Representing Practice: An Assist from Dwight Conquergood, Part 3 of 3

Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.
What has been missing for me so far in Conquergood’s theory of the representation of practice through performance is a sufficiently subtle account of how the four traps that lay in wait for the performer (or read here: theologian) are not determinable in some objective way apart from the way the performer relates to and is understood by their audience. In other words, there might be a reason to exalt practice, or to do something that looks like exalting practice, for example because of a larger-arced aim that the performer/theologian has in mind, or for example because the sufficient watering of a cultural ground is necessary as a debt to be paid or a generosity to be indulged in order for the ritual of learning to continue. Not all practice can be treated with the ethical clarity Conquergood commends, or rather the ethical treatment of practice has to be understood as elaborated only in a context with certain variance about what counts as responsible and respectful rendering of others. His theory, in its attention to cultural variation, already opens onto such considerations.
But I would like to say a word about his ideal situation for performing others’ lives. He calls it “dialogical performance,” and will not be very distant from the sort of soundings of others’ practice with which the best practical theological performance is already familiar. Still, it asks something of a stretch for a lot of practical theology.
By “dialogical performance,” he means a way of rendering others’ lives/practices in an open-ended way, such that plural accounts or perspectives are presented and not cancelled in view of a single view. “The dialogical stance is situated in the space between competing ideologies.” (p.9) The “ethnographer’s home culture should be as open to interpretation, questioning, weighing of alternatives, as the host culture.” (p.9) I want to add here that such a stance presumes the “safety” of doing so, or at least needs to allow for the risk involved in taking that vulnerable stand. This is not always possible, and not always desirable, for all performance situations.
I appreciate the processual quality of what Conquergood suggests. Instead of the right way of working, he describes this approach as “a way of finding the moral center.” (p.10) Like much practical theology, he is after a way of letting the life of the other be tellable in a way that retains, and honors, its otherness.
Tom Beaudoin, Newark, New Jersey