Resumen de Introduction: Reflections on the Medieval Convent Drama Project
Elisabeth Dutton, Olivia Robinson
This collection of essays on ‘Drama and Community’ arose out of our experiences researching and undertaking performances of convent drama, the theatre produced by and for medieval nuns. We were interested to know how particular medieval convent plays may have functioned within the walls of their cloistered communities: we explored the ways in which surviving play scripts may have been physically or experientially shaped by performance in different community spaces and buildings (the chapel, the refectory, the cloister, the school) and on different community occasions or in different liturgical seasons. These considerations involved thinking through surviving buildings records, account books, and other sources of primary information about the life of the community as it was experienced in space and time.
However – particularly as our exchanges with some of the contemporary women’s religious houses situated in our own local Fribourgeois community progressed and deepened, and as we developed a core group of female performers – we became increasingly sensitized to the importance of understanding the complex relationships among theatre, community, and faith that are constructed and maintained between participants when a performance is undertaken. When interviewing today’s sisters as part of our project, for example, we began to understand how many of them conceived of religious performance as both an expression and experience of faith, and as a way to develop and express a shared sense of community feeling and endeavour. Writing plays and performing them within the confines of the community served as a form of recreation and a form of learning, about oneself and about others in the community. Performance also served as a way to honour a sister or to build and express community appreciation or celebration. Equally, it served as a method of exploring scripture and understanding or communicating faith. It is, of course, not possible to either read the emotions and faith-based experiences of our contemporary performers ‘back’ into the Middle Ages or to understand contemporary nuns’ experiences as carbon copies of those of their medieval predecessors. However, our varied experiences and encounters in the course of the project with the Catholic communities of Fribourg (female and male, monastic and lay) have suggested to us new interconnections among performance, communities, and faith, both in terms of what might have been experienced by the medieval convent performer and what medieval convent scripts seek to communicate.
