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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 June 2022
This article offers a critically reflective discussion of and suggestions towards the role of embodied cognitive science within theatre and performance discourse. Through a critical analysis of literature that takes its lead from within the framework of embodied cognition, this article argues that theatre and performance discourse may need to re-examine how embodiment is conceptualized within practical and interdisciplinary accounts of cognition. By exploring specific foundations and driving premises of embodied and classic cognition respectively, this article suggests that if researchers are going to use scientific accounts of embodiment to better understand embodied cognition in theatre and performance, then they must, by their own estimations, accept that all research, and not just practice, is an embodied act.
I thank Valerie van Mulukom, Mark Evans and Emma Meehan for their advice on an early draft of this article.
2 Kemp, Rick, Embodied Acting: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Performance (London: Routledge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kemp, Rick and McConachie, Bruce, The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science (London: Routledge, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McConachie, Bruce and Hart, Elizabeth F., Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn (London: Routledge, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McCaw, Dick, Re-thinking the Actor's Body: Dialogues with Neuroscience (London: Methuen, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blair, Rhonda and Cook, Amy, Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies (London: Bloomsbury, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lutterbie, John, Towards a General Theory of Acting: Cognitive Science and Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lutterbie, An Introduction to Theatre, Performance and the Cognitive Sciences (London: Methuen Drama, 2019); Shaughnessy, Nicola, ed., Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being (London: Bloomsbury, 2014)Google Scholar.
3 I consider here specifically the impact of various journals which express keen interest in embodied-cognition focuses in various disciplines, the success of the Embodied Research Working Group offered by the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR), and the growing number of international conferences on embodiment and embodied cognition. More recently, the 2020 series of discussions/symposiums (eventually postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic) that were hosted by the University of Kent on embodied research comes to mind, as do similar initiatives such as Royal Holloway's Embodied Performance Practices, Memory, Conflict and Reconciliation symposium in late 2019.
4 Rhonda Blair, ‘Introduction: The Multimodal Practitioner’, in Shaughnessy, Affective Performance, pp. 135–46.
5 McCaw, Re-thinking the Actor's Body, p. 4.
6 Rohrer, Tim, ‘The Body in Space: Dimensions of Embodiment’, in Zlatev, J., Frank, R. M. and Ziemke, T., eds., Body, Language and Mind: Embodiment (Berlin: De Gruyter, Inc., 2007), pp. 339–77Google Scholar, here pp. 344–5; Spatz, Ben, What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Joseph Roach, ‘Foreword’, in Spatz, What a Body Can Do, pp. ix–x, here p. ix.
8 I reflect here specifically on Robin Nelson's Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
9 Rohrer, ‘The Body in Space’, p. 349.
10 Gallagher, Shaun, Enactivist Interventions: Re-thinking the Mind (Oxford: University Press, 2017), pp. 148–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 I refer to James. J. Gibson's notion of affordance as conceptualized in ecological psychology. Affordance is recognized as an individual's sociocultural parameters defining what objects and subjects afford in the way of action, and therein how cognition is shaped, and vice versa. For a thorough account on affordance I advise consulting James J. Gibson, The People, Place and Space Reader (New York: Routledge, 2014; first published 1979), pp. 56–60.
12 Enactivism derives from the notion of enaction. In short, within embodied cognition, it accounts for the human body's potential to enact on and through the dynamic that exists and is created through environment and the body. Enaction includes ways of seeing and being in the world. Often accredited to Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch and Evan Thompson's seminal work on embodied cognition, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), where enactivism as a root of embodied cognition took popular hold, the term's history actually pre-dates this, originating from ‘the discontent with the Cartesian ontology and epistemology’ that surfaces within the work of Jean Piaget and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. See Ezequiel Di Paolo, ‘Process and Individuation: The Development of Sensorimotor Agency’, Human Development, 63 (2019), pp. 202–26, here pp. 202–3.
13 Valerie Grey Hardcastle, ‘The Consciousness of Embodied Cognition, Affordances, and the Brain’, Topoi, 39 (2017), pp. 23–33, here p. 24.
14 Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin, Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content (London: MIT Press, 2012).
15 I refer to the suggestion offered by David E. Saltz in the Theory/Philosophy/Science conference extract that surfaces in Amy Cook, ‘Interplay: The Method and Potential of a Cognitive Scientific Approach to Theatre’, Theatre Journal, 59 (2007), pp. 579–94, here p. 580.
16 I advise consulting the following sources for further claims on the subject: Edward Baggs and Antony Chemero, ‘Radical Embodiment in Two Directions’, Synthese, 198 (2021), pp. 2175–90; and Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions.
17 I reflect on how frequently sensorimotor and autopoiesis enactivism is brought up in Kemp and McConachie, The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science, as well as how Lutterbie, An Introduction to Theatre, Performance and the Cognitive Sciences, p. 4, manages to acknowledge ‘4-E cognition’, whilst radical enactivism (REC) as defined by Hutto and Myin, Radicalizing Enactivism, is not mentioned once as far as I can see in either of these publications. Research on REC has been accessible in Hutto and Myin, Radicalizing Enactivism since 2012, and again in 2017 in Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin, Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content (London: MIT Press, 2017).
