Studying Religion in Performance with William Robert

Kristian Petersen:

Welcome to Religious Studies News. I’m your host, Kristian Petersen, and today I’m here with William Robert, professor of religion at Syracuse University and winner of the 2023 AAR Book Award in Religion and the Arts. He’s here to speak to us about his book, Unbridled: Studying Religion in Performance, published with University of Chicago Press. Congratulations William, and thanks for joining me.

William Robert:

Thank you for having me.

Kristian Petersen:

So this book is very innovative, creative — it catalyzed a lot of thoughts for me and I’m so glad I read it. I’m so glad that you won the award to bring it into my sphere and I hope other folks will take a look at it.

I think part of why it’s such an exciting read is it has this very pedagogical feel. I feel challenged as a reader almost as if I was a student in a classroom. And you discussed in the book how this project kind of emerged in one of your intro classes. I was hoping you could tell us about what’s happening in your classes and how did that environment lead you to take up a play as a case for problematizing religion?

William Robert:

Well, thank you for reading the book, that’s very gracious of you. Okay. The backstory. In 2016, I took over my department’s Introduction to the Study of Religion class and I designed it so that we would spend one half of the class studying one play and then use the skills we developed to study another play in the second half. So the class is just two plays. That’s literally all we read. There are lots of handouts and discussions, but the reading is pretty minimal and that format gives us the flexibility and the time and the range to really revisit over and over these texts so that they keep changing meanings and our interpretations keep changing and that turns the classroom into a kind of learning laboratory where all of the interpretive work, all of the critical work is happening live, right there. And we’re watching this thing that we’ve come to know very well change in front of us.

That made for a lot of fun in the classroom and students really came to a kind of epistemological expertise because we spent weeks and weeks and weeks studying the same text, so they got to know it really well and they could do things with the text and that created a sense of vibrancy and even maybe a sense of ownership over their different interpretations. The class was so much fun that I wanted to try and convey that experience in the text and also bring to the text the excitement of studying religion for people who are professional scholars of religion. This is what we do for a living and there must be a pretty good reason we’ve decided to do it and keep doing it. And often that excitement, that spark of creativity and discovery that got us into this in the first place can get a little lost.

And I wanted to make sure that that was the catalyzing force of the book because it’s the catalyzing force of the class. It’s why I keep being excited to go into class and see what my students are going to say and to see what happens when we engage each other. And so I very much took, as you said, a kind of pedagogical energy into the project and I wanted the book to create a dialogic experience where the reader was facing a lot of questions that I wasn’t giving a lot of answers to. And so hopefully at some point the reader begins to see the book as a conversation partner and begins to answer the questions for himself, herself, themselves, and to start to engage in this pedagogical practice or performance.

Kristian Petersen:

Yeah, it definitely feels that way and I think it definitely hooked into those old kind of attractions that I had that do kind of get dulled as we do this day in and day out. The play that you focus on in this book, Equus by Peter Schafer, you say it’s a problem play. So I’m wondering if you could kind of give us a little teaser about what this play is all about, because I imagine many people are not familiar with the details of the narrative, but then what about this kind of critical problem facilitates investigating religion in new ways for you?

William Robert:

Equus is a play from the mid 1970s that Peter Schaffer wrote. It begins with the audience learning that a young 17-year-old boy who lives somewhere in rural England has blinded six horses in an act of incredible violence. He was sent to a psychiatric hospital and the play is narrated through his psychiatrist Dysart’s eyes as Dysart tries to discover why the boy did what he did. And so it’s a little bit of a why done it. There’s a kind of mystery element to it as we —  as the audience — figure out why the boy has done what he’s done and the why has everything to do with religion because it turns out that the boy, Alan Strang, has crafted his own religion around this God, Equus, that he has invented and come to worship. And it’s because of his interactions with this God that he’s fashioned, and the rituals around this God that he’s created, and the mythology about this God that he’s invented, that he does what he does.

And so Dysart’s inquiry into Alan’s psychology also turns Dysart into a kind of fascinated bystander who wants to learn more and more about this Equus religion and Alan unfolds it in the play. So we get to see among other things how a religion gets crafted and how it gets crafted through a combination of borrowing and ingenuity. Because parts of what Alan takes are elements of his mother’s Christianity and parts of what he invents are his own sets of ritual laws and ethical practices and mystical experiences. And that, I think, is really a great opportunity to think about the shape of religion, the elements that go into a religion, why someone would invent a religion and then practice a religion even if it has potentially negative influences on their lives. The play is a problem because it doesn’t really fit into an easy category and because the frames of the play keep shifting.

