Video Introduction

Drawing from the intersections of feminist performance art, ritual practice, and the field of arts-based research in education (i.e. a/r/tography, Irwin & de Cosson, 2004; Springgay et al, 2008)), we explore the labyrinth and ritual as artistic and visceral, tactile, verbal, aesthetic spiritual practices of identification of, and inquiry into, the ‘self’ as spirit, soul, and sacred. By re-working ritual art within embodied scholarship, by attending to a hermeneutics of the ritual body in education, we would transform and re-write the social body, our bodies, as text.

 

The video images are the result of a four month collaborative project on “labyrinths as ritual art and sacred inquiry.” Within this inquiry we witnessed each other making, walking and experiencing the mystery of the labyrinth. We documented our labyrinth making and walking, as well as shared reflective responses to the process in six locations around Vancouver British Columbia’s lower mainland. Both indoors and out, these labyrinths were inscribed onto floors or into the earth with diverse materials; sand, earth, grass, stone, rope, and cement.

 

The labyrinth is a unifying symbol to learn/teach and inquiry within and from. The labyrinth has activated and served as a multi-layered guide for our collaborative project. We thank and honour the land that we walked upon, its ancestors: human, spirit, plant and animal.

 

Keeping the presence of a creative ritual practice alive we combine video documentation of our labyrinth makings and walkings, with Barbara’s oral text of trance, our oral scholarly text, and a sound trance collaboratively created between ourselves and healing sound artist Wende Bartley in the center of the labyrinth walked on Barbara’s birthday.

 

The interactions between the multiple sound and video recordings were not pre-scripted and are mostly random dialogic happenings that occurred during the editing process. Similar to theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh Ha (2005) we experience the digital making of video as ritual making.

 

The multiple layers of trance that weave through this walking journey enable a multi-sensory experience of labyrinths as ritual art. Trance can be described as a waking dream state and when transcribed becomes what Helene Cixious (1997) and Luce Irigaray (1997) would call a “female sentence.”

 

This female text is unaided by grammar and traditional sentence structure. Through trance we enter a rich and provocative awake dreaming state that allows us to step outside of our “normal” selves, and enter into an imaginal realm that is full of new possibilities.

 

We invite you to listen and witness with all of your senses. Walk with us, with open and soft focused attention as you join us in this digital ritual experience.

 

Terms of Reference

 

Sacred Epistemology

Denzin and Lincoln (2000) define a sacred epistemology in writing of the seventh moment in qualitative research: “We imagine a form of qualitative inquiry in the 21^st century that is simultaneously minimal, existential, autoethnographic, vulnerable, performative, and critical.... It seeks to ground the self in a sense of the sacred, to connect the ethical, respectful self dialogically to nature…. It seeks to embed this self in deeply storied histories of sacred spaces and local places, to illuminate the unit of the self in its relationship to the reconstructed, moral, and sacred natural world….This model of inquiry seeks a sacred epistemology that recognizes the essential ethical unity of mind and nature…. A sacred, existential epistemology places us in a non-competitive, non-hierarchical relationship to the earth, to nature, and to the larger world…” (1052).

 

Ritual

Ritual is as old as humanity (Grimes, 1995) and can be used for good or evil purposes. In its transformative aspects it can suspend ordinary time and immerse one in sacred time (Eliade, 1959). Victor Turner expanded the entrenched liturgical definition of ritual by recognizing it as the crossing of a threshold (Grimes, 1995).

 

Spiritual Feminist

A spiritual feminist is one who, according to bel hooks (2000) is on a spiritual quest to unite spiritual practice with restorative justice. Who restores our understanding of the sacred and creates spaces for all to critically delve into outmoded belief systems, broadening our understandings of god/dess and divine wisdom. Rooted within a sacred understanding of female embodiment, she seeks to unite the wisdom of inner and outer experience.

