Although we commonly tie human learning to specific environments and tasks – school and reading, job training in the workplace, actors learning lines at a rehearsal, and so forth – learning happens everywhere, involves mundane actions and perceptions as well as specific tasks, and occurs throughout a person’s lifetime. Children learn interpersonal skills and language, teens learn emotional control and group norms, young adults typically learn parenting and intercultural strategies and older people must learn to accept the limits of their bodies and their social authority. Genetic evolution has primed our body-minds to learn, and all cultures depend upon learning to survive and flourish. Cognitive scientists seek to understand learning in all of these contexts. As the chapters in this part explore, learning often involves embodied accounts of empathy, memory, consciousness, play, imagination and the emotions. Within enactivism, learning occurs all the time; it is a normal part of the perception-action cycle.
The chapters in Part II begin with an essay focused on hominins (our direct ancestors on the evolutionary family tree) who improvised communication before the invention of language. They proceed to the kind of learning that occurs during religious rituals, the public education of a community of citizens who have chosen to perform a commemorative dance together and students in a university classroom who learn how to design a ‘living newspaper’ that explores a significant social issue in their lives. The last three chapters focus on the education of actors. They include an overview of the developmental psychology that supports the ability to perform a fictitious role before an audience, a teacher’s use of metacognitive strategies to enhance student learning in an acting class and Jacques Lecoq’s approach to the teaching of acting technique.
I wrote the first chapter in this part – ‘Improvising Communication in Pleistocene Performances.’ While studying linguistic and anthropological approaches to the gradual evolution of language during the Pleistocene epoch (2.5 million years ago to 11,000 bce), I was struck by the scholarly consensus concerning the growth of cooperation and interpersonal trust among our hunter-gatherer ancestors with regard to their hunting, cooking and childcare activities. Scholars had speculated that early, proto-language communication among these hominin bands involved mimetic kinds of sounds and gestures, but none had applied any knowledge about theatrical improvisation today to the situations and abilities of these hominins, who clearly needed to communicate with each other about common practical problems roughly 2 million years ago. Perhaps, I suggest, the same kind of interpersonal trust that supported many of their other activities could provide the foundation for improvising proto-languaging among our Pleistocene ancestors.
In his ‘Ritual Transformation and Transmission,’ David Mason begins by questioning sociologist Emile Durkheim’s assumption that religious believers understand the ritual actions they perform as a straightforward expression of their religious beliefs. Instead, Mason sides with anthropologist Marcel Mauss and those who agree with him that the embodied actions of the performers, not their professed beliefs, must be the primary key to understanding what the performers mean by doing their ritual. Mason notes that how ritual actions shape beliefs and self-concepts is now the dominant approach in ritual studies. He builds on this performative understanding of ritual through the cognitively inflected ideas of anthropologist Roy Rappaport and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Mason applies this understanding of the embodied emergence of ritual meaning to a temple ritual performed among the Mormon faithful in 1846.
A contemporary dance performance by 100 citizen-volunteers is not the same as a nineteenth- century religious ritual, of course, but both deployed movement to create meaning for themselves and others. Ariel Nereson, in her ‘Communities of Gesture: Empathy and Embodiment in Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company’s 100 Migrations,’ analyses a community-based work in Charlottesville, Virginia, performed in 2009, to commemorate the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln. Bill T. Jones choreographed the piece with amateur dancers, he said, to find out what ‘democracy moving’ might look like. Dressed in costumes of blue and grey to signify the antagonists in the U.S. Civil War and dancing across a space that featured Lincoln’s deathbed in the centre, the dancers performed gestures they had improvised and supported each other physically in the midst of often dangerous moves. Nereson draws on the discourse of public history among historians and the insights of philosopher Mark Johnson on embodied cognition to probe the likely meanings of ‘100 Migrations’ for the dancers and their audience.
Our part chapters move from cultural and historical contexts for learning to educational classrooms with Nancy Kindelan’s essay, ‘Creative Storytelling, Crossing Boundaries, High-Impact Learning, and Social Engagement.’ Kindelan designed and taught an Honours seminar for non-Theatre majors that culminated in each student presenting a ‘Treatment’ for the presentation of a Living Newspaper play, the kind of documentary theatre produced initially by the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) as a part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. In terms of their learning, the seminar challenged students to deploy metacognitive skills – skills that required them to reframe and synthesise what they knew in a general way about journalistic evidence, narrative structure and performative effectiveness – in order to enable them to take a position on a matter of significant social concern and then revise and shape it for a specific audience. The students studied several varieties of Living Newspaper performance, from the FTP productions in the 1930s, to the documentary work of Anna Deavere Smith, and performances by the Rimini Protokoll (a contemporary German-based coalition of artists), and then selectively applied what they learned to improve their final projects.
Our final group of essays on learning acting begins with Thalia R. Goldstein’s chapter, ‘From Banana Phones to the Bard: The Developmental Psychology of Acting,’ which surveys the cognitive and social-emotional capabilities that children normally develop before they are able to perform a role in a play. In terms of cognitive skills, children must be able to quarantine the real world from fictitious dramatic action, and they must learn how to lie persuasively, usually the first step on the way to role-playing. Although engaging in pretend play is a necessary prerequisite for acting, this normal toddler activity is not as demanding and complex as performing a role. A child’s ability to recognise the self as a separate entity is usually the first socialisation step that facilitates acting, but later development must also include emotional regulation, which helps the growing child shift her or his attention back and forth between the world of the play and audience response during performance. In short, Goldstein provides copious empirical evidence that problem-solving, a capacious memory, interpersonal sensitivity and executive control are some of the more important primary skills that growing children must learn before they can become good actors.
Little has been written about how student actors can learn effectively while watching their acting teacher coach others during an acting class. Claire Syler addresses this problem with a chapter enticingly titled, ‘“I’m giving everybody notes using his body”: Framing actors’ observation of performance.’ As she notes, the acting teacher who made that statement wanted to be sure that students used his comments and their observation of other student actors to advance their classroom learning. To declare that he was using one actor’s body as a means of coaching all of his students was a ‘metacomment,’ defined by Syler as a deliberate act of framing that structured his students’ attention and interactions. As in Kindelan’s essay on teaching and learning, Syler celebrates metacognition as a cognitively rich teaching practice that can help students to take charge of their own learning in the theatre classroom.
Part II concludes with Rick Kemp’s essay, ‘Acting Technique, Jacques Lecoq, and Embodied Meaning.’ Noting that Lecoq’s and Stanislavski’s teaching of acting training are complementary, Kemp asserts that Lecoq’s pedagogy can open up many techniques and ways of thinking about acting that would remain mostly unconscious in a class that emphasised Stanislavski’s approach to script-based performance. Kemp focuses on two major principles of embodied cognition that undergird Lecoq’s pedagogy – (1) physical experiences are the foundation for meaning-making, and (2) the embodied simulation of meaning is dynamic. He ends his chapter with a case study that links learning and meaning to culture and underlines the specificity of gestures in performance. This chapter nicely sums up the major links between embodiment and learning (in classrooms, rehearsals, and cultures) and also points us towards Part III: scholarship, which continues to discuss the importance of embodied cognition but also calls attention to enactive and distributed cognition for understanding theatre and performance.