18 Hutto and Myin, Radicalizing Enactivism.
19 Hutto and Myin, Evolving Enactivism, pp. 55–74.
20 I allude to the expression as penned by Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of the Mind (London: Routledge, 1949).
21 Hart, Performance and Cognition, p. 32.
22 Blair, ‘Introduction’, p. 144.
23 Ibid., p. 139.
24 Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions, p. 13.
25 See Jakob Howhy, ‘The Predictive Processing Hypothesis’, in A. Newen, L. De Bruin and S. Gallagher, eds., The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 129–45.
26 Matthew Cobb, The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience (London: Profile Books, 2020), pp. 21–3.
27 Ibid., pp. 16 and 21.
28 McCaw, Re-thinking the Actor's Body, p. 243.
29 Amy Cook, ‘Introduction: Texts and Embodied Performance’, in Shaughnessy, Affective Performance, pp. 83–90, here p. 87.
30 Lisa Feldman Barrett, Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain (London: Picador, 2020), p. 45.
31 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1962).
32 Cook, ‘Introduction’, p. 84.
33 McCaw, Re-thinking the Actor's Body, p. 24.
34 Kemp, Embodied Acting, p. xv.
35 Roach, ‘Foreword’, pp. ix–x.
36 I reference Sandra Reeve, ed., Body and Awareness: Ways of Being a Body, Vol. III (Axminster: Triarchy Press, 2021), as one of the most recent examples of the continued use of these terms.
37 As also noted by McCaw, Re-thinking the Actor's Body, p. 19.
38 Roach, ‘Foreword’, p. ix.
39 Evelyn Tribble and John Sutton, ‘Introduction: Interdisciplinarity and Cognitive Approaches to Performance’, in Shaughnessy, Affective Performance, pp. 27–37, here p. 33.
40 I reflect on Shaun and Julia Gallagher's article, ‘Acting Oneself as Another: An Actor's Empathy for Her Character’, Topoi, 39 (2020), pp. 779–90, as a recent example of an interdisciplinary outcome of acting and embodied cognition which exemplifies what I am arguing for in this article.
41 Briefly, although it is now classified as a pseudoscience, studies of phrenology claimed that specific mental and character traits correlated with particular shapes, grooves and dents on the skull. Phrenology was used to uphold religious and political agendas that reinforced racist and sexist stereotypes well into the twentieth century.
42 Refer to McCaw, Re-thinking the Actor's Body, and Kemp and McConachie, The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science, for recent comprehensive accounts.
43 Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions, p. 41.
44 I would advise Ruth Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical Inquiry, 37, 3 (2011), pp. 434–72, for an accessible overview that will lead into further and more detailed research. See also Shaun Gallagher, ‘Mutual Enlightenment: Recent Phenomenology in Cognitive Science’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4, 3 (1997), pp. 195–214; Lisa Feldman Barrett and James A. Russell, ‘Independence and Bipolarity in the Structure of Current Affect’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 4 (1998), pp. 967–84; Lisa Feldman Barrett and Moshe Barr, ‘See It with Feeling: Affective Predictions during Object Perception’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of Biological Sciences, 364, 1521 (2009), pp. 1325–34; Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, ‘Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency’, Phenomenology of Cognitive Science, 4 (2005), pp. 429–52.
45 I consider Frank Camilleri, Performer Training Reconfigured: Post-psychophysical Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century (London: Methuen Drama, 2019); Sharon Marie Carnicke, ‘Stanislavski's Prescience: The Conscious Self in the System and Active Analysis as a Theory of Mind’, in Kemp and McConachie, The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science; Lutterbie, An Introduction to Theatre, Performance and the Cognitive Sciences.
46 Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (London: Pan Macmillan, 2017), p. 31.
47 Barrett and Russell, ‘Independence and Bipolarity’.
48 See Brain Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (London: Duke University Press, 2002); Giovanna Colombetti, ‘Enacting Affectivity’, in Newen, De Bruin and Gallagher, The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition, pp. 571–87.
49 Barrett, How Emotions Are Made, pp. 1–24.
50 Bella Merlin, The Complete Stanislavski Toolkit (London: Nick Hern, 2007), p. 158.
51 Barrett, How Emotions Are Made, pp. 15 and 19.
52 See, for example, Antonio Damasio, ‘The Somatic Marker Hypothesis and the Possible Functions of the Prefrontal Cortex’, Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, 351, 1346 (1996), pp. 1413–20.
53 Barrett, How Emotions Are Made, pp. 45–7.
54 Alvin Goldman and Frederique de Vignemont, ‘Is Social Cognition Embodied?’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13, 4 (2009), pp. 154–9, here p. 158.