The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science

Rick Kemp, Bruce McConachie, Rick Kemp, Bruce McConachie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351690362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Theater

The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science integrates key findings from the cognitive sciences (cognitive psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary studies and relevant social sciences) with insights from theatre and performance studies. This rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field dynamically advances critical and theoretical knowledge, as well as driving innovation in practice. The anthology includes 30 specially commissioned chapters, many written by authors who have been at the cutting-edge of research and practice in the field over the last 15 years. These authors offer many empirical answers to four significant questions:

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• How can performances in theatre, dance and other media achieve more emotional and social impact?

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• How can we become more adept teachers and learners of performance both within and outside of classrooms?

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• What can the cognitive sciences reveal about the nature of drama and human nature in general?

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• How can knowledge transfer, from a synthesis of science and performance, assist professionals such as nurses, care-givers, therapists and emergency workers in their jobs?

A wide-ranging and authoritative guide, The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science is an accessible tool for not only students, but practitioners and researchers in the arts and sciences as well.

Part I Artistry

Introduction

Rick Kemp

This part considers how insights from cognitive neuroscience can inform the practice of various genres of performance. Information from this field has informed the work of both practitioners and scholars of theatre and performance since the early 2000s. Neuroscience investigates the organisation and functions of the nervous system, seeking to better understand the brain’s relationship to behaviour and cognitive functions. These include, for example, perceiving, thinking, imagining, remembering, speaking, gesturing, planning and doing. Evidently, all of these activities occur in the creation and performance of theatre, and in its reception by audiences. However, much of this cognitive activity happens below the level of conscious awareness, so it is difficult to analyse. The discoveries of neuroscience allow theatre and performance practitioners to better understand both their subject matter – human experience and behaviour – and the often intuitive processes involved in the preparation and presentation of performance in multiple genres. Researchers in cognitive neuroscience combine data from experimental studies with discipline-specific knowledge to build theories that are consistent with empirical evidence of the brain’s functions. The ensuing body of knowledge has led to significant changes in the ways in which we understand phenomena such as perception, language and gesture, emotion, imagination, memory, empathy – even the idea of self. These changes challenge many of the traditional concepts of the mind, brain and self that underlie the practices, training and scholarship of Western theatre. Consequently, an increasing number of practitioners and scholars have been inspired to apply this new knowledge to their art form. There are, however, challenges involved in doing this, as cognitive neuroscience is a broad multi-disciplinary field with many competing theories. Theatre and performance practitioners and scholars have tended to focus on the ‘embodied cognition’ view of the brain’s functions, which proposes that what people perceive, how they conceive and what they do all develop interactively and are tied to their environment. Even within this broad understanding, there are variances of opinion that will appear in the chapters of this part. We hope that these variances, rather than appearing contradictory, will inspire readers of this book to go deeper into the field to determine which perspective accords with their own experience.

Given the widespread influence of Stanislavsky on Western theatre in the twentieth century, we begin this part with a cognitive perspective on his approach by Sharon Carnicke, author of the highly influential Stanislavsky in Focus (1998, 2nd ed. 2009). Carnicke has argued that Stanislavsky’s techniques can continue to be productive in the twenty-first century and has applied Active Analysis (AA, his last rehearsal technique) to both new media and non-Aristotelian plays, as well as utilizing it in a scientific study on the emotional expressivity of physical gesture. In these activities, she continues the work that she began in Stanislavsky in Focus, of freeing Stanislavsky’s ideas from misinterpretation. One of the most significant misrepresentations has been the associating of his work with behaviourism – a process that originated with the Soviet insistence on materialism. Behaviourism held that there was a simple correlation between stimulus and behaviour, confining itself to the study of observable behaviour. It was within this psychological orientation that Stanislavsky’s System was adopted by Lee Strasberg in the USA. Carnicke connects Stanislavsky’s work with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s research on human consciousness and demonstrates how AA can be used experimentally in conjunction with Theory of Mind to generate new scientific knowledge.

