So Joseph and Mary came to Bethlehem.  They were poor and could find no lodging in the inns, which already were full of people who had come for the same purpose; so they had to take shelter in a public passage […] located between two houses.  It provided some overhead covering and served as a meeting place for townspeople who came there to talk or eat together in their free time, or when the weather was bad.  Perhaps Joseph set up a manger for his ox and his ass, or, as some think, peasants coming in to market were used to tying up their animals there and the crib was ready to hand.  In that place, at midnight, the eve of Sunday, the blessed virgin gave birth to her Son and laid him on hay in the manger.  This hay, which the ox and the ass abstained from eating, was brought to Rome by Saint Helena. (de Voragine 38) [5]

A distinction between ceremonial and embodied Nativity re-enactments is made in the thirteenth century, about the time of this account, when Christian modes of representation are shifting and increasing in their realistic depiction of events. Dramatic re-enactments of the Nativity were performed as part of Catholic liturgy.  The Officium Pastorem (Order of the Shepherds) depicted the visit of shepherds to the manger on Christmas Eve or Day (December 25), and the Officium Stellae depicted the arrival of the three kings on Epiphany (January 6).  However detailed and elaborate, these ritualized re-enactments remained symbolic. The manger was symbolized by the altar, or by a veiled crib set up behind the altar. Mary and the infant Jesus were represented by statues, while the re-enactments were traditionally performed by priests or monks in the context [page 25] of a proscribed religious ceremony.

Mimetic re-enactments of this type (and their relationship to modern realism) have been a matter of some controversy in the last four decades, and it is worth briefly summarizing two major approaches before considering medieval Living Nativity tableaux as a distinct mode of performance.  O.B. Hardison, in 1965, famously described the Catholic Mass itself as a ritual drama, in which physical objects, gestures, and bodies took on a highly representational form of role-playing as early as the ninth century (Hardison 78). Hardison’s explanation of an inherent relationship between ritual and realistic drama was challenged by Michal Kobialka’s argument in 1999 for a heterogeneity in medieval sacramental representation grounded in changing theological doctrines on the body of Christ (Kobialka 32-33). The heterogeneity in medieval representational practices (including performance) is evident in Christian philosophy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The practice of embodying the Nativity without a ceremonial frame comes not from the tradition of symbolic drama but from thirteenth-century efforts to connect Christian theology directly with human experience.  Whereas the neoplatonic tradition had construed the material world as an image of God created by God to be duplicated by humans, the intellectual formulations of thirteenth-century Aristotelianism re-characterized God as a human being. Mimesis, or imitation in an Aristotelian sense was thus a conceptual option by the time St. Francis of Assisi offered a re-enactment of the birth of Jesus for lay people outside a liturgical context (Morrison 175).

St. Francis of Assisi is credited with presenting the Nativity as a living experience in 1223, a hermeneutic innovation which many participants in modern day Nativity tableaux cite as the inspiration for their own presentations. According to the record of Thomas of Celano, St. Francis

had a crib prepared, with hay and an ox and an ass.  The friars were all invited and the people came in crowds.  The forest re-echoed with their voices and the night was lit up with a multitude of bright lights, while the beautiful music of God's praises added to the solemnity.  The saint stood before the crib and his heart overflowed with tender compassion; he was bathed in tears but overcome with joy.  Then he preached to the people about the Birth of the poor King whom he called the Babe of Bethlehem in his tender love. […] A knight called John from Greccio, a pious and truthful man who had abandoned his profession in the world for love of Christ and was a great friend of St. Francis, claimed that he saw a beautiful child asleep in the crib, and that St. Francis took it in his arms and seemed to wake it up. (Habig 710-711)

St. Francis' innovation was to present the Nativity written about in the Gospels, the Protoevangelium and the Legenda Sanctorum as describing human experience, rather than as theological abstraction. His thirteenth century experiment thus “set before our bodily eyes in some way the inconveniences of [Christ’s] infant needs, how he lay in a manger, how, with an ox and an ass standing by, he lay upon the hay where he had been placed” (Habig 300).

This foregrounding of poverty suggests the degree to which a recreation of the Nativity would encourage laypeople to encounter the historical event as if it were taking place in the moment by allowing the audience to enter the scene as God’s own “paupertas voluntaria.”[6] St. Bonaventure’s Vita Majora, a slightly later account, describes the re-enactment as a performance, and notes the affective power this distinctive mode of performing the Nativity had on the crowds who came to witness it:

The forest re-echoed with their voices and the night was lit up with a multitude of bright lights, while the beautiful music of God’s [page 26] praises added to the solemnity.  The saint stood before the crib and his heart overflowed with tender compassion; he was bathed in tears but overcome with joy.  Then he preached to the people about the Birth of the poor King…A knight called John…claimed that he saw a beautiful child asleep in the crib, and that St. Francis took it in his arms and seemed to wake it up. (Habig 710-711)

Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure both recount candles and torches illuminating the sky, a manger with hay, an ox and a donkey, a child wakened from sleep, and an exuberant crowd (Habig 300-301; de Voragine xiii, 38). Both accounts describe miracles wrought by hay taken [page 27] from the manger, including safe pregnancies and deliveries, animals cured of illnesses, and humans restored to health. By the early thirteenth century, belief in the Incarnation of God had fused with the corporeal, quotidian experience of Christian laypeople. Raoul Vaneigem goes as far as to suggest that the popularity of Francis' teaching on God's intimate relationship with plant, animal, and human life  "provided the appearance of sanctity for the shamanism that still lay dormant in the heart of the countryside" (Vaneigem 78). [7] In any case, the Franciscan Nativity, with its display of intimacy between human and divine, had made the Incarnation accessible to lay folk,  without ecclesiastical mediation or the authority of the liturgy. The hermeneutic of quotidian immediacy, as well as the meanness of the conditions depicted, made the mode of performance distinctive, transgressive, and in its time theologically dangerous (Lambert 182).
           
