Teaching Critical Performance Theory

In Today’s Theatre Classroom, Studio, and Communities

Jeanmarie Higgins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367409296
• eBook ISBN: 9781000045222
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Drama

Teaching Critical Performance Theory offers teaching strategies for professors and artist-scholars across performance, design and technology, and theatre studies disciplines.

The book's seventeen chapters collectively ask: What use is theory to an emerging theatre artist or scholar? Which theories should be taught, and to whom? How can theory pedagogies shape and respond to the evolving needs of the academy, the field, and the community? This broad field of enquiry is divided into four sections covering course design, classroom teaching, the studio space, and applied theatre contexts. Through a range of intriguing case studies that encourage thoughtful theatre practice, this book explores themes surrounding situated learning, dramaturgy and technology, disability and inclusivity, feminist approaches, race and performance, ethics, and critical theory in theatre history.

Written as an invaluable resource for professionals and postgraduates engaged in performance theory, this collection of informative essays will also provide critical reading for those interested in drama and theatre studies more broadly.

Part I

Course design

Reimagining the syllabus

1 Doing things with theory

Situated cognition and theatre pedagogy

Jennifer Ewing-Pierce

In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks (1994) describes theory as a liberatory practice, but if and only if we ask that theory to do something, to assist in a struggle. “Theory,” she writes, “is not inherently healing or revolutionary. It fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing toward this end” (61). hooks is also quick to remind us that the hegemon enlists theory in the opposite struggle—the struggle to maintain the status quo and protect hierarchical power structures, particularly in the classroom where autocratic privilege tends to be the reigning model of pedagogy (62). In this chapter, pedagogy enlists the help of cognitive science to reorient the classroom toward greater openness in structure as well as content, for the structures of our classrooms teach more than their content. Specifically, I will look at situated cognition, a field founded by Lucy Suchman (a key figure in cognitive science and not frequently cited in cognitive studies within theatre) and the situative approaches to learning in education Suchman has inspired. Furthermore, I will show that using second-generation cognitive science to inform our pedagogy allows for a metacognitive practice that teaches the theory implicitly, while also achieving learning outcomes for teaching dramatic literature. Finally, throughout, situated cognition is positioned as having inherent links with critical theory, providing a hermeneutic of continuity between critical theory and second-generation cognitive science, rather than the hermeneutic of rupture posited by early forays into cognitive science within theatre studies.

Early cognitive science presented the brain as a machine that processes discrete tokens of information, a paradigm that inspired early computer design. As computer science advanced, and models of artificial intelligence failed to achieve verisimilitude, however, it became clear that the brain was a far more complex system than initially theorized. “Second-generation cognitive science” is a specialist shorthand toward the more complex and embodied models of cognition that are leading today. This revolution in thought within Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy of Mind has a continuing impact on the humanities and literary studies, including theatre studies, where over a decade ago an official movement formed on the idea of a “cognitive turn” in theatre and performance studies (McConachie and Hart 2006).

As literary studies had before it via Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind (1991), theatre studies attached to the idea of embodied cognition and its overlap with phenomenology. The keyword “embodiment” appealed to theatre studies at an intuitive level, primarily because theatre is experienced as an embodied practice, distinguishing it from printed literature. Furthermore, however, embodiment had been one of the formational concepts of performance studies and continues to inform the field with and without cognitive theory. Before McConachie and Hart’s adoption of cognitive theory as an official orientation in the field, performance studies scholars were decentralizing text and centralizing embodiment. As one example among many, Judith Hamera, a scholar whose dance training is constitutive of her scholarly orientation, wrote about form, gender, and culture, and “body building” in the classroom (2002, 122). Specifically, feminist theory within performance studies, most prominently through Jill Dolan, Elin Diamond, and Peggy Phelan, made questions of embodiment central to performativity. So much so that cognitive theorist and robotics artist Simon Penny questioned cognitive studies’s failure to make connections to feminist theories of embodiment in his primer on theories of embodiment, computation, and the arts (2017, 209–10). It is an elision all the more baffling in fields claiming a connection to performance studies, which was profoundly shaped by feminist theory in the 1980s and 1990s.

Germane to this collection, one might also question whether cognitive studies, as practiced in theatre studies to date, is “critical theory.” If we understand “theory” to be a system of ideas with explanatory power, undoubtedly cognitive theory does the work of “theory,” small “t,” but it has rarely—if ever—done the work of Critical Theory, writ large, as in the work of the Frankfurt School. In fact, at moments, it seeks to destabilize that work, by asserting the primacy of “science.” As McConachie and Hart point out in the preface and introduction of Performance and Cognition, many of the articles contained therein aim to prove that the truth claims of critical theory were built on scientifically unstable foundations, demonstrably proved incorrect by cognitive theory. Aiming at Freudian psychoanalysis, Saussurean semiology, and Marxism (among others), McConachie and Hart posit that the “cognitive framework” is a more vital field than critical theory because “the validity of cognitive studies rests on the empirical assumptions and self-correcting procedures of cognitive science” (x). As such, seeking scientific “realism” and a higher truth claim, cognitive science, as adopted within theatre studies, frequently evades the questions that critical theory was originally designed to address: questions of power, privilege, capital, race, class, and gender.

