Letter from the Editor

Abstract

At this writing, the global pandemic is dissipating, but not everywhere, and not really. COVID's Delta variant overwhelmed India in the late spring and now reaches around the globe. In places like the United States, people who are not vaccinated seem to have sustained a new COVID surge. The global “we” are some distance yet from returning to the heady days of live performance that existed before COVID entered.This issue of Ecumenica includes two essays that attend to how performance can shape the present, even when performance is mediated by time, distance, and technology. Malini Murali explains how a text can reach into the now from a distant past to enact profound influence on how we experience our immediate world. Performances derived from the Ramayana—one of India's great epics—are constituent parts of what twenty-first century India is. Murali is concerned not with Ram Lila, which is the most common mode of staging the Ramayana's story, but with a sixteenth-century rendering of the story in Malayalam, the regional language of India's southwestern coastal state of Kerala. Murali shows that performance of Tunchath Ezhutachan's poem, Adhyatmaramayanam Kilipattu, can shape present reality, and in laying out this lyrical argument, Murali offers some hope to all of us who have been waiting for so long for the season to change. Hank Willenbrink directs our attention to film. The Trump Prophecy, says Willenbrink, is both a product and a producer of a performative discourse that still provides reality's parameters for many evangelical Christians in the United States. As a sort of text, this film may be read as a reiteration of biblical vision and as a confirmation of a truth about the world we inhabit that not everyone knows.This issue also offers T. Chester's interview with playwright and performer Nia Witherspoon, whose productions provide ritual affirmations for many who do not find affirmation readily available in our world. Among other things in this conversation between scholar and artist, we find a description theatrical performance that, deliberately employed, not only changes the experience of time and space but gives reality a peculiar sensibility—a taste—that the world does not generate itself, otherwise. “This is not theatre,” says Witherspoon in the course of one of her performances. Of course, it is theatre, but it is not pretend. For Witherspoon, the performance moment is what it is, and all of what it is, including everything that everyone present brings—“Black feminist church,” for Witherspoon. Everything that the bodies in attendance can manifest together, as a reality collectively composed.Performance reviews in this issue include the analysis of video-mediated performance—the typical mode of audiencing for most everyone across these past eighteen months—and also a look at a move to bring audience and performers together again in a shared space. Edudzi David Sallah unpacks some of the implications of part of a reality-show competition in Ghana. In March of 2020, Bernice Mawutornyo Ashigbie performed a hybrid combination of a precolonial, judicial ritual and hymns that express a distinctly Christian ethos. Sallah helps us see how such a hybrid performance can affirmatively combine two traditions that we might otherwise see as incompatible. Lauren Shouse provides a look at the live performance of a new musical. The production's nod to the pandemic involved performance in an open-sky parking lot. And it may be that what could be understood as merely a necessary concession was so fitting to the play that such “alternative” venues should not be so “alternative.”Issue 14.2 also includes five book reviews, from Rhona Justice-Malloy, Kay Martinovich, Joya Scott, Susanne Shawyer, and Tamara Underiner. Collectively, these reviewed books take the suffering human body as their subject. Dealing openly, sometimes explicitly, with physical suffering as and in performance, the books are not easy reads, nor are these reviews. In this time of collective suffering, perhaps some serious consideration of the human body's capacity not only to experience pain, but to endure it, to overcome it—even to appreciate it—is warranted.