This part of nine essays examines the many ways that cognitive science has assisted and informed theoretical, critical and historical scholarship in theatre and performance studies. While most of the chapters in our book thus far have relied on insights from embodied areas of cognitive science, several of these essays venture into the fields of enactive and distributed cognition. The first essay, in fact, underlines the importance of systems theory for the epistemology of enactivism and the second primarily explores insights from the philosophy of phenomenology into understanding theatrical spectating as enactive. The science on how spectators actually attend to a performance – the focus of the third essay – nicely complements the second chapter. Spectator attention necessarily leads to meaning-making in the next essay. This is followed by two chapters oriented towards emotional experience – the first about the enjoyment of rasa by audiences at performances of traditional Indian theatre and the next about the emotion of shame that shapes the experience of many traditional tragedies. Performances about ageing bodies and ethical responsibility centre the next two essays, in which a son struggles to help his old father with his bowel problems as an impassive Christ looks on and a dancer has a lively conversation with her complaining legs, arms and feet. A final chapter uses distributed cognition to answer historical questions about the likely staging of four different kinds of theatre, ranging from ancient Roman comedy to contemporary puppet performance.
In ‘Systems theory, enaction, and performing arts,’ Gabriele Sofia contextualises the paradigm of enaction in cognitive science within similar paradigm shifts that have occurred in other disciplines (including sociology, biology and theatre) when those scholars recognised that dynamic systems theory altered key relationships between its parts and the whole. Just as a whole ‘society’ in sociology is more than the sum of its parts (‘social groups,’ ‘language,’ ‘norms,’ etc.) under systems theory, so cognition as a whole system is more than neurons, memory, perception and its other constitutive parts. Sofia points out that systems theory in these and other areas has epistemological ramifications that break down the usual distinctions between objective and subjective knowledge. An audience member, for example, can never gain completely objective knowledge of any performance she is watching because her presence in the theatre necessarily alters – if only in small ways – the relationship between performers and spectators. From an enactive and systems perspective, one phenomenological result of this insight is that the interactions of spectators and actors are the primary co-constituents of all performances, within an ecology that is bounded by specific constraints of space, air and time.
Stanton Garner attends to one aspect of the phenomenological consequence of enaction in his essay, ‘Watching movement: Phenomenology, cognition, performance.’ He investigates what mirror neurons and motor cognition generally can tell us about the cognitive and emotional transactions that couple spectators and actors and the implications that this science has for the experience of spectating. Garner enters the ongoing dialogue between science and phenomenology warily, acknowledging the long history of mutual suspicion that has made this conversation difficult. Part of the problem has to do with the scientific understanding that many cognitive processes are pre- or unconscious, while phenomenology privileges the possibilities of consciousness. Nonetheless, Garner cites several phenomenologists and scientists who have productively borrowed from each other to forge a rapprochement, including Merleau-Ponty, Varela, Sheets-Johnstone and Thompson. Garner ends his essay with a cognitive-phenomenological analysis of the climactic scene between Willy Loman and his son, Biff – emphasising their changing physical and emotional relationships and his responses to them – in the 1999 production of Death of A Salesman with Brian Dennehy and Kevin Anderson in New York.
Given the importance of cognitive attention in watching Salesman, we follow Garner’s essay with a chapter by James Hamilton, ‘Attention to theatrical performances.’ Looking first at the debates about attention in cognitive science and philosophy, Hamilton then comments on the demands that the theatre typically places on spectators for their attention. He recognises that the past theater-going experience of spectators shapes their attention, that regularities in the theatrical environment matter for attentiveness and that directors and performers often create moments of focus to capture spectatorial attention. Hamilton uses the predictive processing ideas of Andy Clark and related theories to understand how spectators seek to minimise prediction errors while watching plays. In accord with enaction theory, he notes that spectator attention is often drawn to performer action as well as their preparation for action.
Amy Cook begins with the example of the New York Public Theatre’s controversial production of Julius Caesar in 2017 to ask what it means to make meaning in the theatre in her ‘Emergence, meaning, and presence: An interdisciplinary approach to a disciplinary problem.’ Meanings emerge in the interactions between performers and spectators within the constraints of theatrical space and time; meanings are never given in the symbols on stage or in the minds of spectators. Turning to the theory of conceptual integration (aka, blending), Cook explains that it challenges conventional semiotic approaches to meaning-making. She also remarks that ‘blending’ has become an unfortunate synonym for conceptual integration because it connotes the operation of a kitchen blender, which merely mixes ingredients together instead of creating new integrations and meanings. Cook adds that she, like many spectators, wants more than spoon-fed meanings when she goes to the theatre; she wants to experience the mystery that derives from ‘presence’ as well.