Today, the mode of performance that made St. Francis of Assisi’s Nativity radical is obscured, if not invisible.  Modern day Living Nativity performances fall into conventions of realism and characterization familiar to any participant in western-style theatre, though as I argue there is more going on in the practice’s mode of performance.  One of the most striking examples of a modern day reference to the Greccio Nativity comes from the description of the Living Nativity at the end of the annual Radio City Christmas Spectacular in New York City. The conventions of realism and embodiment are assumed, as is the imagery’s spiritual significance. The program description also assumes the ubiquity and transparency (though not transcendence) of the Nativity imagery.

The Radio City tableau is a fifteen-minute segment in a ninety-minute pageant that features a pastiche of images associated with the Christmas Season in the United States: Santa Claus, a “Teddy Bear Nutcracker,” the "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" performed by the Rockettes, and “Here Comes Santa Claus” including fifty-four dancing Santas and a scene in Santa’s workshop, as well as a Baudrillardian set of scenes depicting Christmastime in New [page 28] York.  This is a predominantly secular, high-tech spectacle aimed at tourists which evokes a heightened excitement around the cultural and commercial force of modern Christianity’s major holiday. The concluding Nativity tableau replicates an Italian Renaissance painting hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  In imitation of the painting, the stage is set with a Nativity “rock” under a trellis-type roof supported by two large columns against a backdrop of a star and metallic starburst. Though the imagery draws on the Western art tradition, the program notes ground the tableau firmly in the meditative tradition of thirteenth-century Christianity. The Nativity tableau shifts what has been a performance of secular festivity to a performance of spiritual meaning.  The program notes compare St. Francis’ effort to renew the Nativity imagery’s mystery in the thirteenth century with the very lack of spirituality and meaning in contemporary culture, which to that point the Christmas Spectacular itself has celebrated.  The notes read as follows:

The presentation of the Living Nativity is in keeping with a revered tradition originated by St. Francis of Assisi in 1223 for the people of Greccio, Italy. Realizing Christmas had lost its meaning for many in his day, St. Francis pondered various ways of bringing the story closer to them […] we hope our enactment of this timeless story…the Living Nativity, will be a moving and memorable experience for you. (Radio City 1999 program, 32)

Religious imagery, and an appeal to religious meaning grounded in a historical antecedent, thus ends an essentially secular program. Executive Director Howard Kolins observes that the show leaves the audience with no curtain call to disturb the “tribute to the meaning of the season” in “an otherwise commercial production” (email).  As the program notes indicate, the Nativity performance draws its legitimacy from the historical antecedent rather than modern-day belief.

The mode of performance fits within the expectations for western theatrical realism, yet the performance context is so saturated that the Nativity requires an explanatory text to suggest that the imagery signifies more than theatrical illusion might suggest. As Johannes Birringer observed in 1991, “the suspension of disbelief is becoming irrelevant” in the United States, [page 29] where “reality seems already always replaced by its simulations” (79).

III. Religious Belief and Theories of Performance

Readings of the semiotics of the Nativity tableau as a simulation, especially for how the imagery signifies race, class, heteronormativity, gender, and sexuality would be well placed, as would critical analysis of the dominance of a majority tradition in a religiously diverse culture.  The unselfconscious sentimentality of the Radio City tableau, with its appeal to universality, would be a similarly appropriate point of departure for a performance analysis. Even through the lens of performance anthropology, the strand of performance theory most sensitive to religious performance, a Living Nativity tableau appears as a simulacrum, displacing the historical Nativity by making it "simultaneously present and absent […] displayed even as the 'real events' are deferred” (Schechner 231). Performance anthropology would suggest that ritualized gestures and images, such as those in the Spectacular’s Living Nativity, are inherently overdetermined by their repetition and exaggeration.  The Christmas Spectacular seems to do just that: the imagery is out of its religious context, yet it is an indispensible component of the season and the invitation to ponder the scene’s meaning and aesthetics must be general enough for broad audience appeal. A Living Nativity that is actively engaged in a Christian belief system constructs a very different relationship to “the real.” Performance theory might also interrogate how religious performance, though not immune to critique, answers to the collapse of meaning Birringer observed in 1991.  For those invested in a religious tradition, language and performance may point to or evoke, rather than displace, something ineffable that cannot be defined or completely understood.

