Videos by Carol Marie Webster
An arts and science performance research project, Break-in’ Point was presented in 2012 as a part... more An arts and science performance research project, Break-in’ Point was presented in 2012 as a part of the spring and fall production schedule at Stage@Leeds at the University of Leeds in the UK. A collaboration between dance artist De-Napoli Clarke and theoretical physicist Jiannis K. Pachos under the direction of performance studies researcher and dramaturgist Carol Marie Webster, Break-in’ Point was billed a series of encounters that ‘explore the relation of movement and science through the human catoptron.’ The production interrogates “the critical point at which physical, mental, or emotional strength gives way under stress causing structural degeneration… and the experience of what lies beyond.’ Break-in’ Point engaged human trauma and vulnerability through the meeting of arts and science, slippage between the two was necessary to fully grasp the complexity of human experience and response. 3 views
Dr. Anna Kasafi Perkins, a Roman Catholic theologian/ethicist by training, she is a former dean o... more Dr. Anna Kasafi Perkins, a Roman Catholic theologian/ethicist by training, she is a former dean of studies of St Michael’s Theological College, where she continues as adjunct faculty. She is the author of Justice as Equality: Michael Manley’s Caribbean Vision of Justice, and contributor/co-editor/editor for Justice and Peace in a Renewed Caribbean: Contemporary Catholic Reflections, Quality in Higher Education in the Caribbean and Rough Riding: Tanya Stephens and the Power of Music to Transform Society. She has also written several articles and book chapters. Dr. Perkins received her PhD in Theological Ethics from Boston College in the United States. Dr. Adanna James currently lectures at the Seminary of St John Vianney in Trinidad and has taught... more Dr. Adanna James currently lectures at the Seminary of St John Vianney in Trinidad and has taught courses on Catholic Education, Justice and the Women’s Movement and Feminist Theology. She forms part of the Secretariat of the Caribbean Conference on Theology in the Caribbean Today, an open theological space for Caribbean thinkers. She is also a board member of Bethesda, a Family Ministry in the Catholic Church that attends to families of persons with disabilities. 3 views
My Papers by Carol Marie Webster
BLACK THEOLOGY, 2017
ABSTRACT
Within the historical formation of Jamaica, Christian rhetoric and rhetorical practices ... more ABSTRACT
Within the historical formation of Jamaica, Christian rhetoric and rhetorical practices ritually exiled African Diaspora/Black Atlantic women and their bodies from essential human and feminine value systems. However, there were other scripts brought to the island in the bodies of African peoples who arrived as captives in a pernicious Christian project. These scripts promote, value and affirm the bodies of African peoples as sacred and divine. This article presents an ethnographic exploration of Jamaican Catholic women’s bodily presence and performance at the Liturgy of the Eucharist, highlighting critical spiritual practices around the notion of body as temple. In the enlivened space of contemporary Jamaican Catholic Christianity, Jamaican women participate in ongoing rituals of body reverence, the claiming, re-claiming and repossessing of body-selves, in order to become dynamic crossroads spaces where human and divine regularly encounter and intermingle.
African Journal of Gender and Religion , 2024
The landscape of religious scholarship has often been characterized as one dominated by perspecti... more The landscape of religious scholarship has often been characterized as one dominated by perspectives that marginalize the voices of minority groups, particularly Black, African-descended women. While the term Black may be expanded to include people who are not African descended in the United Kingdom (UK), the American usage centers on those who are African-descended and share a socio-political location. In this issue, we are using a Pan-African definition of “Black” to reference people whose ancestors are indigenous to the African Continent.
Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, 2022
Break-in’ Point, a 2012 arts and science performance and community engagement research initiative... more Break-in’ Point, a 2012 arts and science performance and community engagement research initiative, was presented in the spring and fall semesters at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom at Stage@Leeds. The outcome of a collaboration between dance artist A3 and theoretical physicist A2, under the direction of performance researcher A1, Break-in’ Point is based on a series of real-life encounters at intersections of arts and science ‐ exploring force, risk, exposure and resilience. The Break-in’ Point performance offered an interrogation of the critical point at which physical, mental, and/or emotional strength give way under stress ‐ causing structural degeneration and the experience of what lies beyond. This article is an examination of the performance, reviewing and analysing it as an imagined somatic zone ‐ embodied encounters that transcend temporal bound-ness, compelling and igniting new possibilities ‐ that engaged spiritual and epistemological transformation of performers and audiences. The article addresses three main periods in the life of Break-in’ Point: (1) the development period ‐ script building and rehearsals, (2) the performance ‐ live encounters between and among performers and audiences and (3) beyond the theatre ‐ digital engagements in the classroom and pedagogy. The article contributes new concepts and new ways of thinking about science education, the role of digital technology in pedagogy, dance/theatre public engagement and community arts practices as practices of healing, health and resilience.
Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, 2019
This article addresses the concept Body as Archive in the context of contemporary Jamaica, a nati... more This article addresses the concept Body as Archive in the context of contemporary Jamaica, a nation simultaneously grounded in Christian Religiosity and rooted in African Cosmology. Body as Archive is identified here as an understanding of the body that recognizes bodily artefacts as stored in individual and collective bodies for future generations to excavate, critically interrogate, re-craft and/or restore and deploy in the fashioning of present-day individual and community identities, life possibilities and future world imaginings. At its core Body as Archive is the work of the imagination to manifest the body as both archive and artefact, both a space for the collection and recording of historical memory and remembrance and itself an expression of memory and remembrance. In contemporary Jamaica Body as Archive encompasses notions of beauty, the role of dance, and the significance of performance around and about the Jamaican female body. Embedded in this current exploration is an interrogation of the ways in which the bio-political imagination of past generations inform the excavation and deployment of bodily artefacts in the present.
Black Theology: An International Journal, 2017
Within the historical formation of Jamaica, Christian rhetoric and
rhetorical practices ritually... more Within the historical formation of Jamaica, Christian rhetoric and
rhetorical practices ritually exiled African Diaspora/Black Atlantic
women and their bodies from essential human and feminine
value systems. However, there were other scripts brought to the
island in the bodies of African peoples who arrived as captives in
a pernicious Christian project. These scripts promote, value and
affirm the bodies of African peoples as sacred and divine. This
article presents an ethnographic exploration of Jamaican Catholic
women’s bodily presence and performance at the Liturgy of the
Eucharist, highlighting critical spiritual practices around the notion
of body as temple. In the enlivened space of contemporary
Jamaican Catholic Christianity, Jamaican women participate in
ongoing rituals of body reverence, the claiming, re-claiming and
repossessing of body-selves, in order to become dynamic
crossroads spaces where human and divine regularly encounter
and intermingle.
Community Arts Perspective, Vol 1 (3) - available on Open Access Journal , Aug 2008
What is community art activism as it relates to the embodied discipline of dance in 21st Century ... more What is community art activism as it relates to the embodied discipline of dance in 21st Century America? In this paper, I query whether dance can be used as a pedagogical tool to unmask racist, colonialist, sexist and classist practices; inform revolutionary identities; and reinvigorate communities to build and/or resurrect foundational structures that honor, dignify and empower the community as a whole and each individual member wholly. I focus on girls and women of African ancestry (Black or/and African-American girls and women) in their encounter with dance in the social-justice and community-activist initiatives. My concerns are: (1) the intensification of the hypersexualization of the Black female body in contemporary United States cultural discourse; (2) the new and pervasive forms of cultural humiliation and violence exacted upon the Black female body; (3) the implication of both for the formation of Black female individual and community identity. Using critical social/cultural theories, womanist methodologies and performance-studies approaches, and drawing on interviews conducted with M’Bewe Escobar, C. S’thembile West, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, I examine case studies of community arts activists who employ dance as a primary tool for critical social/cultural interrogation and community building. As a dance artist, an African-Caribbean woman and a social/cultural activist who uses dance as a critical tool, I am situated in the midst of this conversation.
Community Arts Perspective, Vol II, (4) - Available on Open Access Journal , Dec 2009
The field of community arts activism imagines itself to be informed about itself and about the co... more The field of community arts activism imagines itself to be informed about itself and about the communities it chooses to or hopes to encounter: It imagines itself to know what it knows and what it does not know. On any given day, practitioners in the field gather the various teaching/leading/guiding tools at their disposal and boldly move toward encounter with their targeted community, confident that at minimum the encounter will inspire dialogue. But, more frequently than is admitted, practitioners in the field spend far too much time engaged in the perpetuation and recapitulation of the dominant cultural hegemony, often evading directing the critical lens at themselves, hence dodging radical reflexivity and dulling the transformative potential of such encounters. This essay will offer a brief critical exploration of some of the ways in which United States culturally hegemonic language and practices are called upon by community arts activists in order to define themselves and identify and pathologize the “other,” frustrating the notions of empowerment, voice, equity and power-sharing often expressly held to be central to the field.
