Performing Psychologies

Imagination, Creativity and Dramas of the Mind

Nicola Shaughnessy, Philip Barnard, Nicola Shaughnessy, Philip Barnard

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781474260862
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Performing Psychologies offers new perspectives on arts and health, focussing on the different ways in which performance interacting with psychology can enhance understanding of the mind. The book challenges stereotypes of disability, madness and creativity, addressing a range of conditions (autism, dementia and schizophrenia) and performance practices including staged productions and applied work in custodial, health and community settings. Featuring case studies ranging from Hamlet to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the pioneering work of companies such as Spare Tyre and Ridiculusmus, and embracing dance and music as well as theatre and drama, the volume offers new perspectives on the dynamic interactions between performance, psychology and states of mind. It contains contributions from psychologists, performance scholars, therapists and healthcare professionals, who offer multiple perspectives on working through performance-based media. Presenting a richly interdisciplinary and collaborative investigation of the arts in practice, this volume opens up new ways of thinking about the performance of psychologies, and about how psychologies perform.

Part One

Contexts

1

Changing Minds and Minding the Gap: Interactions between Arts, Science and Performance

Nicola Shaughnessy and Philip Barnard

‘How do you show the inner workings of a person’s psyche to an audience sitting 25 feet away in the dark?’ For theatre director David Woods, the solution is simple: ‘Get in a cardboard box.’¹ Simple the solution may appear to be, but engaging with the experience of psychosis through performance involves complexities of theory and practice that are central to the concerns addressed in this volume, particularly in terms of the embodied mind, empathy, emotion, identities in transition, as well as the fraught relationship between madness and creativity. The performance referred to here is Give Me Your Love, a staging of post-traumatic stress disorder. This is the second piece in a theatre and mental health trilogy by the UK company Ridiculusmus – whose The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland is the focus of Chapter 10 – presented in a form appropriate to content, as a dialogue between the two performance makers David Woods and Jon Haynes with Richard Talbot as a third voice providing a critical commentary. Described as ‘the play that wants to change the way we view mental health’, the dramaturgy is informed by the Finnish ‘open dialogue’ approach to therapeutic intervention for acute mental illness. The dialogic systems theory informing this radical therapy and associated understanding of the relations between mind, body and environment are endemic to the principles and practices of cognitive and affective approaches to theatre and performance. In the contributions to this volume, the embodied, embedded, enactive, extended and ecological interact as meaning-making structures through the creative practices featured.

Since the publication of Affective Performance and Cognitive Science in 2013 and the launch of the Performance and Science series, discussion of arts–science and performance–health interfaces has continued through volumes on Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience (edited by Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia and Victor Jacono), Performance and the Medical Body (Alex Mermikedes and Gianna Bouchard), Theatre, Performance and Cognition (Amy Cook and Rhonda Blair) and Performing the Remembered Present: The Cognition of Memory in Dance, Theatre and Music (Pil Hansen and Bettina Bläsing).² In these interdisciplinary dialogues, contributors discuss the various forms collaboration can take and the different roles played by the arts in engaging with science. Accessing conditions of mind through creative practices is a pervasive theme in these volumes and in the burgeoning fields of arts/health with subfields developing in relation to autism, dementia, ageing and trauma.³ Interdisciplinary collaboration between arts and science is increasingly acknowledged as a means of addressing complex problems,⁴ with the contested territory of ‘mind space’ a focus of investigation and funding. Indeed, in 2015 an international interdisciplinary delegation (artists, humanities scholars, neuroscientists, psychologists and social scientists), organized by the Wellcome Trust and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, met for three days to ‘explore the inner and outer dimensions of the mind, to look at how the spaces we inhabit, our own bodily awareness, the presence of others, shared experience and illness affect the spaces our minds occupy’.⁵ Key questions for discussion and debate were concerned with how we understand the mind (across disciplines), the challenges of collaboration and the capacity to change thinking in conditions that cause psychic distress. One provocation suggested that ‘we can change the mind (via drugs, electric shock therapy), but know very little about the mind’. The clinical psychologist Emily Holmes, a participant in the discussion, countered this view with a provocation that ‘we know so much about the mind and so little about how to change it’.