Spirituality may be defined as a category of experience, difficult to describe except in symbol or metaphor, involving a sense of forces that transcend both the self and material conditions, whereas religion may be thought of as the organization of spirituality into forms of doctrine, ritual, community, texts, historical events, personages and systems of belief.[8] Participants’ investment in a religious tradition and spiritual experience is a critical component in [page 30] assessing modes of religious performance.  In the case of Living Nativity tableaux, the mode of performance hinges on a notion of “the real” that presumes the material world (including the human body) to be infused with spiritual meaning. The Nativity tableau both testifies to and for some believers is that reality.

For a believer, performance can articulate a sense of the ineffable in material forms without displacing or deferring.  Rather, the act of corporeal performance is believed to demonstrate the spiritual truth of the historical event (Chauvet and Lumbala viii). At the edge of postmodern performance theory, Christianity's sign would be the body; the body in a Living Nativity would become that which it signifies. Perhaps the centrality of the human body in Christianity accounts for the observation that Christianity may be  the only religion to give rise to a theatrical tradition that does not require elaborate masks and makeup (Dox 98-99). In the context of Christian theology, exposure of the human form affirms the deity’s humanity, rather than the otherness of deities and spiritual beings.  But in a Living Nativity performance, belief in the Incarnation of God is inextricable to a mode of performance, in which the presence of the human body testifies to God’s presence in human society.  Performance allows the historical event to be re-experienced as a spiritual event through the bodies of the performers and spectators. 

Modern-day Living Nativity tableaux are generally a lay activity separate from formal worship services. Performances try to infuse the details of everyday life at the beginning of the first century A.D. with transcendent meaning. For those invested in the tradition, witness of the scenes’ elaborate historical detail produces a sense of the event’s immediacy and relevance. Historical detail is based not on the findings of biblical archaeology and anthropology, but on a tradition of religious texts, artwork, and iconography. The immediacy of re-representing the presumed authenticity of traditional imagery generates emotive and spiritual responses, which function as testimony to the reality of the Nativity as a historical event and to the truth of the [page 31] Incarnation of God in human form.  Representing God's Incarnation realistically as a live event, with emphasis on fidelity to narrative accounts and subsequent visual images, enacts and embodies the very spiritual principle upon which Christian faith rests: the interplay of divinity and humanity. What might appear to be theatrical realism, realistic representation, or mimesis is more complicated.

In the terms of modern Catholic sacramentalism, described by Dominican Matthew Powell at the beginning of his elegant exegesis of the Nativity tableau’s imagery and meaning, any representation of the Nativity (live or iconographic) is always, already spiritual. The imagery is inherently laden with the "reality and mystery of the Incarnation, that God the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, became a human being in the person of Jesus Christ.”  The images, signs, symbols, and visual remembrances testify to God's presence; they are "sacred signs which signify spiritual effects that are obtained through the prayer of the Church" and "draw us toward the heavenly kingdom” (Powell 15-16). For Christian believers, there is a spiritual (non-material) reality encoded in the materiality of the Nativity imagery. Performing the imagery infuses the quotidian with those spiritual effects:

The Christmas crib declares the present truth that humanity has been redeemed and transformed. Not only have we been created in the image and likeness of God, but God himself has become one of us and has dwelt among us. […] The Christmas crib proclaims God's boundless love for us.  It further declares that every person, of whatever condition or situation, is welcomed and wanted by Christ, and that each of us has his or her place at the stable of Bethlehem and in the Body of Christ.  The crib also presents to us Mary and Joseph as examples of the acceptance of God's will and of human holiness. (16)

Germaine Mehl's short essay "Deception d'une Petite Fille" offers a striking comment on the credibility and affective power live bodies give to the already spiritually saturated Nativity imagery.  She writes of herself as a child of four accompanying her mother to the country to see what has been described to her as a crèche.  At the end of a long hike, the promised crèche turns [page 32] out to be a small carving in a rock crevice along the forest footpath.  This was not the true, living crèche she had imagined ("je compris alors que ce n'etait pas la vrai crèche, celle dont je revais").   Her sadness and disappointment are incomprehensible to the adults, but aside from the distant crow of a rooster, she deems nothing in the moment worth her attention. Through the eyes of this child, inanimate stone was not—could not be—the Nativity (141-142).
 
For believing participants, the practice of embodying the imagery of the Nativity extends belief in divinity taking human form by giving human form to a divine event.  The performing bodies in a Living Nativity insist that their presence affirms God's presence in a direct, material correspondence. Erasure of the referent, reduction of the body to sign in a signifying system, or denial of a performer's connection to the Nativity imagery is in fact anathema to this mode of religious performance. What follows here suggests that Nativity tableaux performed by believers do not signify spiritual belief (as does the Radio City tableau), but quite literally make the Incarnational moment corporeally present and, for believers, real.

IV.  Realism and Embodiment as Hermeneutic Strategies

Practitioners’ accounts suggest that for believers, embodiment and realism are consciously employed hermeneutic strategies by means of which the Incarnation can be better understood. The performance becomes a kind of in-dwelling, which allows a physical component to spiritual experience (Moynahan 70-78). This section explores examples of how that in-dwelling happens for practitioners as they fuse realistic representation, fidelity to narrative and imagery, the emotional experiences associated with tableau performances, and a belief system in which a deity is born as a human being.