 

Trance

Trance as we work with it is a performative ritual that takes place within an altered state of consciousness. It as an active form of meditation that is not focused on the concept of stilling the mind, which predominates in most traditional Eastern meditation (Suzuki, 1975). The active meditation/performance of trance is a place of expanding the mind’s imaginary; where as Thomas Driver observes “[w]e perform our becoming, and become our performing” (1997, 114). Jean Houston (1987) in her work within “sacred psychology” teaches trance as an inquiry method of “gaining... knowledge from... states of consciousness that are deeper than your ordinary state... that can avail you of more subtle and comprehensive knowledge” (173).

 

 

References

 

Bickel, Barbara (2005). Embracing the arational through art, ritual and the body. Paper presented at the 3^rd Annual International Conference on Imagination and Education. Vancouver, BC: Simon Fraser University. Retrieved from http://www3.educ.sfu.ca/conferences/ierg2005/viewabstract.php?id=206

 

Britzman, Deborah P. (2006). Novel education: Psychoanalytic studies of learning and not learning. NY: Peter Lang.

 

Cixous, Helene. (1997). The laugh of the Medusa. In R. R. Warhol & D. P. Herndl (Eds.), Feminisms: An anthology of literary theory and criticism (347-362). \ New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

 

Compton, Vanessa (2002). The labyrinth: site and Symbol of transformation. In E. O’Sullivan, A. Morrell & M. O’Connor (Eds.), Expanding the boundaries of transformative learning. (103-120). NY: Plagrave.

 

Denzin, Norman (1989). The research act: A theoretical introduction to sociological methods (3^rd ed.). Englewood cliffs, NJ:Prentice Hall.

 

Driver, Tom, F. (1997). Liberating Rites: Understanding the transformative power of ritual. Boulder, Co: Westview.

 

Eliade, M. (1959). The sacred and the profane: The nature of religion. (W.R. Trask, Trans.). New York: Harcourt, Brace. (Original work published 1957).

 

Gebser, Jean (1984). The ever-present origin (N. Barstad & A. Mickunas, Trans.). Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

 

Grace Cathedral (2006). The cathedral labyrinths. Retrieved August 1, 2006 from www.gracecathedral.org/labyrinth/

 

Grimes, Ronald L. (1995). Beginnings in ritual studies. University of South Carolina Press.

 

hooks, bell (2000). Feminism is for everybody: Passionate politics. Cambridge, MA: South End.

 

Houston, Jean (1987). The search for the beloved: Journeys in mythology and sacred psychology. Los Angeles, CA: Jeremy P. Tarcher.

 

Irigaray, Luce (1997). This sex which is not one. In K. Conboy, N. Medina & S.Stanbury (Eds.), Writing on the body: Female embodiment and feminist theory (248-256). Columbia University Press.

 

Irwin, Rita L. & de Cosson, Alex (2004). A/r/t/ography: Rendering self through arts-based living inquiry. Vancouver, BC: Pacific Educational Press.

 

Lincoln, Yvonna & Denzin, Norman K. (2000). The seventh moment: Out of the past. In N. K. Denzin & Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (1047-1065). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

 

Minh-ha, Trinh T. (1992). Framer framed. NY: Routledge.

 

Northrup, Lesley, A. (1997). Ritualizing women: Patterns of spirituality. Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim.

 

Reason, Peter (1993). Reflections on sacred experience and sacred science. Journal of Management Inquiry,              2(3), 273-283.

 

Reason, Peter (2000). Action research as spiritual practice. Retrieved February 12, 2006 from http://www.bath.ac.uk/~mnspwr/Thoughtpieces/ARspiritualpractice.htm

 

Reason, Peter (in press). Living as part of the whole: The implications of participation. Curriculum & Pedagogy.

 

Sayward, (2005). A Labyrinthine Library. Retrieved July 5, 2007 http://textualities.net/collecting/features-n-z/sawardj01.php

 

Springgay, Stephanie, Irwin, Rita, Leggo, Carl & Gouzouasis Peter (Eds.). (2008) Being with a/r/tography. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense.

 

Suzuki, Shunryu (1975), Zen mind, beginner’s mind, NY; John Weatherhill.