Recent years have seen instances of trans-disciplinary activity combining concepts and techniques from theatre and performance with scientific methodologies to advance knowledge and understanding in a variety of arenas. Our intent in this part is to provide detailed examples of the development of ‘two-way traffic’ between the cognitive sciences and theatre and performance studies. The part’s title deliberately echoes the field of Translational medicine, which is a rapidly developing inter-discipline in biomedical research that involves collaboration between multiple scientific disciplines. The aim of the field is to facilitate the discovery of new diagnostic tools and treatments by using what is known as a ‘bench-to-bedside’ approach. The bench in this description is a laboratory bench; our goal here is to demonstrate that theatre and performance can be thought of as laboratories for life – places where humans can safely experiment with provisional versions of social interaction. In contrast to the mediated reality of screen drama, rehearsal studios and performance venues create sets of conditions in which planned or improvised behaviour create embodied meaning. As I’ve described elsewhere, performers employ most of, if not all, the cognitive activities that are involved in daily life. Theatre and performance-training methods have developed techniques that enable performers to consciously generate behaviour that is normally involuntary in daily life. They do so within multiple intersecting constraints, such as the narrative of a written play, the personality of a fictional character, the theme of a devised or dance piece or a particular style of performance. These constraints enable audience members to focus their attention on ‘what if’ scenarios of life, perceiving real bodies in ways that stimulate their cognition in ways very similar to social encounters in daily life. One of the barriers to the empirical examination of the living skills embodied in theatre and performance has been the difficulty of communicating exactly what those skills are to investigators in other fields. Both terminology and concepts in training and analysis are highly specialised and vary between different methods and schools of thought. Consequently, they obscure fundamental principles of the human behaviour that is the subject of theatre and performance. The rapidly growing research field that this book represents has begun to address this issue through applying cognitive science to theatre and performance. In this part, we hope to demonstrate how the knowledge gained from doing so can be transposed to other fields.
Our first chapter in this part provides a model of how a cognitive understanding of theatrical expertise can support valuable interventions in social welfare. Cognitive psychologist Helga Noice and actor Tony Noice report on a theatrical intervention that offers professional acting instruction to ageing populations. They describe a series of related studies that they have conducted in Switzerland and the USA to discover whether acting techniques can assist in maintaining cognitive functioning in older people. The Noices focused on an acting process known as ‘living truthfully under imaginary circumstances’ that is at the core of the style of psychological realism. This process has been taught to residents in multiple retirement homes and community senior centres in the USA and its effects measured by reliable scientific assessment instruments. For over 20 years, this project has generated evidence that participants have experienced significant cognitive benefits, including increases in episodic memory, list recall, creativity and problem-solving ability. The practice thus lowers risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia in mentally healthy older adults.
In contrast to the project described by the Noices, the work that my colleague, Rachel DeSoto-Jackson, and I describe is still in its early stages. We both teach performance in the Department of Theater and Dance at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and have been developing training in empathetic communication. Multiple behavioural studies over the last 30 years have indicated that empathy is desirable in the interactions between patients and healthcare professionals. However, there has been little agreement over how empathy training should be designed. Several years ago, our department initiated a collaboration with the nursing training programme at our university to offer a course that would assist trainee nurses in successful interpersonal communication with their patients. DeSoto-Jackson has been teaching this course for the last two years and has introduced techniques from Augusto Boal’s Forum Theatre and Image Theatre into the content as well as using her own model for structuring communication between patient and caregiver. Self-reporting from students in the course has shown that these techniques have proved successful in developing what the students themselves describe as empathy. In our chapter, we contextualise a case study of this course with information about empathy derived from the cognitive sciences, which suggest potential explanations for the self-reported benefits of the training by its participants.
Experience Bryon also teaches performance practice, and in her chapter applies her framework of Integrative Performance Practice (IPP) to a field known as Situated Awareness (SA), also known as Situational Awareness. This field seeks to systematise the cognitive activities which one uses to evaluate and predict the actions of multiple elements in one’s environment through processes such as pattern recognition, interpretation and evaluation. SA is used in a variety of contexts by professionals like police officers, fire fighters, air traffic controllers, nurses and military commanders. Currently, many approaches to SA depend on a dualistic framing, defining features of SA as either a product or a process. Some theorists propose that situational awareness is a product in the mind of the human operator, while others consider it to be the process of acquiring awareness. Those familiar with concepts of enactivism and situated cognition will rapidly recognize that these concepts can fruitfully be applied to SA to elide the dualistic separation of an ‘agent’ from his or her environmental perception. Bryon proposes that her performance practice of ‘middle field’ awareness can assist theorists and practitioners of SA to improve both its theorisation and its practice.
Our next chapter describes a valuable intervention in a vulnerable population. This is the ‘Imagining Autism’ project developed by Nicola Shaughnessy and Melissa Trimingham at the University of Kent. Their chapter focuses on an interdisciplinary collaboration between the fields of theatre and psychology to benefit children on the autism spectrum. This project originated in the field of applied and socially engaged theatre, terms that refer to theatre practices that are applied in social, educational and community contexts with a therapeutic or educational purpose. The original aim of the project was to involve autistic children in activities that engaged them socially, physically and creatively. Theatre practitioners designed and delivered theatrical exercises, with psychologists evaluating the effect of the exercises on the children. As the project progressed, however, the success of the exercises in raising assessment scores in the autistic participants prompted adaptations of the research design, creating a ‘transdisciplinary’ approach. The success of this project has rippled out beyond the immediate participants and has prompted learning in all those involved, children, parents and researchers alike. It is an inspiring example of the transformative power of theatre.
The final chapter in this part describes the concept of ‘consilience’ – the ‘jumping together’ of phenomena. The author of this chapter, my co-editor Bruce McConachie, is well known in the field of theatre and performance studies for pioneering the application of cognitive neuroscience to the understanding of theatre and performance, and has written extensively on topics ranging from audience reception to the evolution of performance in play and ritual. Here, he participates in taking up the challenge posed by biologist E.O. Wilson to researchers in the sciences and humanities to create a common groundwork of empirically based knowledge that can link C.P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ of the sciences and the humanities. McConachie takes on the topic of climate change by investigating how potential areas of consilience between history and evolution can inform our understanding of how humans perform politics. He identifies the cognitive phenomena that underlie performance in political contexts that directly embody and practice versions of authority and solidarity, and also in stage performances that comment on the exercise of governmental power. McConachie’s ultimate goal in doing this is to contribute to an improvement of democratic citizenship and governance in response to the challenges of global climate change and resource depletion.