In this volume we aim to elucidate the various ways in which interactions between performance and science can complement, interact with and enrich our understanding of the embodied mind while also having the capacity to change our thinking and perception through experience and action. In so doing, we venture into areas of new knowledge creation and practice, emerging across disciplines that challenge traditional paradigms. Recognition of the value of lived experience to research is mobilizing qualitative methodologies through concepts such as ‘living labs’, discourse analysis and creative research tools in the social sciences.⁶ This is also in the context of debates around medical versus social models of disability, whereby the emphasis of the biomedical model on impairments, abnormality and intervention is challenged through a civil rights approach, advocating that societal structures and attitudes determine dis/ability.⁷ There is also increasing recognition of the importance and value of engaging service users, particularly in mental health contexts as ‘experts by experience’, contributing to the design and delivery of care models and training. Similarly, the burgeoning development of community-based participatory research models, particularly in autism and dementia research (two conditions that feature in this volume), is in response to gaps between ‘knowledge and practice’ with community advocates demanding research that has relevance to their day-to-day experience and well-being as evident in Elizabeth Pellicano’s 2014 policy report on autism, A Future Made Together, in which the prioritization of biologically based research and the lack of consultation with the autistic community mean that ‘advances in research fail to impact upon those who need them most: autistic people, their parents and carers and those who help support them’.⁸

Across disciplines there are related concerns about the need to engage first-person perspectives in research and to challenge divisions across and within communities of practice, powerfully articulated by Peter Fonagy in a postscript to Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, which refers to the ‘regrettable dichotomy’ emerging from ‘laboratory versus clinical encounter oriented papers’ in discussions of depression.⁹ Fonagy finds ‘the interiority of the clinical account is only partially met by the exteriority of the laboratory science’, referring to the necessity for the ‘complexities which the interiority accounts present’ and the value of ‘dynamic description’ which is ‘not yet captured’ by empirical research. Fonagy’s articulation of the need to systematically and explicitly link first- and third-person data in these studies of depression reflects similar concerns in mental health research more broadly: ‘It will require a comprehensive examination and evaluation of subjective experience that is able to preserve its richness and complexity at the same time as quantifying its key characteristics.’¹⁰ Related concerns are prevalent across disciplinary cultures (and in this volume) as scholars investigate questions of value in practice-based research, relations between evidence and knowledge, ‘intrinsic and instrumental impacts, and the value of participatory research’.¹¹

When seeking to elucidate complementary interactions between performance and science, it is vital to probe deeper into disciplinary cultures. Humans quite naturally categorize or otherwise pigeonhole all sorts of aspects of the world we inhabit. For example, we are not just artists and scientists. We are musicians, actors, painters and sculptors or we are doctors, biologists, physicists, chemists and psychologists. The particular knowledge and skill sets of the associated communities of practice, as well as their differing languages, play a big part in determining not only what we do but also what we attend to, what we understand and how we understand it. Since we live in a richly connected world we, as individuals, can belong to several communities of practice and intersect in one way or another with many others. At these intersections lie both risks and opportunities.

For example, a scientist who works with an explicit logic of words, mathematical algorithms or chemical symbols will most likely value replicable phenomena, methodological rectitude, predictability and statistical significances but may well be challenged, or perhaps even mystified, when it comes to understanding an artist who senses feelings and significant meanings in the arc of an unpredictable improvised performance in contemporary dance, or who sees knowledge embodied and expressed in the abstract form of a unique artistic artefact. Yet the sciences and arts very obviously do intersect in a rich variety of ways that are considered valuable. Over the course of history many artworks have been inspired by a stimulus from science or nature. Likewise, many scientific studies of, for example, creativity, or of the brain structures on which it depends, have focused on arts practice and performance. The products of many of these studies are often primarily intended for use by other scientists working in similar paradigms. However, where they are intended to promote interdisciplinary dialogue a key issue then becomes whether the products of science merely constitute a noteworthy and interesting general point for discussion, a simple idea to be requisitioned, or whether they can usefully extend or enrich what artists actually already know or otherwise do well. If we are to benefit from potential opportunities at intersections between psychology and the performing arts, then, at least for some projects, we need to attend to an object of study conjointly and build bridges to support shared understandings as well as meaning-making and preferably go beyond that to do some form of real work. In approaching that work, we need to formulate and express ideas that provide a balance between rigour and richness.