This chapter is followed by one on improvisation by psychologist and theatre practitioner Gunter Lösel that considers many of the different manifestations of this activity through the lens of cognitive science. The juxtaposition of these two chapters addresses the traditional idea of Western theatre history that there are two basic categories of theatrical practice – scripted and improvised drama. Cognitive science offers a more sophisticated understanding of meaning and interpretation in theatre through identifying varying parameters within which creators of performance can make expressive choices. Lösel addresses the fact that while the skills of acting and improvisers overlap, there seem to be specific abilities and cognitive functions that are necessary for improvisational theatre. As he points out, improvisers have a greater variety of options than actors, since they are creating content as they perform it. Lösel examines how it is that improvisers can make choices without hesitation or apparent ‘thinking.’ He describes three approaches to identifying the skills of improvisation by considering, firstly, the vocabulary of improvising practice, secondly, the idea that improvisation is a form of problem solving and, thirdly, the application of theories of embodiment and social cognition.

This perspective involves the model of dynamic systems theory (addressed more fully in Part III), which also informs my chapter on devising. A dynamic system is a model of interaction that describes the flow of relationships among the components of a whole phenomenon, acknowledging the real-time ‘circular causality’ of elements within a system. As such, it is a useful way to describe the ways in which people, environment and actions simultaneously affect one another in the context of devising a dramatic performance, as well as presenting that performance. While devised theatre has become a familiar feature of Western performance, little has been written about what connects its many disparate expressions. In this chapter I use theories from embodied cognition to identify underlying principles that may be applied across varied devising processes. In doing so, I hope to provide practitioners, researchers and students with some useful concepts that can frame the processes of devising. Among these is the fact that devising is inherently creative, and I suggest that its multi-modality is a significant cause of this by describing how embodied multi-modality leads to both metaphorical thinking and ideational combination.

Devising is a form that uses improvisation but arrives at a fixed ‘performance score,’ thus disrupting the traditional binary of scripted and improvisatory theatre that I mentioned earlier. This disruption is furthered by the examination of some historical forms of theatre. In the next two chapters, Darren Tunstall and Peter Meineck trace ideas of embodied cognition through performance of Shakespeare and Greek theatre, respectively. The recognition that Shakespeare’s actors rehearsed with cue scripts has been a significant factor in understanding the processes of performance in his time. A cue-script shows only one’s own speeches and the lines that cue them. Reading these without the benefit of seeing the whole play written out meant that actors had to be singularly alert for their cues, resulting in a degree of spontaneity in their speech and action. In contemporary rehearsal processes, the cue-script approach is employed by only a few companies, with a variety of methods used by others. Tunstall reviews some different strategies for rehearsing Shakespearean text modelled upon some influential theatre practitioners, and investigates how an understanding of embodied cognition might enhance these processes. Peter Meineck was the founding director of Aquila Theatre and also holds the endowed chair of Professor of Classics in the Modern World at New York University. He thus combines the understanding of a practitioner with his scholarly research. Meineck points out that the study of Greek drama has tended to be either textual or archaeological, with little attention paid to the embodied experience of performance and reception. In his chapter, he explores how the application of cognitive theory to ancient drama can help us better understand how these plays functioned in antiquity. His approach applies research from the affective sciences, cognitive theory and social psychology to examine the extra-textual elements of the performance. Here he focuses on environment, masks and movement, and identifies cognitive processes that support historical evidence that suggests that the experience of watching a play in the fifth century bce was highly emotional. His analysis offers valuable information that can inform the ways in which these ancient plays are understood and presented by modern practitioners.

The next two chapters also demonstrate how cognitive science can influence contemporary practice in different genres – one improvisatory and one scripted. Pil Hansen explores interdisciplinary studies of cognitive science and dance improvisation, while Jeanne Klein applies basic cognitive-affective principles of child development to the field of Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA). Hansen explains that in dance for the stage, improvisation can be used to create new material that is then ‘set’ in choreography or incorporated into a system or score in performance. She goes on to examine the concept of presence and how this is challenged by some contemporary improvisers. Employing the concept of ‘constraints’ from dynamic systems theory, she discusses how the incorporation of explicit constraints may give dancers the ability to actively stimulate levels of memory and planning that are otherwise implicit. The contrast of explicit and implicit cognitive processes is also a feature of Jeanne Klein’s chapter. As a TYA practitioner, she has long argued that productions need to take account of children’s developmental cognitive-affective perspectives in order to optimise child spectators’ aesthetic experiences. In her view, optimal experiences occur when audience members recognise, articulate and apply artists’ intended meanings to themselves and society. This is more likely to occur when practitioners appropriately match their material to one of the four age-related epistemological orientations in their audiences.

