ABSTRACT
Devotional practice in Vrindavan, India, is play that provides for seeing in – not as – an embodied role. The performative religion that developed in the sixteenth century discovered that a devotee was not bound to matter but could inhabit a desired self and the reality to which that self might be fit. Vrindavan’s bhakti traded on a thousand years of rasa, a curt theory concerning how theatrical performance works in audiences. Rasa recommends that a person perceives, in physical sensations, a stage actor and the expression of feeling that the actor offers to the senses. A person can similarly objectify their own sensations – those that rest on an actor’s expression – and contemplate those sensations as art to the effect of discovering that the self is a function of the theatre event. The paradoxes of feeling that theatre audiences encounter, in which they experience as reality what they consciously recognize as fiction, come from the role playing that audiences themselves do as audiences.
