 So for inviting me, I want to thank Maddie Bratt and Jose for all the help with the presentation. And this is, I went to the Graduate Center for my PhD, so I know this space very well. So it is both a homecoming and very intimidating, so. So I want to start with a little bit of reminiscing. So I remember distinctly the experience that sparked my passion for theater. I was 10 years old, and I sat in the front row of the Mezzanine at the National Theater in Washington, DC. During the performance, I leaned forward. My forehead was pressed into balcony and railing. My eyes were glued to the stage. And in the weeks that followed that performance, despite repeatedly recounting it in vivid detail to anyone who would listen, I felt incapable of really expressing in words the show's powerful impact on me. It's narrative and choreography were not the source. The spectacular set, makeup and costumes were not really the cause either. And although I'm certain I'd seen other plays before this one, this is the production that stays with me even now. It was Cats. Something happened at the theater the night I saw Cats. The performance lodged itself inside my body and remained there in a very visceral, tangible way. Trying to express this sensation in the weeks that followed, I recreated Cats in my family's living room, singing and dancing to the entire two cassette soundtrack every night. That's like what was before CDs. You've never seen one. So I'd like to flip it and then put the other one to flip it, but I was committed. So this evening ritual was the only thing that I could do with the performance that seemed to have lodged itself inside my body. We deem a play successful, pleasurable, or no worthy for any number of reasons that might provoke us to think in new ways, challenge our expectations or entertain us. The text could be cleverly written or the performance brilliantly acted, skillfully designed and innovatively staged. But plays that transform us, that prompt us to commit ourselves to theater, that we recall years later, not just mentally but also physically, these plays would do something to us. Their performances certainly leave traces in our mind, but more remarkably, they embed themselves somewhere inside our bodies in such a way that we carry them with us, not only to every future theatrical event, but also to our other encounters and experiences in the world. Many performances move us, but transformative theatrical events remain inside of us where they continue to affect us for years and perhaps forever. So with these passages, I opened my first book on performance culture in late medieval York. They point to an interest in a methodology that guided that project and then continued to guide my research into both medieval and contemporary religious performances. I also related to interest in biology. I earned my undergraduate degrees, my bachelor of science degree in biology and chemistry, and although I ended up eventually with a PhD in theater and I'm an M.A., or an M.D., I should say I can't even say M.D., I'm so good to get it. My interest in the human body and its functions has been really central to my research, and it has also led me to use a range of different theoretical frameworks. Among them are cognitive theory. So for theater studies, especially cognitive studies and cognitive theory have really helped us understand reception much better and the way in which we kind of interact with what we're seeing, the way in which the body is and the corporeality of the body is as well as the materiality of objects on stage really impact us. So in my work on performance in the late Middle Ages, I used theories from cognitive science to think about how medieval spectators engaged and understood religious performances. But doing so also involved using my own body and its responses as a platform for analysis. So for example, here, I would walk around the 21st century York, which really retained some of the same elements of its medieval character and typography. And it really inspired me to ask questions about how spectators saw and interpretive performances in that medieval scene. I wondered about how seeing religious plays performed on wagons against the backdrop of familiar buildings and businesses and homes might have impacted the religious meaning that they would derive from the plays. And then alternatively on the flip side, how could seeing these performances annually that would circle through the city in those medieval streets then layer the everyday environments with ongoing devotional meaning. So religious meaning that might be reactivated each time they walked down the street or gazed upon a building. And then I used cognitive theory to suggest answers to these questions and their relevance to how we understood medieval drama. So as I hope this illustrates, I'm keenly interested in how live performances make meaning and specifically in how the material event-ness of or surrounding a religious performance generates ongoing meaning through the physical bodies of the spectators. I focus on a performance's dramaturgy or its dramatic composition to analyze how the different elements of a theatrical event operate in combination to affect the physical bodies of spectators. Now, while my work on New York really focused on representational elements of what spectators would see and sometimes hear, my more recent work has been concerned with non-representational elements of performances such as pacing or rhythm. These are primarily felt by spectator's bodies and therefore they only become really apparent when a person physically