The Medium and the Message investigates the incorporation of Afro-Cuban trance techniques in Western theatrical performance. Through art practice and research, I am asking two questions: how do performers, trained in Western theatrical contexts, articulate their experience with Afro-Cuban trance techniques? And how can my research methodologies illuminate the inherent intercultural tensions in ways that are productive for performance practitioners and theorists? To answer these questions, I created four new works of theatrical performance where I developed a method for performers, utilizing Afro-Cuban rituals adapted for non-practitioners. Working toward a phenomenological understanding of what is happening when a performer incorporates a character, I drew on the ritual knowledge of trance possession in Lukumí and Palo Monte in order to examine how ontologies might speak to each other in artistic practice. I also served as advisor for the creation of a fifth work in order to test the method outside of my studio. I constructed a studio practice methodology, called kanga (from the Bantu for tying and untying), using three methods based on aspects of Afro-Cuban ritual, and modified for performance contexts: spell, charm, and trance. This methodology enacts and complicates distinctions between performance and ritual, serving as a contribution to respectful and responsible intercultural performance practices. My research-led practice includes autobiographical writing and auto-ethnography under a phenomenological research methodology that uses three methods for data collection: formal recorded interviews, video footage of the studio work, and regular rehearsal debriefings. The overall methodology, bridging theory and practice, is bricoleur, drawing from ethnography, psychoanalytic theory, and phenomenology. Both research and studio work led to the articulation of a state of consciousness in performance that I call hauntological. This borrows from Derrida (1994: 10) but is redefined to refer to a state of being where reality is co-constituted by the living and the dead, where ancestral spirits are invoked to do the work once reserved for characters. Finally, this led to the construction of a creative artifact called The Ghost Lounge, an art work that evokes a hauntological state of consciousness in the viewer.

Dance is the language of the soul. Dance, as a theological source, can remind us of who we are in and with the living perichoresis of the Trinity. Dance, as embodied art, can provide us with a new way of viewing and discussing pneumatology and that we too, in our incarnate reality, participate in perichoresis. Within this work I seek to answer the questions of how dance is a source of theology, why a pneumatology of the body is significant, and how dance provides a framework for a pneumatology of the body. The creation of a pneumatology of the body is a rooting or re-membering of the Spirit and our own spirit in incarnational—skin and bones—reality that includes us in Trinitarian perichoresis. Pneumatology of the body is dancing with the Holy Spirit in our given time and space to retrieve the dignity of our embodied inspirited selves as made in the imago Dei. The gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit are not abstract concepts. Through dance as embodied art we can move from abstract, intellectual concepts of the Spirit to incarnational truth of our flesh and blood, wounds and joys, where the Trinity dwells within and around.Dance as a source of theology can provide a framework for a pneumtology of the body. The Holy Spirit as relationality holding all of life together is our Holy Bridge. Within this work, we re-member our foundational belief in the interconnectedness of body and soul, and that we too participate in the Trinitarian perichoresis as part of God’s dancing revelation. In a world of division and duality, the Spirit as Holy Bridge brings us back home to the core of who we are individually and collectively, while dance provides a space for honoring difference and duality together in harmony. Dance gives expression to situations and things in our lives that are challenging to grasp conceptually and intellectually, while allowing for the embodied witnessing of a person’s and community’s story.A dancing theology as a framework for a pneumatology of the body reminds us that Spirit is our Holy Bridge between body, senses, feelings, challenges, and transformations, between my body soul temple and your body soul temple, and between individual and communal. By dancing with us in our daily lives, the Holy Spirit draws us ever deeper across loving bridges into communion with Trinitarian perichoresis. The Trinity is the Dance of Life in which the Spirit performs the role of empowering the never-ending communion and relational vitality that is God in and with Godself.