Living Nativity tableaux can take many forms. Live Nativity scenes may be simple, such as the crèche at the annual Christmas market and crib festival at Andechs in Upper Bavaria near Oberammergau, which has been described as  a "living picture" of the biblical scene (Brother [page 33] Stephan 380). A stable built by local farmers at the summit of a hill includes space for musicians, and about twenty local people represent Mary, Joseph, shepherds, angels, and Wise Men.  Performers arrange themselves around an empty manger, in which visitors leave gifts for charity. Living Nativity tableaux may be quite elaborate. Sequoia Heights Baptist Church in Manteca, California, First Church of the Nazarene in Little Rock, Arkansas and Westminster Presbyterian Church in Pasadena, and The Doubling Gap Church of God in Newville, Pennsylvania present multi-scene “drive-through” tableaux. Westminster Presbyterian's scenes, for example, depict a series of events in the Nativity story, beginning with the Annunciation. Sequoia Heights Baptist Church puts the Nativity in the eschatological context of Christ's life, from the Nativity through the Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension.  In these multi-scene drive-through performances,  scripture passages on cassette narrate each scene as cars stop or drive past, or are displayed on placards or leaflets.  Other churches, such as the Chambers Hill United Methodist Church in Lower Swatara Township, Pennsylvania, present “walk-through” tableaux.  The walk-through tableaux at Fellowship Baptist Church in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey present thirteen live scenes beginning with the Creation and ending with the Ascension of Christ after the Crucifixion, which includes angels “flying” on mechanical cherrypickers.

Regardless of their format, contemporary Living Nativity scenes consistently rely on representation of the Nativity as a historical event for their effect. The performance may be perceived as happening in the real, secular time of its performance, and simultaneously  in "out-of-this-world time" (Polanyi 159). But by design Nativity tableaux maintain fidelity to existing imagery from historical sources, and the symbolic tradition of Western medieval, Renaissance and Romantic art.  Common familiarity with precise imagery, as much as theological abstraction, makes the historical event “real.”

Some Living Nativities maintain the equivalent of the  “fourth wall” on which modern theatrical realism depends, but the mode of performance by no means depends on this modern [page 34] theatrical convention.   Performers at Andechs are discouraged from interacting with spectators, unless the shepherds have to stop spectators from teasing the animals (Brother Stephan 380). At Sequoia Heights Baptist Church, automobiles separate the spectators and the scene, "in a non-threatening way" [9]. Our Savior Lutheran Church in Westminster, Massachusetts restricts spoken language to ancient Hebrew and Greek phrases to distance spectators from the scene, while simultaneously trying to give "a sense that this really did happen" in another time and place (Schneeflock). As one participant in a particularly elaborate scene noted, “our leper really looks like someone you want to stay well away from.”

In some Living Nativities, however, spectators do become part of the re-enactment.  A collaboration of several neighborhood churches in Aurora, Illinois has presented "Jesus Prince of Peace Living Nativity" since 1991.  The event is in part an outreach effort to "reclaim" a neighborhood public park, which has become a site of drug and alcohol use and prostitution.  To highlight the Christian message of peace, Joseph with Mary, who rides what one participant called a sometimes "uncooperative" donkey, traditionally lead a Peace March to McCarty Park [10]. The four-hour event includes a procession and pageant, ecumenical services, singing and readings from the Gospel of Luke, hot cider and cookies. The event is designed to invite curious non-Christians to experience "the true meaning of Christmas" and as an opportunity to "step back" from the secular "hustle" of the season to focus on the miracle of the Incarnation through the "exact details" of the event (Shalf). A motivation for presenting Living Nativities can be to create a direct encounter with the commercial secularization of Christmas, as well as allowing direct engagement with the spiritual reality the tableau offers in an embodied way. Re-representing the "exact details" as preserved in the long tradition of crèche representations reinforces the religious meaning of the historical Nativity symbolically as a reconstitution of the quotidian reality of the event and its relationship to contemporary daily life. 

The visual images evoke important Christian concepts: Christ's humility (stable and [page 35] manger), freedom from original sin (Virgin Mary), command over the powerful (kneeling Wise Men or Magi), love for all creatures (animals), recognition by supernatural beings (angels) and perhaps more importantly, stillness in the tableau itself.  Traditional symbols, however, are open to interpretation (though not critique).  A printed description of one Living Nativity, for example, explains that the shepherds "were keeping watch over their fields by night" (Luke 2:8) because scarce game made wolves hungry enough to move close to towns and attack sheep, whereas the authority of the Legenda Sanctorum states that shepherds kept a "nocturnal vigil" over their sheep twice annually in observance of the summer and winter solstice (de Voragine 41). Constructing a life-like imitation of the imagery, not historical accuracy or fixed symbolism, is vital to re-experiencing the event.

Similar efforts are applied to characterization. Casting may simply be determined by the availability of individuals who fit visual images that have evolved over time within the tradition. As Brother Stephan notes of the Andechs Nativity performers, "[o]ne girl who is playing Mary now hasn't even been baptized yet, but she is very good in the part so I don't see why she shouldn't do it” (379). Mary is usually portrayed as a young or young-looking woman, but rarely as a teenager (which is the historically likely age range for such a marriage). Joseph is portrayed as older, graying and bearded.  Characters less precisely described in the sources allow for more interpretive license in casting.  Children often portray angels and shepherds, and older men the Magi or kings. Ethnicity, like gender, age, and social status, is dictated by the texts and centuries of visual art. 