Rhonda Blair was one of the first scholar/practitioners to apply cognitive science to acting practice in The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience (2008). In her chapter for this volume, she describes how she has applied theories of embodied cognition to her directing. Using case studies of two productions, she gives examples of how an understanding of cognitive principles can enhance the interaction of text, research and embodiment. She proposes that this can help us better understand both theatrical practice and aspects of human cognition, since rehearsal processes and performances provide discrete models of cognitive ecologies. The term cognitive ecology describes mutually interdependent elements in a cognitive system, and represents a shift in cognitive theory from defining units of analysis by their inherent properties to units defined in terms of dynamic patterns of correlation across elements. Blair uses her examples of preparing and presenting Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire as demonstrations of the ways in which both rehearsal and performance can be recognized as cognitive systems. Thus, theatrical activity provides a frame that integrates text, individuals and material items in a coalescence of meanings.

In the final chapter in this part, Vladimir Mirodan addresses the following common question: ‘are stage emotions actually experienced or are actors only giving the appearance of emotion-driven behaviour?’ There is no simple answer, since cognitive neuroscience offers competing explanations of emotion. Mirodan first outlines the principal theories regarding the arousal, perception and transmission of emotion, and then looks at ways in which certain widely used acting approaches relate to them. The so-called ‘read-out’ theories of emotion, supported by neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux, suggest that a stimulus provokes physiological reactions that, when registered in consciousness, are recognised as emotions. Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp proposes an alternative explanation, that there is state of ‘affective consciousness’ that is unreflective and unthinking. In other words, we do not need to consciously ‘know’ what we are feeling in order to feel. Cognitive scientist and philosopher Giovanna Colombetti suggests that scientists have neglected the actual subjective (or phenomenological) feeling of emotion in their studies – that in order to fully understand emotion we need to know not only what is experienced, but how it is experienced. She also states that emotion is an intrinsic part of cognition – that one cannot separate the two. Mirodan adroitly describes these positions before going on to examine how cognitive explanations of emotion – while still partial and uncertain – might begin to influence acting practices.

The rich variety of the chapters in this part indicates how lively and exploratory the field of cognitive theatre and performance studies has become in its application of scientific theories to the practices of performance. While there are varied opinions within the field, there is a widespread recognition that the Cartesian separation of mind and body that was implicit in earlier explanations of practice is no longer valid or helpful. Holistic and situated descriptions of cognition provide a fertile ground for the linking of performance theory and practice that looks likely to continue to grow.

1 Stanislavsky’s Prescience

The conscious self in the system and Active Analysis as a theory of mind

Sharon Marie Carnicke

This chapter interrogates the continuing value of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s legacy to acting in the wake of twenty-first-century discoveries in cognitive science, specifically Theory of Mind. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, Stanislavsky conducted a broad search through many fields of knowledge, including the science and psychologies of his era, for ways to verbalize his tacit experience with acting. His effort was deeply experimental, resulting in a globally influential acting System that has been successively transmitted and transformed by actors from generation to generation. While his System in its many, often distorted, forms continues to hold exceptional authority in actor training programs and rehearsal halls worldwide, that authority is also being challenged by rapid technological and dramaturgical changes that impact actors’ work. Stanislavsky himself acknowledged the inevitability of change, when in the opening pages of his autobiography he recalls everyday items from his nineteenth-century Russian childhood that his students no longer knew—candles made from lard, the horse-drawn tarantas, flint-lock muskets, and the like (Stanislavskii 1988–1999, vol. 1: 53).¹ By extension, neither he nor his students could have imagined the world in which twenty-first-century actors live.

As I have argued elsewhere, Stanislavsky’s pragmatic techniques can constitute a living legacy as long as they can accommodate production and dramaturgical conditions that post-date his life. To test such adaptability, I have experimented with applying his last rehearsal technique, Active Analysis (AA), to new media and non-Aristotelian plays. For exam...