“He was born blind so that the work of God can be revealed in him,” John 9:3. The appropriation o... more “He was born blind so that the work of God can be revealed in him,” John 9:3. The appropriation of disabled body images and metaphors in the symbolic language of Christian theological discourse played and continues to play an instrumental role in the formation, building, and sustaining of Christian faith communities. Yet, Christianity's symbolic language is also used effectively to disenfranchise and alienate the actual disabled body from Christian communities. An inheritance from its Graeco-Roman and Jewish ancestry, Christianity takes as normative a direct link between disability and sin. This paper focuses on John 9:1-41 in exploring early Christianity's use of disability to articulate its ideals and examines the implication of the disability/sin correlation for contemporary Christian Communities.
If I Do What Spirit Says Do: Black Women, Vocation, and Community Survival, Feb 2013
What does it mean to be a Black, female, Catholic, disabled and a theologian in living in the bod... more What does it mean to be a Black, female, Catholic, disabled and a theologian in living in the body coding socio-cultural religio-political discourse of twenty-first century America? What does it mean to simultaneously belong to multiply groups of bodies symbolically loaded with unearned burdens? What does it mean to carve out space/s for Divine presence whilst struggling with reforming and re-informing your understanding of yourself? For Dr. Diana L. Hayes it means knowing that she is in an ongoing relationship with God in whom she seeks refuge, but from whom she also escapes to a good human-centered mystery novel. Using interviews conducted with Dr. Hayes over the course of a year and calling on womanist and disablist theories, theologies, and methodologies, this paper explores the complex and interpenetrating terrain of race, class, sexuality, disability, and spirituality as they dynamically converge in performance in the living out of a life.
Groundings, Issue 16, Jan 2006
In order to discuss development in Caribbean feminist thought it is important situate some of the... more In order to discuss development in Caribbean feminist thought it is important situate some of the basic notions within historical and cultural context. To posit the subject/issue, “Development in Caribbean Feminist Thought,’ is to make some fundamental presuppositions. First, that there is such a thing as Caribbean feminism. Then, that this Caribbean feminism has articulated cohesive understandings of itself such that it holds its uniqueness in focus while maintaining core concepts which define feminism/s. And, finally, that this Caribbean feminism has teeth and sophistication enough to have formed (formally and informally) a think-tank for its expression/s. This short paper presents a critical examination of the encounter between Caribbean and feminist history and culture.
Contemporary western society boasts and laments its secular nature. Many scholars celebrate this... more Contemporary western society boasts and laments its secular nature. Many scholars celebrate this secular nature as areligious, objective, and scientific; yet, those who do so conveniently forget that secularism was born out of, and continues to maintain, systems and values of Christian religious culture. They feign amnesia regarding secularity’s Christian self, espousing the superiority of secularism in contrast to the ‘superstition’ of religiously vigorous societies. In the ideological West, this secularism has played itself out, with regard to the young female body, in the diminished existence of ‘finishing schools’ and/or church-based organizations whose responsibility it was to prepare girls and women for their role as ‘helpmate’ to future male masters (their husbands) and child bearers of the next generation. The role as molder and guide of girls and women has been taken up by various contemporary western organizations such as the girls’ scouts. However, few such organizations contribute to the level of inscription and ordering as the dance studio. The proliferation of the dance studio in western and westernizing cultures, in urban and sub-urban settings, speaks both to the success of the dance studio in taking on this unique social service and to societies’ continued demand for the ordering and control of the bodies and life possibilities of girls and women. This study takes the standpoint that contemporary Western societies construct female bodies as bodies of lack and disorder, to be dominated, controlled and managed. In this environment the dance studio provides service to this social discourse, offering a place for the development and promotion of ‘appropriate’ female body images- images that act to sustain Christian patriarchal cultural concepts of the feminine. Drawing on feminist and disabilist theories and theologies, this study explores and examines some of the ways in which one dance studio, in city of Leuven, Belgium, contributes to Christian patriarchal ordering and control of women and girls.
My Performances and Public Engagements by Carol Marie Webster
Attentive to challenges of the body and notions of the body in Christianity and Christian theolog... more Attentive to challenges of the body and notions of the body in Christianity and Christian theology, this workshop draws on critically reflexive theatre and dance practices, liberation theories and theologies, and anthropology of the body to engage in a three-part introductory excavation and exploration of the body. With an interest toward revealing and deepen individual participant’s understandings of embodied vocabularies that inform personal, social, and cultural identity, the workshop positions body as the central epistemological site for social, political, spiritual, religious, and cultural reasoning. It can be said that body’s logic animates human encounters with and engagement in with the world. As the inheritors to legacies of somatic practices, transmitted, primarily, tacitly from one generation to the next, participants in this workshop are encouraged to consciously identify practices that form the personal and social archives in the body and are through experimentation brought into critical dialogue with self and society.