The semiotics of racial difference, religious difference (the historical figures were Jewish, not Christian), the politics of age and marriage, and issues of gender and sexuality are glossed by the affective power of fidelity to sources and traditional imagery. One Presbyterian Church, for example, notes with gratitude that an African-American man regularly portrays one of the Wise Men and thus maintains the tradition that the Wise Men were foreigners. However, identification [page 36] of a performer as dark-skinned identifies a cultural and racial “other,” revealing the tacit assumption that Joseph was (and is) light-skinned. The examples from popular culture described at the beginning of the paper challenge the stable categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality upon which the Nativities depend.  Within the religious tradition, however, representational fidelity to the proscribed European imagery works differently. A live tableau reinforces belief in the birth of a deity in human form, the potential of which is understood to be unifying transcendence social configurations of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Many performers describe their roles in the recreation of proscribed imagery as an opportunity to reflect on the real presence of God's love, but may have different relationships with the figures they represent.  Some try to become the character, while others treat the biblical characters as acting roles: "Some of the cast members really do 'get into' their part.  I do consider it acting but I don't immerse myself like I would for a stage role" (Mahaffie). Interpretive exegesis in the magazine Crèche Herald attributes flexibility in interpretation of Nativity imagery to ambiguities in the biblical accounts and centuries of artistic license beginning in the Renaissance, concluding that “[w]herever and however your crèches speak to you is testimony to the power that this image conveys” (Beavers 6).

As a hermeneutic strategy, embodying the Nativity involves a kind of corporeal and psychological investment in the theology of the Incarnation that exceeds traditional mimetic characterization and representation. Though constructing the imagery accurately is a priori, a Nativity scene must also create and maintain a spiritual dimension despite the inconveniences of cold feet, ill-fitting crowns, plastic babies, and irreverent animals. Embodying the imagery, in effect witnessing to the historical moment, can be a transforming experience for participants and observers.  Cynthia Naylor of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints guides couples portraying Mary and Joseph to imagine "how it must have felt to have held and loved the Son of God" as a way of both representing the biblical characters and as a way of accessing the spiritual [page 37] meaning thought to be inherent in the historical event.  She observes a process of deepening understanding of the tradition as they rehearse:  "at the beginning of the rehearsal the couples [were] light-hearted, but [afterward], with tears in their eyes, said it was a wonderful spiritual experience to play these parts."   The Living Nativity scene here is not only representational and physically embodied, but the body itself becomes a means of spiritual experience. Belief is given form through the experience of embodiment: the sign is the body, and a body in a Living Nativity becomes that which it signifies. 

Ironically, though the body of the Christ Child is the theological focus of the Nativity scene, it is rarely represented with a live baby.  A live tableau demands an artificial stillness and silence in cold conditions for one to three hours at a time (performers often rotate in shifts).   Living Nativities usually substitute the infant Jesus with a life-like doll, or do not represent a baby visually at all.  As in the thirteenth-century account of St. Francis' display, belief in Christ's corporeal presence is considered sufficient to translate the inanimate or absent image into a living reality.  In the parameters of mimetic realism, a doll substituted for a living child is invested with the authority of a “real” body because the live bodies around it treat it as a “real” child.  In the drive-through Nativity at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Pasadena, California the manger scene is the climax of ten episodes in the Nativity story.  Though a doll substitutes for the Christ child, visitors frequently ask participants "How do you make the baby stay still?" (Dent). Similarly, at the Temple of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Washington, D.C., where all characters except Mary and Joseph are represented by mannequins, many visitors admit they cannot tell "if the baby Jesus was real" (Naylor).

The Christ figure may also be symbolic.  At the annual Living Nativity at Andechs, visitors fill the empty crib with charity gifts as an expression of Christ's love.  In the tradition of the Protoevangelium, the Radio City Christmas Spectacular tableau lights the crib from within, with stage lights, so that Christ is represented as an effect, rather than a presence or absence. An [page 38] exception to these examples is the Nativity at North Mentor Centenary United Methodist Church in Mentor, Ohio, where  visitors to the crèche traditionally place their own children in the manger as a way of blessing the child as a living human being in Christ's care.  This is a superb example of the emotive immediacy, the synchronicity of the historical event and the present moment.  The live body of a child sustains the scene’s realistic reconstruction of the Nativity as dictated by the representational tradition. At the same time, the historical Christ Child is both substituted and invoked by the child placed in the crib.  Belief in the care of Christ mediates the shift from the constructed, historical reality to that of the everyday life of parents and parenting. I would argue that the “fourth wall” of western realistic theatre spectatorship does not exist to be broken at such a moment. Belief in the presence of Christ in the empty crib and the spiritual significance of the blessing allows for no barrier between the scenario and the participants. In all of these examples, the body of Christ in a Nativity display is assumed to be a spiritual presence, whether represented by an empty crib, a doll, a live baby, or light.  Variations in presentation allow participants to create new interpretations of the interplay between the historical event and the present, with the theological focus on the infant Christ.

