There are countless ways to use embodied learning in the religion or theology classroom. It's especially important to use visceral pedagogies when teaching our future educators, because we all tend to teach in the ways we’ve been taught. Here Victoria Rue’s book, Acting Religious: Theatre as Pedagogy in Religious Studies ([2005] 2010) is very helpful, with chapters on improvisation and performance in classroom settings, on evaluating performance academically, and on overcoming our fears as first-time visceral teachers. Below are a few examples of classroom practice that I have found useful:
Digging into narratives: Rashomon. In Akira Kurosawa’s 1951 film Rashomon, the story of a sexual assault is presented entirely in flashbacks from four different characters’ points of view. To explore a narrative (e.g., Biblical) text using Rashomon, the full text is first read aloud, with each character played by an actor who speaks or moves through that character’s part. Then each actor in turn except for the narrator sculpts the other actors, through the eyes of her in-role experience. These sculptures should not be naturalistic, but they should be “true” to the story as seen by the sculpting actor – however deformed, expressionistic, surrealistic, allegorical or metaphorical they may be. Thus the sculpting actor goes round to each of the others, placing them in poses, giving them expressions, and whispering to them their thoughts and motivations as her character understands them. The group then reruns the text, stuck in the postures they each have been given. Then the next actor / character becomes the sculptor, and the story is rerun again (Boal 2002, 236-237). Note: the narrator and Godself are usually not ideal participants, because of the overwhelming narrative, emotional, and theological “baggage” that omniscient characters can accrue (Pitzele 1998, 39-51, 221-224).
Analyzing concepts: Machine of the Word.
Like the Image Theatre technique that produced “Community at Our School” but “dynamized” with movement and sound. Participants are invited to create a 3-d image of a particular theme (“church,” “education,” pastoral care,” “the Book of Jonah,” etc.) First they turn static poses into repetitive movements; then they add a repetitive sound to the movement; then they change that sound into a repetitive word or phrase. Jokers can explore the tableau further by speeding up the action, or slowing it to a crawl. Conversely, the image can begin with dynamic movement: creating the “Machine of Education,” in which one, then another, then another participant take the stage to represent “education” through a repetitive movement and sound. In all these creations, each participant is always “vis-à-vis” every other, creating an overall image which the Joker invites them to interpret as a whole (Boal 2002, 94-95, 176-184).
Digging into lyric or narrative: Scriptural Interview. In this exercise, the characters in a poem or narrative (sacred or secular, including inanimate characters) can be assembled for a panel interview (Rue [2005] 2010, 74-79). While a Scriptural Interview can be conducted without using embodied exercises to prepare the participants, the result can be much richer if each participant is invited to sculpt themselves into character, and further invited to “dynamize” their character with movement, sound, a repetitive phrase, and a minute or two of continuous “internal dialogue. (Internal dialogue is non-stop stream-of-consciousness talking out loud, informed by the sculpture that the character has taken on, and within which she remains frozen throughout the dialogue exercise.) Again, it may be best to avoid interviewing God or the narrator.