So some of the play is Dysart breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience directly. Most of the play are flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks that Dysart is narrating and/or the audience is watching. And so one of the decisions the audience has to make is how trustworthy Dysart’s recounting of this is, but they also have to make certain kinds of ethical decisions about their judgment of what Alan did and their judgment about what Dysart does to Alan in the treatment process. It’s a problem play because it doesn’t really fit into a category and it doesn’t really resolve in any clear way. And a lot of the book, not a lot of the book, but some of the book is a kind of detective work chasing the potential meanings of the play’s final two lines, which are enigmatic at best and elusive at worst. And one of the book’s gambits is that understanding the meaning or really the interpretation of those two lines is a kind of hermeneutic key to understanding and interpreting what the play is really about, what the play’s genre is, is it a tragedy, is it a thriller, is it something else? And also understanding the role that religion plays in these two characters’ lives.

Kristian Petersen:

It’s hard to kind of express the feel of the book, but you use the play as a case, as you mentioned, in the book, and through that you kind of provide or use this kind of prism of the play to explore critical terms for studying religion. So I’m wondering if you could maybe just help us think through — what new themes might it provide for thinking about religion and how might it challenge us to rethink common themes in religious studies like ritual or worship or sacrifice, which also seem to come up in the play?

William Robert:

They do. That’s a great question and maybe it echoes part of your previous question that I didn’t really answer, which is how might this play be a problem for people who study religion? Because grafting a prefabricated theory or methodology of what religion is and how we ought to study it doesn’t really work for Equus. There are too many crucial parts of the play, too many of its vital dynamics that wouldn’t really get captured with methodology that reduces religion to belief or belief plus ritual plus scripture or some other familiar formula. Because of that, and because of the pedagogical experiences that I had teaching this play and working with students, critical terms seem to be the most valuable tools for investigating the play and the play required, at least in my reading, that we use some unfamiliar tools and that we recraft some fairly familiar ones.

So each chapter in the book — the book doesn’t call them chapters, but that’s what they are — takes up one critical term that I think is important and integral to studying this play as a way of studying religion. The book ends up offering 32 different critical terms and each chapter tests out the ways in which this term helps us understand the play, helps us understand something about religion in the play, helps us understand something about religion in a way that might be unexpected. And some of the terms are very much specific to the play, but a lot of the terms could be extrapolated into a polythetic organization of this category called religion.

And maybe in the broadest methodological terms, the play is generating a case in which it’s using a set of terms that makes sense for it to articulate what it understands and studies as a religion — in a way that might suggest that others might take similar approaches to whatever their subjects are and reinvestigate critical tools, reinvent critical terms and see what they come up with and see the ways in which that affects both the study of religion and the shape of the things studied that they’re calling religion.

Kristian Petersen:

One of the specifics from Equus that kind of sprang out to me — with admitting that I didn’t get to read the play, I didn’t get to see one of his performances, but what I could gather from your retelling in your book — this idea of animality comes up. And I know you’ve kind of tackled this previously in other places in some ways, so I’m wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about what you think is the role of animality figuring into the study of religion, and then where does this kind of play out in Equus, perhaps in relation to notions of sexuality or divinity or some combination of all the above?

William Robert:

That is a great question and that is a hard question, so I will do my best to respond to it. When I think about the category of religion and I think about some of its animating questions — some of those things that this object or subject, force, in the world is doing — often religion is some response to the questions about what are the limits of this thing we call human and how ought humans interact with other kinds of beings in the world? And animals are one of those beings. And we could do a kind of run through of religious traditions and see the ways in which in so many cases, the shape of the human that the religion traces and the way in which the religion prescribes that humans deal with other creatures is really at the core of the religious tradition’s sense of itself, its ethical systems, often its belief systems and mythologies. Because of what Alan does in the play, because his crime is so horrific, it raises questions about his own humanity and whether we’re willing to count him as human when he’s so violently transgressed, some pretty established and not especially controversial limitations about violence and about killing those kinds of things.

Alan also has a set of mystical experiences based in a ritual practice that he develops in which he tries to become one with this horse God that he has created. And so the ways in which animality, humanity, and divinity mix and mingle and blur in those experiences, I think raises questions not only about the shapes and the contours of those categories, but also their various valuations.

Because if we think about a divinity, humanity, animality triad in most religious traditions, the power dynamics and the organizational schema are pretty clear about which is the most valuable and which is the least valuable. But if we can’t really tell which is which, and if some of those categories are blending in with others in unexpected and maybe even confounding ways, then all of a sudden the question of animality, at least in Equus, becomes a question of humanity and divinity and where one stops and the other starts or where one bleeds into the other or where one mixes with the other in some kind of mystically animating way. These rituals that Alan performs that try to generate these mystical experiences also have clearly sexual dimensions and result in, for Alan, orgasmic experiences.

