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The Common and the Holy: What Icons Teach Us about Performance

Orthodox liturgy, in its use of icons, performs the relationship between the common and the holy in a very different way than that of the Western tradition. The Eucharistic liturgies of the Roman Catholic and some Protestant traditions focus on the dramatic arc of the Eucharistic liturgy, while the icon-laden liturgies of the Orthodox have a more circular and fugue-like structure. In counterpoint to a long tradition in theater history that sees the Eucharistic liturgy of the Western churches as a model for theatrical performance, this article will discuss the human relationship with the aesthetic object of the icon, and how this relationship can also describe performance. When performance is approached relationally, it cannot be succinctly defined as representation, fiction, or illusion, but instead as the endpoint and the beginning of its own reference. For example, liturgies and rituals represent old realities at the same time that they actively create new ones. A wedding ceremony represents a long history of marriage and its meaning in society. But there is no one specific wedding that it represents. Instead, each ceremony becomes the lived reality of the example to which it refers—each wedding is its own best example. Icons also function in this manner; they become what they refer to, and are their own examples. In this way, we can begin to lay out a net of relationships between iconicity, liturgy, and performance, questioning the characteristics that link them together. How are liturgies iconic when they refer back to themselves as their own examples? How are icons liturgical when they are encountered as living relationships? And how is performance itself both liturgical and iconic when it makes use of both specific objects and materials but at the same time gestures toward the infinite? By engaging liturgies I have attended through these questions, as well as looking at my own training in iconography and liturgy, I put forward that the Orthodox engagement with icons offers another way for both theology and performance studies to examine the role and uses of objects and materials that looks beyond theatrical representation toward iconic performance.