Performing psychologies: Reflections on terminologies

The terminology of the title Performing Psychologies is an integration and conflation of arts/science, with performing associated with activities in process as well as the translation of material from one medium to another, while psychologies are associated with the scientific study of the mind, mental processes and the characteristics and behaviours of individuals and groups.

The editors are themselves representative of these different communities of practice engaged in interdisciplinary dialogue. Barnard’s work as an applied scientist is introduced by Shaughnessy in Affective Performance and Cognitive Science, as a means of ‘thinking in threes’, to bridge dualisms between the ‘two cultures’ through new paradigms of arts/science interaction.¹² Shaughnessy’s earliest work on feminism and theatre was informed by psychoanalytic theory, prior to her turning to cognitive and affective neuroscience to conceptualize embodied and creative processes in applied and socially engaged theatre. On encountering Barnard’s work in dance contexts (particularly the ‘choreographic thinking tools’ he co-developed with dance specialists) and his model of Interacting Cognitive Subsystems, or ICS (Chapter 3), the framework was used by Shaughnessy in the analysis of a drama project with autistic children, Imagining Autism.¹³ This interdisciplinary collaboration between drama and psychology engaged autistic children (7–12-year-olds) in a programme of drama workshops and immersive installations using improvisation, puppetry and interactive media to facilitate communication, social interaction and imagination.¹⁴ ICS offered ‘a macro-system’ for the analysis of the creative activities, the interacting sensory modalities and the thinking and feeling processes that contribute to meaning-making in participatory theatre.¹⁵

The theoretical landscape of mainstream laboratory-based cognitive psychology in the 1970s largely relied on micro-theories developed to account for ‘performance’ in tightly restricted and focused tasks designed to study specific mental skills such as short-term memory, visual attention or use of language. Outside the laboratory it was not easy to categorize intellectual or emotional faculties so cleanly. Working in applied contexts such as information design, human–computer interaction or clinical psychology was doubly challenging. First, it required a way of thinking about macro-theoretic relationships among all the different facets of cognition to which ICS was the response. Second, it required careful thought about how theories themselves might best be elaborated to make them transformable into something useful when the rigour of science needs to be traded off against the complexity and richness of so much of what we do in everyday life.

The wider bridging paradigm is a response to that second challenge as a flexible design for conceptualizations of interdisciplinary theory and practice. It identifies generic representations and processes used when creating or extending knowledge of all types and applying that knowledge back into a social context. The tripartite model illustrates the processes and interactions between experiences and behaviours in the ‘real world’ of people and their representations in applied science. As such it can be adapted to explore and analyse the relations, intersections and interactions between the different states and intermodalities we negotiate as theatre and performance scholars and/or practitioners.¹⁶

Our specific articulation of ‘bridging practices’ between scientific theory and the real world not only describes the craft of clinical practice (as originally intended) but has also been used as an analytical framework for practical research processes in applied theatre, dance and film.¹⁷ The introduction to the macro architecture of ICS facilitated a new framework for dialogue between contemporary neuroscience and neuropsychologies, and between cognitive, perceptual and creative processes in applications of science and performance.¹⁸

Barnard has stated that as a scientist, he is ‘particularly challenged by a whole range of deep questions that arise when it comes to thinking about cognition, creativity and the arts’.¹⁹ He warns that ‘to even approach a level of sufficient adequacy and applicability our theories must inevitably address that complexity [i.e. different mental functions] in one way or another’. The development of ‘basic macro-theories of broader scope’ offers a paradigm for use as a bridge between psychology and a potentially wide range of performing arts. For example, the articulation of ‘bridging practices’ between the real world and scientific theory describes not only the craft of clinical practice but also the practice-based research that was the basis for his work with dancers, particularly Wayne McGregor and Scott deLahunta, whose collaboration with Barnard led to the development of the ‘attentional score’ (discussed in Chapter 3).

This interdisciplinary model offers a framework for understanding and analysing cognitive–affective interaction and change. It recognizes qualitatively different kinds of information, distinguishing between two levels of meaning, one specific, the other more holistic, and suggests that the more holistic one is linked to affect. This has been used in relation to several of the conditions of mind that are referenced in this volume as the psychologies that are engaged with through performance, to include depression (Chapter 7), schizophrenia (Chapter 10) and eating disorders (Chapter 6), helping us to underst...