Consider, then, that cognitive theory within theatre and performance studies has mostly neglected the work of Lucy Suchman, one of the founding theorists of situated cognition. An anthropologist of science and technology, Suchman’s 1987 text, Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Interaction, employed ethnomethodology to reveal that the human lives in a networked world of dynamic interactions between other bodies and the physical and social world. This human–environment dynamism is remarkably like Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s environment and organism dialectic, described in La structure du comportement, translated into English in 1983, which inspired the bulk of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind published in 1991, making the omission of Suchman curious. Similarly, taking its cue from literary studies, which built its foundation on Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, theatre studies have by and large cathected to the idea of embodied cognition, but it is Suchman’s situated cognition that is parent to the child. Situated cognition is the genus, embodied cognition is the species (Robbins and Aydede 2009, 3).

Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook’s exceptional collection Theatre, Performance, and Cognition: Languages, Bodies, and Ecologies does take on situated cognition, understanding it through 4e cognition. “4e” cognition combines four dominant views in cognition: embodied, enacted, extended, and embedded. All of this is to say that cognition is situated. Evelyn Tribble has applied situated cognition to analyze not Shakespeare as an individual man of genius but as part of a complex system that produced him and that he helped to produce (2016). Tribble calls these systems “cognitive ecologies,” describing what has fallen into the realm of complexity theory in computer science and has impacted psychology, economics, and sociology. In the same collection, Sarah E. McCarroll focuses on the participation of material environment in situated cognition, literally through material as she looks at what she calls “the historical body map” through clothing. While Suchman’s work has gone unexamined, the powerful paradigm shift she enacted is finding its way into the work of theatre studies. Of further note, works such as Tribble’s and McCarroll’s establish connections to prior work in the field through discourses of feminist materialism.

For this chapter, I assert less the novelty of cognitive theory than establish a hermeneutic of continuity with larger, still ongoing discourses in theatre studies inspired by the Frankfurt School. While certain aspects of embodied cognition have allowed some to theorize that the reality of our embodiment has more power than the social and cultural constructions that condition our use and reception of language, the parent concept of situated cognition has far more in common with the Frankfurt School than difference. Both the Frankfurt School and situated cognition take as a non-negotiable starting point that there is no cognition without culture and no culture without cognition. The Frankfurt School focused on social, political, economic, and societal conditions as a matrix for social change. Situated cognition focuses on the dynamic interactions between social, political, economic, societal, and physical environments as being constitutive of the individual and how the individual acts within systematicity. Therefore, there is a stronger potential for a hermeneutic of continuity with the endeavors of the Frankfurt School than a hermeneutic of rupture. Rather than embodiment coming to mean a hardwired brain that operates at an individual level based on its biology independent of cultural construction, embodied cognition now means that cultural, social, and physical influences network with individual brains. In short, embodied cognition comes to mean the study of complex systems. As we will see, classroom communities are complex communities that benefit from this scientifically grounded continuation of the Frankfurt School project.

A field that has adopted situated cognition and used it as a liberatory practice is education. In education, situated cognition has evolved into what some refer to as situated learning; others object to that nomenclature because it implies that some learning is not situated, and situated learning scientists believe all learning is situated (Sawyer and Greeno 2009, 348). Instead, adherents refer to situative approaches to learning to acknowledge that learning is always and everywhere situated, that is, conditioned by the social, cultural, and physical environment as much as by any individual hardwiring in the individual learning mind.

At stake is the power of situative approaches to provide a liberatory pedagogy that destabilizes autocratic classroom design. Furthermore, it offers a metacognitive component that performatively teaches the theory of situated cognition. However, it is not surprising to learn, and germane to this discussion, that performance is a fundamental paradigm that situated cognitive scientists study. As Sawyer and Greeno write about studies of musicians and actors, “the interactions of some activity systems, such as jazz or improvisational theatre groups are not decomposable,” and provide this as a model of what situativity looks like in a classroom (350).

Individualist versus situative

That’s the difference education as the practice of freedom makes. The bottom-line assumption has to be that everyone in the classroom is able to act responsibly. That has to be the starting point—that we are able to act responsibly together to create a learning environment. All too often we have been trained as professors to assume students are not capable of acting responsibly, that if we don’t exert control over them, then there’s just going to be mayhem.

(hooks 1994, 152)

Contrasting the situative approach to the individualist approach that typifies most classrooms is helpful to understanding situativity in learning:

Table 1.1 Individualist learning versus situative learning

Individualist	Situative
Continual accumulation of knowledge	Gradual appropriation through guided participation
Knowledge is possessed by the individual mind	Goal-directed toward socially situated activities and practices
Directed toward formal abstract thought	Culturally specific in process and outcomes

Situative learning researchers acknowledge that learning never happens in solitude. Even learning that occurs in an environment where the body is physically “alone,” the individual is engaging with socially and culturally produced objects such as computers, books, and other learning materials that were created by others. All learning is networked (Sawyer and Greeno 2009, 364). In s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Teaching critical performance theory in today’s educational landscape
• Part I Course design: Reimagining the syllabus
• Part II Classroom identities: Engaging students in theory
• Part III Studio: Theorizing praxis
• Part IV Communities: Applying theory
• Index