdom Workshop?
William: The workshop comes out of my long-standing commitment to bringing performance into the classroom—not just as an activity, but as a pedagogy, and with the wager that performance can generate kinds of learning, especially embodied kinds of learning, that won't happen if we're just sitting there, stationary. We do things that will generate new kinds of information for us and help us learn in ways that wouldn't be possible otherwise.
CSWR: Picking up the thread of embodiment in your work, and the potential for embodiment in creating a deeper, or a different kind of understanding than would be allowed in typical scholarly techniques; What kinds of performance techniques do you find allow participants to go deeper, and how do you introduce performance techniques in the study of religion for people who are new to performance?
William: Well, any engagement with performance requires initially developing a baseline of trust and a space in which it's okay to be vulnerable and it's okay to fail. The first step is always trying to create that sense of relationality among whoever's in the room, whether it's my students or workshop participants. Because if we're all super self-aware, and hyper self-concerned about how we look, then we're not going to get anywhere. We're not going to be able to really lean into the activities, take any risks, and learn from them. We're going to be doing either what we think will look good, or what we think someone like me wants to see. So that is really the first step.
I work on plays primarily, and performance is in their DNA. Talking about a play without engaging our bodies and doing some kind of performative work reduces a play to a text and is a real disservice to a play. What makes plays special is that they're not just texts; they are texts, but they’re texts that require performing. And that means performing by bodies, and that brings all of our bodily realities and our bodily differences into play. It gives us a very different sense of our identities, and of the different identities in the room; in the ways in which we move, and in the ways in which different bodies are, really.
After that the techniques are a combination of theater games, acting techniques, and activities I just make up. So a lot of the things that students do, or that we'll do, are things that I invented. I don't know where they came from. Often students will ask me, “Who came up with this?” and I’ll say, “Well, I did”. I share that in part because of their willingness to ask, and having that be a live question for them is indicative of the kind of space of trust that has to be engendered. It can't be this monolithic power dynamic, where they don't feel like they can ask that kind of question, or where I can't be as vulnerable as they are in the space. I encourage them to ask those kinds of questions and to challenge what we're doing–not in a jerky kind of way, but in a real pedagogical engagement. Because if they understand why we're doing what we're doing, then the chances that they'll learn go way up.
It requires this kind of relation in which it's not just about my making decisions in a completely autonomous way, but my making decisions in relation to what other people are doing or not doing. That is the first lesson of acting: “Listen. It's not about you. It's about the other person.” If you're in your head about whatever you're doing, it's probably not going to be great. Performance is a really embodied way to teach that lesson that's much more effective than sitting everyone down and saying, “Now, everyone, the first thing that we have to be aware of is the importance of listening and relationality.” That’s not going to work. But if we play a game and then we debrief afterwards about what we learned from that game–what I thought we might learn and what other people did learn–that's a much more vibrant learning environment. That can generate all kinds of learning, some of which I could predict, and some of which I couldn't. For me that's a lot of the fun—because I like to play, too. I like to learn, too. I don't want to show up and only say a bunch of things I've said before. Some of teaching is that, but a lot of teaching is when things happen in the moment, and you're able to say, “Wow, I never would have thought that would have happened. That was so cool.” Because that recharges the environment for everyone in a really positive way.
CSWR: I'm tracing a couple of different threads, namely the intersections of improvisation, embodiment, and shifting and transforming identities implicit in the acts of listening and understanding that it's not about oneself. I'm curious, what led you to select Euripides’ Bakkhai as the play for this workshop, and what in particular about Anne Carson's version is going to allow for, or feels like fertile ground for, these kinds of explorations?
William: Bakkhai is an amazing play. It's hard to get better than that if you're a tragedy. It is in some ways the uber tragedy of ancient Athens because it comes in 405 BCE, which is more or less the end of the tragic era. After that, philosophy takes the place of tragedy. And the festival of Dionysus doesn't have the same kind of cultural force in the fourth century BCE that it had in the fifth century BCE. Bakkhai is also the most self-conscious tragedy of the period—a piece of metatheatre, that is, a performance about performance. It’s a piece of theater that's asking you to reflect on what theater does.