In 2012 the arts and science performance research project Break-in Point was presented as a part ... more In 2012 the arts and science performance research project Break-in Point was presented as a part of the spring and fall production schedule at Stage@Leeds at the University of Leeds in the UK. A collaboration between dance artist De-Napoli Clarke and theoretical physicist Jiannis K. Pachos under the direction of performance arts researcher Carol Marie Webster, Break-in' Point was billed a series of encounters that 'explore the relation of movement and science through the human catoptron.' The production interrogated "the critical point at which physical, mental, or emotional strength gives way under stress causing structural degeneration… and the experience of what lies beyond.' Break-in Point engaged human trauma and vulnerability through the meeting of arts and science, slippage between the two was necessary to fully grasp the complexity of human experience and response. This paper presents a critical exploration of the 2012 performance of Break-in' Point reviewing and analyzing it as an imaginative somatic site/zone that engaged spiritual and epistemological transformation of performers and audience/s. Drawing on the concepts somatic ethics (where the sensorial systems are in full engagement/value) and affect, the paper will address the development of process, product, and dissemination of the project through and examination of three periods in the life of the project: 1) the development period -script building and rehearsals; 2) the performance -live encounters between and among performers and audiences; and 3) beyond the theatre -digital engagements in the classroom and pedagogy. In each period the project constructed temporary communities in which arts and science were mutually constitutive within each other in the construction of somatic narratives can transcend particularities and invite critical dialoguing within and between real and imagined somatic zones/sites.
My Talks by Carol Marie Webster
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Videos by Carol Marie Webster
My Papers by Carol Marie Webster
Within the historical formation of Jamaica, Christian rhetoric and rhetorical practices ritually exiled African Diaspora/Black Atlantic women and their bodies from essential human and feminine value systems. However, there were other scripts brought to the island in the bodies of African peoples who arrived as captives in a pernicious Christian project. These scripts promote, value and affirm the bodies of African peoples as sacred and divine. This article presents an ethnographic exploration of Jamaican Catholic women’s bodily presence and performance at the Liturgy of the Eucharist, highlighting critical spiritual practices around the notion of body as temple. In the enlivened space of contemporary Jamaican Catholic Christianity, Jamaican women participate in ongoing rituals of body reverence, the claiming, re-claiming and repossessing of body-selves, in order to become dynamic crossroads spaces where human and divine regularly encounter and intermingle.
rhetorical practices ritually exiled African Diaspora/Black Atlantic
women and their bodies from essential human and feminine
value systems. However, there were other scripts brought to the
island in the bodies of African peoples who arrived as captives in
a pernicious Christian project. These scripts promote, value and
affirm the bodies of African peoples as sacred and divine. This
article presents an ethnographic exploration of Jamaican Catholic
women’s bodily presence and performance at the Liturgy of the
Eucharist, highlighting critical spiritual practices around the notion
of body as temple. In the enlivened space of contemporary
Jamaican Catholic Christianity, Jamaican women participate in
ongoing rituals of body reverence, the claiming, re-claiming and
repossessing of body-selves, in order to become dynamic
crossroads spaces where human and divine regularly encounter
and intermingle.
My Performances and Public Engagements by Carol Marie Webster
My Talks by Carol Marie Webster
Within the historical formation of Jamaica, Christian rhetoric and rhetorical practices ritually exiled African Diaspora/Black Atlantic women and their bodies from essential human and feminine value systems. However, there were other scripts brought to the island in the bodies of African peoples who arrived as captives in a pernicious Christian project. These scripts promote, value and affirm the bodies of African peoples as sacred and divine. This article presents an ethnographic exploration of Jamaican Catholic women’s bodily presence and performance at the Liturgy of the Eucharist, highlighting critical spiritual practices around the notion of body as temple. In the enlivened space of contemporary Jamaican Catholic Christianity, Jamaican women participate in ongoing rituals of body reverence, the claiming, re-claiming and repossessing of body-selves, in order to become dynamic crossroads spaces where human and divine regularly encounter and intermingle.
rhetorical practices ritually exiled African Diaspora/Black Atlantic
women and their bodies from essential human and feminine
value systems. However, there were other scripts brought to the
island in the bodies of African peoples who arrived as captives in
a pernicious Christian project. These scripts promote, value and
affirm the bodies of African peoples as sacred and divine. This
article presents an ethnographic exploration of Jamaican Catholic
women’s bodily presence and performance at the Liturgy of the
Eucharist, highlighting critical spiritual practices around the notion
of body as temple. In the enlivened space of contemporary
Jamaican Catholic Christianity, Jamaican women participate in
ongoing rituals of body reverence, the claiming, re-claiming and
repossessing of body-selves, in order to become dynamic
crossroads spaces where human and divine regularly encounter
and intermingle.