experiences a performance. So this research has focused on Christian performances that depict the last days of humankind at birth or the end times. I've examined performances that represent the events on a personal or global scale and in both medieval and modern contexts. One similarity across these is the prevalence of violence, specifically violence that does not just function through representation. So I therefore spend a lot less time interpreting what I see or the violent images and more time really thinking about the physical sensations that they produce in order to understand how those might impact the religious meaning that the audiences then make from the planes. So I visited a number of these, contemporary end times plays. Hell houses and judgment houses are more familiar. They're almost canonical to this genre. They've attracted a lot of attention by theater scholars and then also by the popular press. George Radcliffe's 2001 documentary, Hell House, was in part responsible for that attention. These shows are licensed, they're packaged and the congregations purchased them with scripts, production directions, design elements, sometimes sound effects, and they both of these genres use a kind of small group walkthrough structure. So although they differ in significant ways, both use this and then end it with a kind of scene in which spectators are directly forced to confront and consider their own moment of judgment at kind of the pearly gates moment. Spectators watch as characters who that are stand-ins for themselves encounter recognizable depictions of everyday violence. And I've argued that these performances with their vivid violence provokes a kind of individually oriented fear. And that focuses people on a personal moment of judgment. All right, by contrast, Hell's Gaze is an outdoor reality drama that's produced by Lighthouse Baptist Church in Dawsonville, Georgia. And it functions very differently. I initially approached this production thinking it would evoke the same kind of fear that I had had an experience at Hell House and Judgment House. However, my own physical experience of the production revealed something quite different. And so this is an example that I'll spend the rest of my time discussing. Hell's Gaze is an annual event with a four-week production schedule, time to coincide with a Halloween and content house season. So right now, the Hell's Gaze website describes the performance as, quote, nine action-packed heart-pounding scenes filled with scares and pyrotechnics that will leave you staring death in its face and wanting to find the way out of Hell's Gaze. So, and then this is another, from their home page. You can see there's a parental advisory because it's quite graphic. There's also a one-minute publicity video on the home page. So if we can move to that right now, that would be great. And as that will show, this is really a piece of immersive theater that situates spectators as participants in the end-time events as found in the book Revelation. And so we're gonna watch that. Pretending not to know, what are you ignoring? Should you be focused on today? What means to be lost? A huge group of people really showed me that this works. I mean, people were incredibly emotionally moved by this. There was a lot of tears, there were a lot of prayers, and it was much more so than Hell House or Judgment House, which seemed less sensational, so they might work more. But this actually seemed to, at least from my position, provoke a really powerful response. So analyzing the devotional function of a performance like this, in a really considered thoughtful way, to kind of respect and try to understand what it's doing, required opening myself up to feeling its effects and effects, to really performing the actions and responses that the performance's dramaturgy encouraged. And by performing, I don't mean to pretend or to simply go through the motions. Instead, I really tried to enter into a genuine, meaningful, bodily relationship with the form, experiencing all of its sensory contours and meeting its expectations as fully and sincerely as I could, even if I could not ultimately arrive at the point of belief. And of course, to be useful, this kind of engagement cannot be casually undertaken. It must be grounded in rigorous critical research of various contexts, textual, cultural, social, theological, and historical, all of which, from which the performance emerges and into which it's produced. Engaging Hell's Gates in this way allowed me to consider how its violence functioned differently than the other end of time performances, rather than presenting clearly legible representations of violence to provoke fear. I argue that Hell's Gates relied upon violent intensities to induce really strong, unsettled feelings that the production would then organize and make legible by using biblical scripture. The production was divided into several scenes that took place in a variety of different locations. Some episodes were staged in large outdoor areas with the action happening all around us, while others occurred in warehouse-like spaces with spectators standing or sitting on the bleachers. The first episode took place in a cordoned off outdoor area with a film screen at one end. Standing in the space, we watched a video that outlined various signs on Earth that all point towards an appending end, capital E. These events included wars, pestilence, famine, and earthquakes. And after the video ended, gates opened in front of us and several guides began yelling at us to follow a path that wound through a very