It also is the only surviving Greek tragedy that stars a God. And when the first thing that happens in a play is that a God walks on stage, so many of our models for religion go out the window, because now suddenly we can't have a belief-centered sense of what religion is. Because Dionysus isn't asking for belief in that kind of way. He's asking for all kinds of things. But I don't think it's belief in the way that we 21st century Euro-American trained academics think about it. So all of a sudden, Bakkhai refuses our Neo-Protestant lenses about what religion is.
And it also asks us immediately the question of “Is religion a good thing?” Because, reading Bakkhai, it's easy to come out the other end and say, “Religion is not good. Religion is terrible. Look at the devastation that it wreaks in these people's lives.” That is also a good question to ask ourselves when we're studying religion—not just to assume that religion has a certain kind of moral or cultural valence, that religion is always a good thing. Religion is not always a good thing. It's often not a good thing.
Bakkhai puts that question in play in a way that a text that’s closer to us in time and culture maybe couldn’t, because we wouldn’t be willing to execute the same kinds of critical evaluations. I'm guessing that there aren't going to be any Dionysus worshipers walking around in my classrooms or in this workshop. That allows for us to engage critically in a way that if we were doing a 21st century Christian play we couldn't.
Now, Anne Carson—I mean, she is a genius, and she has a MacArthur Award to prove it. There are two things that I really like about this version. One is that Anne Carson is committed to making ancient Greek theater live for 21st century audiences. She's not interested in creating a museum piece. She's not interested in a kind of historicist re-creation of what might have happened in 405 BCE. That's a nice kind of thing to put on the shelf and look at, but it doesn't do contemporary cultural work. And it doesn't really give us any sense of the religious stakes that the play presented for the people at that time and for now. And it certainly doesn't answer why this play is still being performed, because it is still being performed. There's probably a performance going on today somewhere in the world. I really appreciate that Carson is giving us a version that isn't just a word for word translation, but also isn't an adaptation that has moved so far away from
Euripides’ text that it's almost unrecognizable. So on the one hand, this isn't a stuffy translation, but it's also not Richard Schechner’s DIONYSUS IN 69’, or something like that. I think it's right in the middle.
The other thing I really like about Carson's version is how distilled the language is. There's not a word that isn't necessary. The way that I think about it is that Anne Carson threw Bakkhai into a pot and cranked up the heat and reduced it down until it was just a kind of syrupy essence. And that's what we get–the most concentrated version of the flavors of Bakkhai without anything unnecessary. That adds to the power of the work. That adds to the accessibility of the work.
Dionysus isn't going on and on about things that we aren't going to know much about. It also brings out the humor in a different kind of way. The starker translation and Carson's willingness to go there idiomatically makes it funnier, which also makes it much more tragic. Because that combination of comedy and tragedy turns up the volume on both.
CSWR: As I was reading, I found myself really hitting the peaks and nadirs of emotion. Bakkhai offers so much along the entire spectrum of emotional experience. I'm curious about pairing the Bakkhai with your performance approach to the study of religion. What do you feel are the broader implications of this kind of work within academia, and within spiritual or religious communities?
William: That's a great question. One thing I think it does is force us to re-interrogate the all too easy distinction between scholarship and teaching. It forces us to bring both to bear on one another. I can't talk about this kind of work without talking about what I do with students every day. It comes out of the classroom. That directionality is not a common one in our field. I have to bring all of my scholarly knowledge and sensibilities into the classroom when I'm doing this work. I have to know a lot about this play. I have to know a lot about performance studies. I have to know all those kinds of things, so that I can have them ready if and when we might need those pieces of information. But I'm not showing up with the knowledge so that I can show off how much work I did or how much I know. It's in the service of helping people to learn.