Since many Living Nativity scenes are repeated annually, props and costumes are often stored and modified year after year, though they are not treated as liturgical vestments.  Many are hand-made by church members.  The Mormon Visitor Center in Washington D.C. keeps three sets of costumes for Mary and Joseph (the only live characters) in different sizes to accommodate changing participants. The shepherds' costumes at North Mentor Centenary United Methodist Church in Mentor, Ohio were purchased in Tripoli and donated by a member of the congregation.  Some standard props, such as shepherds' staffs, are made to look authentic; others, such as the gifts of the Magi, may be more obviously representational.  At McCarty Park in Aurora, Illinois, the three Wise Men one year brought their gifts in a soup tureen, a potpourri jar and a wooden chest, all of which had been supplied by the performers. Yet, the anachronistic incongruity was easily accommodated into expectations for realistic representation:  “[the] [page 39] hodge-podge effect lends itself to the atmosphere of what that original Nativity must have been like" (Shalf).

A Living Nativity tableau may also invoke local histories for participants, which may be rooted in a church congregation’s institutional memory and become part of the performance insofar as they establish common reference points for the community. North Mentor Centenary United Methodist Church has presented its Living Nativity since 1973.  The original eight performers, greeters, and contributors are still remembered by name, including Taffy the Nazarene, a donkey whose fur had grown in the pattern of a dark brown cross down her back.   For the co-founder of this Nativity, memories have accumulated in layers: a girl who left her bottle in the hand of the "Baby Jesus;" mothers who placed their children in the manger; a doll presented to the manger in memory of a deceased child; a young woman playing Mary who became ill and gave birth nine months later; and escaped sheep chased by Mary, Joseph, shepherds, Wise Men and angels (Burgett).

Participants describe many purposes for representing the Nativity as a living scenario, including outreach, evangelism, ministry, missionary work, resistance to the secularization of Christmas, and testimonial storytelling.  But performing a Nativity scene is generally not thought of as worship in and of itself.  Students at Lebanon Valley College, for example, consider their impersonations of biblical characters to be a form of worship only in the context of the lessons and carols service that precedes the Nativity (Woomer). However, many performers do assume that audiences will approach the tableau as a kind of worship. The embodied imagery becomes an external, visual spectacle and simultaneously a highly subjective, internalized experience:

Some have been known suddenly to start praying.   Some laugh if somebody starts mumbling to themselves, but most of the time, people do concentrate […] sometimes people just stood there crying.  They sort of withdrew into themselves, studied it, and thoroughly experienced it, really became totally involved in it.  That's the beautiful thing about it. (Brother Stephan 380) [page 40]

As part of its missionary efforts and Christmas celebration, the Visitors Center at the Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints attracts thousands of religious and secular visitors annually, many of whom are moved "to know more about Jesus" after seeing the display (Naylor) [11]. Instances of spectators returning to Christian faith after lapsing, and of the Nativity’s effect on people outside a particular denomination, are also not uncommon in the local histories of individual churches.  Morris Dent of Westminster Presbyterian Church recalls two Catholic nuns who were moved to sing carols during the Nativity, and the inter-denominational effort at McCarty Park also cites instances of lapsed Christians returning to their faith after witnessing the Nativity scene.

V. Religiosity and Mode of Performance

The conceptual premise (or promise) of a Living Nativity tableau is grounded in the idea "that a sign is the means which permits the invisible reality to be present" and that the thing signified (God) can indeed be accessed through signs (Vagaggini 24). In Living Nativity performances, what seems to be an effort to represent an historical event and imbue it with symbolic meaning offers much more (McGinn 76).

While the Living Nativity of the thirteenth century integrated the human body into the nominal world of human experience, contemporary Living Nativities rely on conventions of mimetic realism, Christian sources going back to St. Francis’ crèche at Greccio and to thirteenth-century Aristotelianism, to bring Christian meaning into secular culture.  Yet, meanings are derived not only from the re-articulation of traditional images, but through what Michael Polanyi calls "in-dwelling," that is, living in the imagery (Polanyi 54).

Representing the Nativity as a “living” event offers participants direct access to the Christian theology of Incarnation.  Not only does the performance re-construct imagery of the Nativity that has taken on the status of the real, the process of embodying the imagery quite [page 41] literally demonstrates how the theology works, how God (spirit) infuses the human (material) world.

Because the spiritual message of the Nativity relies on representing the harshness and poverty of Christ's birth—the very point made at Greccio in 1223—as well as the theological mystery of the Incarnation, the realistic details of quotidian experience and the abstractions of spiritual experience cannot be separated in the hermeneutic of a Living Nativity tableau.  Performing bodies dominate the visual field, but at the same time, these bodies take on—not metaphorically, but quite literally—responsibility for articulating a theological mystery. Corporeality in a Living Nativity display is assumed to be uncompromised presence, not the “radical reality” performance theory might suggest. That assumption, which ameliorates the illusion-breaking problems of anachronistic props, escaped sheep, and dolls representing Divinity, resists the demand of poststructuralist performance theories that referents are always deferred or erased by representation.

