Year of Graduation

2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

MFA: Dance

Directing Professor

Jeffery N. Bullock

Abstract

This thesis interrogates Marian iconography and its role in constructing a moral binary that marks female bodies as either sanctified or sinful. Drawing on feminist and postcolonial theory, iconographic analysis, and historical case studies, the research analyzes how Christian symbology established the Marian Mold: a theological aesthetic apparatus that exalts feminine sanctity through ideals of virginity, obedience, and maternal receptivity while constraining feminine expression. This paradigm, propagated through the British Empire’s colonial regimes, shaped the regulation and reinterpretation of embodied traditions. The thesis investigates these dynamics through two case studies: the Devadasi tradition and Bharatanatyam’s reformulation in South India, and Indigenous expressions of the Hupa Valley Tribe’s Flower Dance. Examining these traditions in dialogue reveals how colonial Christian moral structures, operating through the Marian Mold, systematically reconfigured embodied practices tied to feminine sacredness, rendering their expression legible only through disciplined forms of propriety. Contemporary practitioners, however, continue active reclamation, reasserting these traditions as living expressions of feminine divinity and collective resistance. Interwoven throughout is the author’s positionality as a Latter-day Saint woman engaging in a theological framework that acknowledges female-gendered divinity while simultaneously participating in a contemporary ideological apparatus of empire. The written thesis culminates in a choreographic work that recasts the stage as a ritualized sacred space, presenting embodied performance as both method and revelation; drawing on Marian iconography, it reprocesses Mary not as a figure who escapes the Marian Mold, but as a body that interrupts and renegotiates it in real time, enacting a collective reclamation of the Divine Feminine.

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Performance Access Statement

If you wish to see the creative piece or performance that accompanied this thesis, please complete the Request Form, and you should receive a response from the Dance Department within two weeks.

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