realistic, post-wrapture scene of pandemonium. We saw a section of an airplane that had apparently fallen out of the sky and crashed to Earth. We passed the site to various car accidents where bloody victims hung out of the vehicles and the walking wounded staggered all around us. We passed fires and carnage as we traversed the disaster area. The performance also happens after nightfall and the lighting is produced almost exclusively by elements within the scene. So in this case, flashing the ambulance lights, headlights, search lights, fires, and unexpected explosions provided that lighting also created a really disorienting atmosphere. Representationally, that violence is typical of pre-tribulation Christian narratives. When all believers are suddenly raptured, disaster will result as the cars they're driving corine and crash, airplanes they're flying, crash to Earth. However, the disorienting somewhat chaotic scene also assaults spectators sensorially. So many things are happening simultaneously and all around the audience. That the scenes of violence confronts spectators on a level of sensation really rather than narrative. I responded physically and emotionally into the violence long before I really understood its representational meaning. This violence of sensation remained consistent across much of the performance with episodes roughly following a standard tribulation account and all of them very elaborate with respect to production. So for instance, one ends with the two witnesses that are referred to in chapter 11 of the book of Revelation appearing on the top of the building and they begin proclaiming the word of God and those on the side of the antichrist start to shoot at them and the gunfire is whizzing over the spectator's heads. The witnesses are uninjured and then in a flash of smoke and light they disappear, they vanish. And then all of a sudden in all of this yelling, all of us who are respecting us are rushed into a warehouse space for the next scene. So at the end of every scene, the guides shouted at us to run or to hurry into the next space and then they aggressively instructed us to remain quiet or to stay standing once we reassembled. They created a really hostile environment in which law and order had seemingly been supplanted by law and such an overwhelming environment really prevented me as a spectator from immediately interpreting the scene's present moment. Instead it left me suspended in a kind of unsettled emotional state and seeking some kind of narrative order. That order is then supplied into episodes where the rhythm and mood shift really drastically. In one of these, a young preacher uses scripture to explain what has just happened and planted spectators in the audience ask questions that the preacher then answers by referencing Bible verses, specifically passages from Revelation. In this intimate quiet space, yelling and disorientation were totally replaced by the preacher's composed demeanor, his rational explanations. Sensory chaos was made orderly and legible by the word of God. In contrast to Hell's house or Judgment House, Hell's gates also superimposes its end times theology onto a global landscape. During the performance, I was not following the story of a single individual or seeing a metaphor for myself. Instead I was living in a culture as it collapsed around me and feeling an increasing loss of control as the events have folded. A number of dramaturgical elements really inscribed this feeling into my body, being herded in a big group, yelled at incessantly, ordered where to stand when to sit. All of these reduced my sense of agency and personal liberty. The episodic structure and the quick transitions cultivated a sensation of constant change about stability or trustworthy leadership. And indeed the fast pace often left me just trying to figure out how I was gonna navigate this distorted, disoriented world logistically. During scenes that are staged indoors, spectators are usually squeezed against one another and this lack of personal space and freedom really reinforced the feeling of personal liberty lost. So by assaulting the senses in this way, the terror of being left behind became less about the individual violent acts and more about how the tribulation event as a whole overturned cultural values and principles. This upending was conveyed through sensation, hurting, rushing, yelling, crowding, combined with random and often very startling use of lights, gunfire, and explosions. They all produced a violence that suspended me in a state of confusion and frustration. I may have been intent on physically navigating the present as I often was, but my feelings were pitched anxiously forward towards a future in which I would hope those sensations made sense. This chaotic atmosphere was then made orderly and calm and intelligible through scripture during the scene of the pastor and in a final scene which also takes that same tonal shift. Last slide. So Helmsgates provides spectators with felt evidence of what will happen. And that's its goal. And it expects, really, spectators to understand why consequently it only makes sense to believe. From start to finish and despite what really might sound, I'm sure it does very overwrought, very melodramatic. The show's tenor remains pretty logical. Moreover, it cultivates this religious message through feelings that may then be refelt later in different circumstances and in reaction to a variety of other seemingly secular triggers when watching news coverage of the devastation and rescue attacks following a natural disaster. When passing a car crash