These tableaux propose a concept of embodied representation in which the body does not stand for (or beside) a referent, but following the theology, makes the referent present.  Here, the referent (God’s Incarnation) does not escape representation, nor can it be deferred by representation. Such a performance practice challenges performance theories to consider the possibility that what seem to be paradoxical binaries – human and divine, past and present, spiritual and material – are in fact reconciled in and by a specific mode of performance produced by a belief system. Living Nativity tableaux, as just one example of religious performance, call theory to go further in the effort to understand how performance works in general.  In this particular case, the challenge is to theorize the body in performance and the “real” that is performed not only as a cultural productions threatened with disappearance (Birringer 205), but to take the spiritual dimension of religious belief seriously as a formative component of the mode of performance. Embodiment, in the words of one participant,  "makes [the scene] come to life [page 42] where we can feel the spirit of this wonderful event" (Naylor).

The quotidian materiality of a Living Nativity scene—its presentation of religious iconography as living and real, its reliance on historical subject matter for authority—gives the unrepresentable, absent body of Christ a presence in the living bodies of the performers. This mode of performance recuperates corporeal presence rather than evacuate it in the conventions of realistic representation. A perspective outside the tradition might see, as Richard Schechner suggests, "ambivalent symbolic actions pointing at the real transactions even as they help people avoid too direct a confrontation with these events" (Schechner 230). However, from within the tradition, the tableau performance forces confrontation with the event it depicts. The reality re-represented is in fact the theological mystery.  Ed Schneeflock of Our Savior Lutheran Church articulates that difference succinctly and eloquently:

Sometimes even the most sincere Christians come to think of Christianity as a set of ideas.  I can understand why.  There are many reasons why it is both easier and more attractive to deal with ideas than it is to deal with real people and real problems.  But the fact is that God gave up His Glory to become a real human and to commit Himself to real people and their real problems.  The Living Nativity is a tool to remind us that God did become human.

Such a statement echoes the call of phenomenology to “fashion a new and enlivened world of meaning” at a time when “many view matter, mind, and spirit as desiccated ideas no longer able to sustain living human commitment” and how to “restore meaning and depth to human existence so that it will recognize the human body as the core of personal existence and not as an object of detached observation or conception?” (Pollio et al 62). Timothy Beal, in his ethnographic study of  the via religioso of United States highways, addresses the complexity of religious (again, Christian) representation along the axes of realism and the body. His description of how “Holy Land USA” (a commercial enterprise in which visitors visit simulated biblical sites) functions for believers describes a similar dynamic to that of Living Nativity tableaux’ mode of performance: [page 43]

[Holy Land USA] doesn’t realistically represent either the geography of Palestine and Israel or the historical world of first-century Judea during the time of Jesus. And yet, for many of our fellow travelers, it had become profoundly, phenomenally real.  But “real” in a sense very different from what we mean by empirically or objectively real.  Real, rather, in the sense of being religiously real, an experience of ultimate reality.  Real in the sense that one feels as though one has become a part of it.  As though one has lost oneself in it. (Beal 41)

Christianity’s particular relationship to texts, iconography, and history develops one mode of religious performance.  The example of Living Nativity tableaux speaks to the need for flexibility in current performance criticism, without discounting the political and social issues of (in this case) religious hegemony. Living Nativity tableaux serve as one site from which to explore the relationship between religious belief and modes of performance.  The complexity of linking religious belief to modes performance suggests the need for analytical theories that can accommodate religion and spirituality as conceptual foundations for some performance practices. Analyses of how modes of performance emerge from formulations of religious belief, such as David B. Mason’s recent Theatre and Religion on Krishna’s Stage, point to the need for a deeper understanding of how objects, space and bodies operate in religious performance practices as a vital component of contemporary performance theory. Theoretical approaches to performance may have emptied performance of content, meaning, and affect, but religious performance has not necessarily responded to such demands for vacuity.

Works Cited

Beavers, Ashley. “Different Views of the Crèche Inspire Different Settings.” Crèche Herald 4.2 (Summer 2000): 6.

Birringer, Johannes.  Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism. Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 1991.

Boston, Rob.  "Away with the Manger?" Church and State 41.11 (December 1988): 9-12.

Brother Stephan.  "Nativity as Living Picture:  The Christmas Crib at Andechs."  New Theatre Quarterly. 6.24 (Nov 1990): 379-381. [page 44]

Burgett, Joan. North Mentor Centenary United Methodist Church, Mentor, OH. Personal interview, 1999.

Chauvet, Louis and Francois Kabasele Lumbala.  Liturgy and the Body.  London: SCM Press, 1995.

Dent, Morris. Westminster Presbyterian Church, Pasadena, CA. Personal interview, 1999.

Dox, Donnalee. The Idea of the Theatre in Latin Christian Thought: Augustine to the Fourteenth Century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.

Fuchs, Eleanor.  The Death of Character:  Perspectives on Theatre After Modernism. Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1996.

Goodman, Jill Laurie. "Crèches, Menorahs and the Courts," Tikkun 10.1 (1995): 30-32, 85.

Habig, Marion A.  St. Francis of Assisi:  Writings and Early Biographies.  Chicago, IL: Franciscan Herald Press, 1972.

