The Élan Vital and Sacred Research: Questioning the Spiritual Imperative in Performance Studies

Abstract

In this essay I examine calls within the discipline of performance studies to understand the work of performance as spiritual or sacred. Using the concept of the élan vital, I explain how such calls are often lacking in explanatory power, negate the body, and are problematically conflated with virtue/moral behavior. I provide a sustained analysis of Norman Denzin's Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture to demonstrate this often problematic conflation. I then suggest how performance studies work that is informed by sacred and spiritual spaces as sites of study has more potential for reflexivity.

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