I also think it puts bodies front and center in a way that doesn't always happen, even in work where we still see references to “the body” as if there were this concept. As if there were this singular thing when we're talking about performance, which is always different in different contexts, with different bodies interacting differently. That raises questions about bodily differences, which are identity differences and human differences.
I love that different bodies can make a work completely different. One of the things that I like to do with students, once they're familiar enough with the play, is to ask who their dream cast would be, because that is incredibly revealing to them about how different the play would be if this person versus that person played Dionysos. In the original production of this translation, Ben Whishaw played Dionysos and did a brilliant job. But what if Beyoncé had played Dionysos instead? How different would that be? And how would Beyoncé’s Star Power affect the ways in which we're understanding this God? To say nothing of the fact that she's a Black woman, and that that would raise all kinds of really interesting questions about genealogy and kinship, about gender and race, about foreignness and otherness that the play is pushing at us. The play is asking those kinds of questions, but different casting with different kinds of bodies can really animate all of those issues. And Beyoncé is just one example. (I'm often thinking about Beyonce.) But then what if we cast ...–and you can go on and on with this. All of a sudden the play completely changes every time you reimagine these things.
The Dream Cast activity also helps students to expose to themselves, without having to expose to anyone else, what their own biases are. If someone comes up with an all white, male, cishet cast, and then we start talking about this–without any embarrassment to them–they're able in their own heads to say, “Oh, yeah, maybe that wasn't such a great idea. Maybe I should think about recasting some of these roles.” I find that to be a really interesting activity. And like a lot of the ones that I do in the classroom, it’s one that is more or less a private experience, unless students choose to share their ideas. So it's not like I'm asking students to write it down and share it with anybody else. It's more like, “What would you imagine?” And then I ask, “Do you want to recast?” Inevitably they do, but that's a way of getting them to think critically about their own senses of things and their own categories and frames, without saying to them in a didactic way, “You know, you really should be thinking in much more diverse and much more imaginative ways about these things.” Does that make sense?
CSWR: Yes, it does. It's calling to mind the idea of the classroom as a rehearsal space, which is so different from what many classrooms feel like. A space within which it is safe to try something, iterate, rehearse, revise. Considering that this is a very unique opportunity within the study of religion, what are you hoping participants will take away and bring to their work in the future from having experienced this workshop?
William: I'm hoping they take away what I always hope I take away anytime I walk into a classroom. And those are two insights or “aha!” moments. One of them is that I could have sat in a room for 100 years and I never would have thought of that. In other words, I needed these people and this interaction to get to that idea. I couldn't have gotten to it on my own. But now I have. That can be really frameshifting. That can completely change the game. I love when that happens with students, and it always does. That’s one of the things that I find so exciting about teaching, is when those things happen.
The second thing is for people to leave thinking, “I didn't know I could do that.” For people to surprise themselves with their own capacities, to invent, to think, to question, to interact, to perform. For some people, if we perform part of a scene, that’s no big deal, because they've done it before, or because they like to perform, or whatever. For some people that can be life changing: to be able to put themselves in that space, and to shock themselves by what they're able to do. There's no greater joy as a teacher than to watch those things happen. When I see students do those kinds of things, and I see that look of, “I can't believe I did that. I didn't know I had it in me. I didn't know that was possible.”
Shifting the parameters of possibility is one of the things that we in the humanities can give to people. That’s part of our cultural and educational value: to ask questions and do activities that change the frames of possibility. Scientists and social scientists can do that, too, but not in the same kinds of ways. I love it when worldviews explode, and all of a sudden, everything looks a little bit different to students. That’s a gift we have to give them. And, in lots of ways, it's the gift that religion offers to its adherents: to change what seems possible, whether that’s by exploding the boundaries of the human in terms of adding the superhuman or the divine or whatever else, or just changing the ways in which we see the world and move through it. That's often what religion is aiming for. So to be able to do that pedagogically is in some ways to have a kind of performative experience of the effects of religion without the buy-in.
Story by Tristan Angieri, MDiv '26