Day 2: Ocean of Song & Dance: Emerging Currents in Tibetan & Himalayan Performance Studies

Name: Day 2: Ocean of Song & Dance: Emerging Currents in Tibetan & Himalayan Performance Studies
Start: 2025-12-06T10:30:00+00:00
End: 2025-12-06T19:00:00+00:00
Location: 403 Kent Hall

December 6 @ 10:30 am - 7:00 pm

Ocean of Song and Dance brings together scholars, artists, and practitioners to event poster explore the shifting currents of song, dance, ritual, and theatre across the Tibetan and Himalayan worlds. Featuring a keynote address by Jamyang Norbu and panels on performance, gender, and identity, the program also includes live, immersive demonstrations and participatory workshops on ache lhamo, or Tibetan opera. The conference highlights performance at the intersections of tradition and innovation, the sacred and the secular, and the local and the global, culminating in a participatory discussion on new directions for performance studies in Tibetan & Himalayan contexts. Through conversation, performance, and shared experience, Ocean of Song and Dance celebrates the creativity and interconnectedness of Himalayan expressive cultures, inviting reflection on the power of performance to carry history, shape identity, and inspire new cultural currents.

RSVP FOR DAY 2

Day 2 | December 6, 2025

10:30am – 12:00pm

Panel I: Text & Performance / Kimerer LaMothe, Constantine Lignos

International Affairs Building 918

12:00pm – 1:15pm

Lunch

1:30pm – 3:00pm

Panel II: Gender, Ritual, and Performance / Kati Fitzgerald, Joshua Brallier

International Affairs Building 918

3:00pm – 3:30pm

Tea break

3:30pm – 4:30pm

Performance & Identity / Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy

Kent Hall 403

4:30pm – 6:00pm

Dance Workshop: Gorshay and Ache Lhamo / Tenzin Kelsang, Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy

Kent Hall 403

6:00pm – 7:00pm

Concluding Discussion & Reception

Kent Hall 403

PANEL I: TEXT & PERFORMANCE

The Play of the Text: Rhythmic Bodily Movement and the Experience of Religious Meaning

Kimerer LaMothe

Within the study of religion, a tendency to privilege textual forms of religious expression and inward form of religious experience has resulted in a paucity of conceptual resources for acknowledging the agency of human bodies in the production of religious meaning. In this panel, LaMothe shares her ecokinetic phenomenological approach to the study of religion. This approach understands religious systems and symbols, texts and rituals, as patterns of bodily movement, or “movement potentials,” which educate human senses to ranges of possible meaning and action. An ecokinetic approach offers myriad opportunities for revealing the originary and constitutive role that dancing in particular, and bodily movement in general, play in the world’s religions.

Incomplete Choreographies: Authorizing & Activating the Absent Body in Tibetan Buddhist Dance-Writing

Constantine Lignos

Beginning as early as the 16th century in Europe, the word choreography came to mask a certain anxiety around the two activities it brings together. Dancing (choreo-) is fluid, embodied, and ephemeral, whereas writing (-graphy) is fixed, disembodied, and symbolic. Without recourse to written documentation, without the ability to “capture” the body on the page, dance, it was feared, would forever be lost. This anxiety, however, is absent from Tibetan Buddhist dance texts dating back to at least the 13th century. Rather than attempting to preserve the entirety of a performance, these texts assume that the dance already lives in the body—or “in the bones”—of trained practitioners. Drawing on an archive of some 60 Tibetan Buddhist dance texts, I show how these writers created living texts that reside in the space between the body and the page. They do not record every step but rather authorize ritual lineage and activate embodied knowledge through cosmological framings, cues, and mnemonic prompts. By taking on performative functions, these texts do not merely document performance, but project ritual action forward, preserving memory even as they shape the future, summoning bodies, gestures, and worlds into being.

PANEL II: GENDER, RITUAL, & PERFORMANCE

The Sound that is Heard Without Ears: Silence, Muteness and Mantra in the Songs of Khandro Tsulsang

Kati Fitzgerald

Khandro Tsulsang was a female Buddhist master who lived before, during and after the tumultuous period of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet. She was ordained as a nun, undertook a program of rigorous study and meditation, took a vow of silence, was imprisoned and targeted for struggle sessions, fled and was lost to her family members, teachers and students. After decades, she was rediscovered as a mute nun living in Lhasa. She composed a number of songs of realization during her periods of retreat, imprisonment and exile. These songs tell us important information about the kinds of meditative practices she was engaging, the female lineages she was upholding, as well as the poetic repertoire she had access to while in retreat. These songs also suggest an experiential knowledge of sound emptiness, which is evidenced through her own decades-long muteness, as well as her use of specific tonal vocabularies. Placing her poetic soundscapes in the broader context of her life and studies, I will consider Khandro Tsulsang’s extreme sensory deprivation in dark retreat, her refusal to speak, and her recitation of mantra and composition of songs of realization as an extension of her understanding of sound emptiness.

Speaker Bios:

Kimerer LaMothe (Harvard University) is a dancer, author, playwright, and philosopher of religion. She earned a PhD in Religion from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University; taught at Brown and Harvard Universities for six years; and has received fellowships for her work in dance and religion from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Center for the Study of World Religions, both of Harvard University, and the Lower Adirondack Regional Arts Council (LARAC), three times. LaMothe is the author of six books, including Why We Dance (Columbia University Press); Nietzsche’s Dancers (Palgrave MacMillan), and Between Dancing and Writing: The Practice of Religious Studies (Fordham University Press).

Kati Fitzgerald (Otterbein University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy & Religion at Otterbein University. She is an anthropologist of religion, whose work focuses on the lives and religious experiences of the Buddhist laity. She uses primarily ethnographic methods in contemporary Tibet to understand the religious theories of everyday Buddhists. She teaches courses on Asian Religions, Ethics, Gender & Sexuality in the Study of Religion, the intersection between performing arts and religious practice, and religion and medicine.

Joshua Brallier (Northwestern University) is a doctoral candidate in Buddhist Studies at Northwestern University. His dissertation research considers the gendered dimensions of tantric ritual, narrative, and ideology in Tibetan Vajrayāna Buddhism, with particular interest in the role of masculinity in tantric Buddhist subject formation. His dissertation focuses on the life and writings of Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé, the deer-hunting, alcohol-drinking, gun-wielding tantric master from the Golok region of eastern Tibet. He holds an M.A. in Buddhist Studies from the University of Colorado Boulder, an M.Div. in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism from Naropa University, and a B.A. in Religious Studies from Georgetown.

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