Constantine studies the history and performance of Tibetan Buddhist tantric ritual dances (Tib. 'cham/s) in Tibet, India, Bhutan, Mongolia, China, and the wider Tibetan Buddhist world. He breaks with previous scholarship in the area by reading both into specific local dances and across their traditions, traversing sectarian, temporal, and geographic boundaries, to consider a broader big-picture analysis. By working with the idea of embodied knowledge, the situating of theoretical insight and intellectual understanding within the body, Constantine reveals the topological network that ties together the disparate local traditions of cham and how these dances bring tantric contemplation to life. Through his transdisciplinary training in Religious Studies, History, and Performance Studies, Constantine balances archival research and textual analyses in Tibetan and Chinese with oral histories, ethnographic fieldwork, and his personal experience as a performer.
At NYU Tisch, Constantine studied the influence of Buddhist ideas on avant-garde theatre in New York City in the mid- to late-20th century. This led him to think about the concept of “Western Buddhism” and the increase in attention on mindfulness and meditation in today’s zeitgeist. He is interested in questions of appropriation/appreciation, intersectionality/identity, authority, and modernity in the development of a so-called “Western Buddhism.”