Part of that presence may derive from what ancient Indian aestheticians called rasa, which Erin Mee explores from the angle of enactivist emotion theory in ‘Relishing performance: Rasa as participatory sense-making.’ Simply put, rasa is what audiences ‘taste’ while experiencing a performance; it occurs in the interactions between performers and spectators, whom Mee terms ‘partakers.’ While rasa as ‘taste’ is a useful metaphor, Mee insists that this experience can be more fully realised if it is understood as the emotional dimension of intersubjectivity joining performers and partakers. She turns to the ideas of Giovanna Colombetti, whose enactivist approach to empathy and the emotions has been widely cited, to better understand the kinds of actor-audience interactions that occur in performances today as well as those that happened in the traditional theatre of India.
In ‘The self, ethics, agency, and tragedy,’ David Palmer begins by asking how Darwin’s materialist understanding of evolution and cognition could possibly have anything to do with our understanding of tragedy, which is necessarily premised on the possibility of agency for its tragic hero. Without some ability to know and choose his fate, the hero’s fall is reduced to melodrama; he becomes the victim of circumstances beyond his control. Palmer gets around this problem by dividing the hero in two, such that he is both a material self and an image of and for himself – a conscious image in a life narrative about himself that secures his self-respect. If the hero violates the ethical expectations of this narrative, he often falls into shame and possible death. When Macbeth violates his better judgement and self-respect by killing Duncan, for example, he suffers from guilt and remorse, which only deepen his tragic entanglements for the rest of the play. Palmer’s essay unites a cognitive understanding of the emotions with a Platonic understanding of tragedy.
John Lutterbie examines the ethical and political possibilities of theatrical ostranenie (Shklovsky’s term for making familiar matters strange) in his ‘Aesthetics and the sensible.’ He borrows ‘the sensible’ from Rancière, who uses it to mean the institutions and beliefs that organise our social world as normative and acceptable; like Shklovsky, Rancière believes that disrupting ‘the sensible’ and rendering it strange through performance can open up possibilities for progressive political action. According to Rancière, two types of images have this power to disrupt normative spectator expectations: the intolerable and the pensive. Lutterbie finds potent examples of both images in The Concept of the Face: Regarding the Son of God, Romeo Castellucci’s three-part production intended to challenge the power of the Catholic Church. A pensive head of Christ devoid of compassion dominated the background of the production as three different dramatisations featuring intolerable images occurred in the foreground. Lutterbie focuses his attention on the first piece, which featured a middle-aged son trying to help his incontinent old father, who fouls his diaper three times. Lutterbie reports that the intolerable images (and smells) of these three defecations forced him to look away, but the impassive image of Christ intentionally offered no consolation.
‘Talk this dance: On the conceptualization of dance as fictive conversation,’ by Ana Margarida Abrantes and Esther Pascual, foregrounds the importance of conversation as a flexible and powerful frame for performative communication. The authors demonstrate their thesis through an exploration of Tchaikovsky’s Left Leg, a dance with dialogue written by Tiago Rodrigues for prima ballerina Barbara Hruskova, who danced and spoke it in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2015. In the performance, Hruskova talked to different parts of her body – her legs, feet, arms and so forth – and then related what her body parts said and did back to her; her feet, for example, tell her they are tired and want to rest and then run off (seemingly by themselves) when she tries to get them to dance again. Staging the conflict between the ageing dancer and her body through a dialogue of fictive conversation and action evoked more empathy for her than would a conventional monologue, the authors assert. Rodrigues’ script also invited Hruskova to mark several of her moves rather than fully dancing them, a strategy Abrantes and Pascual relate to Edwin Hutchins’s understanding of distributed cognition.
Distributing cognition in the environment is the focus of our final essay in this part by Evelyn Tribble and Robin Dixon, ‘Distributed cognition: Studying theatre in the wild.’ Their title echoes Hutchins’s path-breaking 1995 book, Cognition in the Wild, which makes the case that cognition is best studied where it is normally practiced – in work places, everyday life and nature, not in psychology labs. In their chapter, Tribble and Dixon primarily study how various groups of actors offloaded their cognitive challenges to opportunities offered in three different historical theatres and their technologies as a means of stabilising its primary conventions for themselves and communicating them to their spectators. How did Shakespeare’s performers memorise all those lines in such a short time? How did the actors in ancient Rome communicate the fixed locales of Plautus’s comedies to their audience? How did the improvising performers of commedia dell’ arte keep track of where they were in the plots of their fast-moving narratives? These are just some of the cognitive problems that actors at the time had to solve and that historians today must try to understand in order to figure out how such theatre succeeded with their spectators. For their fourth example, the authors look specifically at how the puppeteers behind (and underneath) the Handspring Puppet Company’s production of War Horse endowed their constructions of wood, plaster and cloth with the breath of life.