And so that element of sexuality, that element of sexual pleasure, and the relationships between religious ecstasy and sexual ecstasy all tied together by this boy’s relationship to a horse who might also be a God — that makes a set of …. It makes a mess really is what it does, but it makes a very curious mess. And part of the analytic work that the book tries to do and that I try to do with students when we study the play is to try and see if we can sort out these categorical and terminological distinctions, and if we can’t, what that tells us about the way in which, at least in this case, this religion is confounding their clear organization.

Kristian Petersen:

Your book very much prompts the reader to really turn up their imagination. And often while I was reading the book, and even as I’m talking to you now, I kind of try to imagine myself in your classroom and what it might be like, and while you focus almost solely on Equus throughout the book, at the end, you mentioned Patty Smith, and song is another place like play where there’s this kind of tension between text and performance, and I’m wondering, just descriptively how Patty Smith and song arrives in your class or is used in your class. But then it also makes me think, do you think it’s possible to take up your approach that you’ve done with plays to other formats like songs or concerts or films where there is this kind of relationship between text and performance?

William Robert:

[Long pause] Your questions are really good and they leave me coming up short each time as to how to answer them, and I’ve been doing my best to try and answer them seriously and not just trying—

Kristian Petersen:

— So far it’s been great—

William Robert:

— Because the answer to this question in part might involve a joke, but I’ll respond to the second part of your question or your second question first. Do I think that people could use other art forms? You mentioned song — it could be poetry, it could be literature, it could be film, it could be any number of things — and do some version of what this book does with the play? Well, there’s a part of me that really hopes that they don’t in the sense of: take a model of this book and just translate it. I don’t think that that is — I don’t think that that would work, and it’s certainly not what the book is trying to do. It’s not trying to provide a ready made model. What it’s trying to do, as you suggested in your question, is to privilege or at least highlight and foreground the role of imagination in the study of religion and to look at imaginative enterprises like plays, like literature, like film and music and other forms of media. So if the book inspired someone to take a piece of art that they felt very powerfully about that they thought had something really dynamic and interesting to teach about the study of religion, and then to use that as a way of rethinking how and why they’re doing what they’re doing — that I think would be a dream scenario for me in terms of ways that this book might influence other people.

But I certainly don’t think it’s providing an instant just add water methodology. That would frankly horrify me a little bit, but that’s more about me than about anything else.

Patty Smith. Partly I included it because I promised a friend who, when we talked about this book, knew that I used Patty Smith’s music when I taught this play and said, “Well, if you write this book, you have to include a Patty Smith chapter.” And I said, fine. That was the deal. The music comes in — well, in the classroom activity, it comes in because we start each session of the intro class with a student bringing in a piece of music that the student would use if the student were producing or directing a particular scene in the play. And so we listen to the piece of music, the student explains, “I would use this piece in this scene for these reasons.”

It becomes a hermeneutic activity because if you’re using this piece of music for this scene, then pretty clearly you think that the scene is about that, and this is how you’re interpreting and staging it. So the music is a way to get students involved. It’s a way to get students to think their ways into performance and the staging of a play and not just reading a play is a piece of literature, but viewing a play is a piece of live action art that is infinitely interpretable.

And it’s also a lot of fun because students inevitably bring in pieces of music I never would’ve thought of or didn’t even know existed, to be honest. But it connects with the students and it sort of has a snowball effect. So if a student brings in a piece of music and then other students say, “Well, I like this.” I’ve heard all kinds of music over the years. When it’s my turn to do that, because I take a turn just like they do, I usually bring in a piece of music by Patty Smith and we listen to it. The piece I bring in is a piece called “Land,” which is the end of Patty Smith’s debut album, Horses, and it’s about a scene of sexuality, mysticism, and violence. And so it gives us a way to think about how those elements are working in the song and might or might not be working similarly in the play. It also creates a certain mood. Songs have their own affective registers, and Patti Smith’s is a kind of incantatory music poem that builds into a frenzy and then slows itself back down. So there’s a certain kind of performative energy and directionality to the song that makes it a good fit, I think, for the play and for the particular scene that I like to use it in.

Kristian Petersen:

Great.

William Robert:

I hope that answered some of your questions.

Kristian Petersen:

Yeah. Yeah. That’s great, William. Well, thank you for spending some time talking about your book and your classes, and I appreciate you thinking with me as I tried to kind of emulate some of the things that happened to me while reading your book. So I appreciate you playing along, and congratulations on the award.

William Robert:

Thank you very much. Thanks for the time. Thanks for the fantastic questions. Thanks to the AAR for this really unexpected but immensely amazing award. I never would’ve guessed this book would’ve won it, but I’m thrilled that it did.