Hardison, O.B.  Christian Rite and Christian Drama.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965.

Kobialka, Michal. This is My Body:  Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999, 32-33.

Kolins, Howard. Email correspondence. 21 April 2000.

Lambert, Malcolm.  Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from Bogomil to Hus. London: Willmer Brothers, Limited, 1977.

Mason, David V. Theatre and Religion on Krishna’s Stage. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

McDonald, Diane L. Prosser.  Transgressive Corporeality: The Body, Poststructuralism, and the Theological Imagination. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.

McGinn, Bernard. "Apocalyptic Spirituality:  Approaching the Third Millennium." The Year 2000: Essays on the End.  Ed. Charles B. Strozier and Michael Flynn. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

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Morrison, Karl F.  The Mimetic Tradition of Reform in the West. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. [page 45]

Moynahan, Michael E. "Drama and the Word." Liturgical Ministry 5 (Spring 1996): 70-78.

Naylor, Cynthia. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (The Mormons), Visitor Center, Washington, D.C.  Personal interview, 1999.

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Pollio, Howard R., et al. The Phenomenology of Everyday Life.  Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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Schechner, Richard.  The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. London:  Routledge, 1993.

Schneeflock, Ed. Our Savior Lutheran Church, Westminster, MD. Personal interview, 1999.

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Endnotes

1. For the early debate on government sponsorship of holiday displays, see Rob Boston, "Away with the Manger?  Why Mary, Joseph and the Baby Jesus Are Creating a Scene at the Courthouse" in Church and State (December 1988), 9-12.  For consideration of the sanctity of such publicly displayed holiday imagery, see Jill Laurie Goodman, "Crèches, Menorahs and Courts," in Tikkun 10.1 (1995): 30-32, 85.

2. See, among numerous sites and reports documenting the celebrity Nativity, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/4078285.stm.

3. Comments were collected between 1999 and 2000 in the form of written and verbal responses, and are printed with the permission of each individual. The following people contributed written or verbal perspectives for this inquiry: Morris Dent and Skip Ober Miller at Westminster Presbyterian Church, Pasadena, CA; Cynthia Naylor, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (The Mormons), Washington, D.C.; Ed Schneeflock, Our Savior Lutheran Church, Westminster, MA; Mark Mahaffie, Sequoia Heights Baptist Church, Manteca, CA; Lori Shalf, Mary Alice Gin and John Bedell, First Presbyterian Church, Aurora, IL; Joan Burgett, North Mentor Centenary United Methodist Church, Mentor, OH; Pastor Darrell Woomer, Lebanon Valley College, Annville, PA; Pastor Jeffrey Whitman, Colonial Park United Church of Christ, Harrisburg, PA; the Rev. Michael Gesler, Grant United Church of Christ, Grant, MI; T. Casey and the staff at Little Rock First Church of the Nazarene, Little Rock, AK; Howard Kolins, Executive Producer, The Rockettes Christmas Spectacular, and Mr. Owen Seda of the University of Zimbabwe.  Particular thanks to Rita B. Bocher, editor/publisher of Creche Herald, Wynnewood, PA and to the generous readership of Creche Herald, especially Betsy Christensen, Betsy Scott and Mary Herzel. Distinct aspects of the research were presented in 2001 at the Convivium Center for Medieval Studies at Sienna College, Albany New York and the American Society for Theatre Research annual conference, San Diego, California, and in 2004 at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in Toronto, Ontario, and the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals conference at the Centre for the Study of Medieval Rituals, Copenhagen, Denmark.

4. For a study of Christian displays, their symbolic capital and imaginative reconstructions of Christian narratives, see Timothy Beal,  Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005).  For the significance of embodiment in Christian material culture, see Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

5. Jacobus de Voragine xiii, 38.  The tradition of the Ox and Ass can be traced to the fourth century in the letters of St. Jerome on the Bethlehem Church of the Nativity "the place where the ox had known its master and the ass the cradle of the Lord" and in Isaiah 1:3 "The ox knows its owner and the ass its master's crib."  See Powell 24, 37. [page 47]

6. Jacques de Voragine’s Legenda Sanctorum, the Protoevangelium of James,the Vita Majora of St. Bonaventure, and Thomas of Celano’s First Life preserve not the accuracy of the event but what is considered significant about the event.

7. Vaneigem 78.  A century earlier, the relationship between Catholic ceremonies and pagan rites is documented as a natural fusion in, for example, John Beleth, Summa de Ecclesiasticis Officiis, ed. Heriberto Douteil, C.S.S.P. (Turnholti:  Typographi Brepols Editores Pontificii, 1976), II: 137: 267-271.

8. For a succinct distinction between spirituality and religion, see the editorial, "Why Spirituality?" in Tikkun: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture and Society (March/April 2000), 7-8.

9. Mark Mahaffie, Sequoia Heights Baptist Church, Manteca, CA.  Sequoia Heights Baptist changed its story-line and updated its website for 2000. See http://www.sequoiaheights.org.

10. Recalcitrant donkeys are a recurring problem, as Grant United Church of Christ chronicled in an online description at http://www.grantucc.org/live.htm.

11. The Visitor Center is open to the public.  The Temple itself is open only to Mormons.