on the side of a highway, when watching an international espionage movie of Jason Bourneville or a domestic thriller series like Homeland, re-feeling allows those subsequent experiences to also be imbued with that same religious significance, taking ostensibly discreet experiences and then through emotional association, uniting them into a common religious interpretation. By means of this re-feeling, the religious significance of Helmsgates is always coming into being. It makes ongoing religious meaning by providing spectators with a way to organize and make legible subsequent encounters that evoke the same kinds of disorienting, troubling or unsettled feelings. However, ultimately it was only by actively and trying to sincerely engage the performance itself and then interrogating my own bodily responses that this logic of feeling really became apparent to me. So I was asked to kind of present you with an example of the kind of work that I do as a scholar and so this is what I chose and I'm very happy to talk, answer questions or just open up conversations. So thank you for listening. When I first returned to New York City, my upstairs neighbors were Easter-forming Christians and they had a really modest study class in their apartment which was extremely noisy. And they also were often out of town and I started to realize it was coincidental with the RNC fundraisers. And then when Trump was elected, I just couldn't resist and I found one of their Facebook pages and he likened Trump's election to Moses. You know, that this was much like Moses and then another reference that I didn't even know how to look it up, it was, you know, I think that this is a lot of why people just wanted to accept what's going on in this weekly because there's been a lot of work done to make that association on a visceral level. Yeah, I mean I would say that I've done a lot of research historically and that's true of American history since like the 1600s. It's very interesting and it's been really on all sides. The Apocalypse, the Antimes has been used as a really powerful political tool. And it's very much, although it's, you know, you can say it's global, but it's very much a part of kind of American religiosity which is, you know, there's something unique to it in this culture for any number of reasons, but yeah. So I would be surprised. I mean, I know that these things that it's often recalled, it was, it often came up around references to the Antimes around Barack Obama's presidency. References to Antichrist and things like that were thrown around a lot, so yeah. Thank you, this is so wonderful. So if I'm understanding what you're saying correctly, you're talking about using this kind of like artificially traumatic experience to put people in a space where they're receptive to some message which has been given to them in the prior to these Bible verses. And I guess I'm wondering, while that feels important to me in many ways, I wonder if it seems that there is a possibility in that form for something more liberatory in terms of putting people, I guess, like what I dream of they're doing, right, of like having an experience by which we actually be feeling more capable, more individual, more empowered, as opposed to I was made powerless and then was given an answer. And I guess I wonder if you've encountered kind of what the reverse side of this coin is, either in research or in your personal life, or like what that dramaturgy might look like in a way that's effective. Yeah, I probably would not give you a good answer to this. I would, you know, an interesting person doesn't work on evangelical performance culture forms like this, but with a look at how it works as social activism is John Fletcher. So he's kind of tried to flip the script on that a little bit to kind of see the ways in which this can be, these kinds of tactics can be used to kind of promote other kinds of feeling, kind of more of liberatory feelings. I would say that if you are not within this community, this probably doesn't seem like liberation. When you're in it, there is a degree talking to people who went to it. There's something very freeing about finding that structure. In a way, I mean, every theater experience is a little bit, I think, traumatic. I mean, it takes us through this emotional journey and then, you know, the catharsis if you want to talk Aristotle or whatnot. And this is just using it to present a kind of theology. But also a lot of people come in to these experiences kind of looking for it. So it's not as if they came in totally fine and then it's like, you broke me down and built me up. Instead, there's a kind of searching that's involved in it. One of the things that a lot of people, myself included who studied this look at is that these are not really meant to convert people. These are meant to kind of reinforce and help reinvigorate the faith of those who already believe, but might be in a moment of searching and are looking to kind of find stability again. So I don't know, does that kind of get out of some of what you're talking about? I think so. So maybe what I'm saying is something slightly impossible, which is like, how can you do this in the end instead of buttoning it up with an answer, button it up or unbutton it to a non-answer? Yeah, yeah. I think that the Hellenhaus does that a little bit because that leaves the question open. Whereas this does definitely wrap it up a little bit more tightly. And I think that's why it functions in a different arena. Yes. Thank you so much. Thank you. We're going to move to one right next door to have a look.