M.F.A. Dance @ the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum

Corpus Mirabilis: The Life and Practices of St. Catherine of Siena and the Recentering of Female Agency and Play in Performance as Resistance. Thesis Performance and Installation by M.F.A. Dance Graduate Student Melissa Miller Eleanor D. Wilson Museum – Hollins Campus Free Admission Thursday, June 13, 2024 – Live Performance 7:30 pm Friday, June 14 – June 28, 2024 – Exhibition Tuesday – Sunday, 12- 5 pm Thursday – 12-8 pm Corpus Mirabilis: The Life and Practices of St. Catherine of Siena and the Recentering of Female Agency and Play in Performance as Resistance centers around the life and death of Catherine Benincasa: a 14th-century Italian Tertiary Dominican, mystic, influential writer and leader, and eventual saint, in the European Catholic Church. Saint Catherine of Siena’s faith practice included a dedication to mortification of the flesh, practitioners of which believed they should subdue desires, which are at war with their soul, by means of self-inflicted suffering. She began her practice of self-harm at the age of eight, culminating in her death via self-imposed starvation at 33. Not considered suicide by the church leaders of the time, her death was recorded instead as succumbing to pious fasting and called, posthumously, anorexia “mirabilis,” Latin for “wonderful.” Looking at her life and death will be my point of entry for discussing animosity toward the female body in, but not restricted to, high-control Western religious environments. Exploring how these attitudes toward women have been internalized and propagated has urgency for everybody, female or otherwise.