Constantine Lignos is a scholar of religion and performance who studies a remarkable and largely unexplored archive: tantric dance texts (cham yik) produced by Tibetan Buddhist scholars from the 13th century to the present. These texts reveal that Tibetan Buddhism produced a rich tradition of performance theory, a discursive arena in which scholars theorized religious subjectivity, the role of aesthetics in ritual performance, and even whether performance can be captured in text at all. Because these texts insist on live relational transmission, Constantine supplements his historical and textual analysis with embodied learning, training with monastic dancers in India and the United States. As a Fellow at the Yale ISM, Constantine will be developing a book manuscript based on his dissertation, “Dancing Tantra: Body, Text, and Performance in Tibetan Tantric Buddhism,” which takes Tibetan Buddhist performance theory seriously as a sustained intellectual tradition that grapples with how ritual and aesthetic practices create and dissolve a sacred world, and unmake and remake the self.
Constantine received his Ph.D. on the East Asian Religions track of the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures at Columbia University. He holds an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Columbia University, and an M.A. in Performance Studies and B.F.A. in Drama and Dramatic Writing, both from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. For more information about his research and teaching, visit www.constantinelignos.phd.