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  • The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre
  • Christine Simonian Bean
The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre. By Stephen Di Benedetto. New York: Routledge, 2010; pp. 238.

Stephen Di Benedetto's The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre looks to cognitive science and phenomenology to examine the ways artists use the five senses in performance, asking "to what effect?" Appealing to performance practitioners and scholars alike, Di Benedetto makes a convincing case for artists to play consciously to their audience's senses. While a fair amount of the text describes what occurs in the human body while watching performance, the book's primary thrust is to argue that, by understanding what occurs physiologically in the body as it experiences sensations, one can become a better sender and receiver of various stimuli, enriching spectator perception and reception of an event. Practitioners can use knowledge of the senses both to produce conscious comprehension in their audience members (referred to by the author as "attendants" throughout) and to affect them viscerally, potentially changing their experience of the world.

Di Benedetto divides his book into six chapters. The center four concentrate on the individual senses (sight, touch, smell and taste, and hearing), while the first functions as an overview and the last as a conclusion. The author begins each internal sense [End Page 483] chapter by describing the science behind contemporary understandings of a particular sense. He then provides the reader with rich examples of sense-stimulating performance (ranging from the violent shock effects of Survival Research Laboratories to the dream-like compositions of Robert Wilson) to demonstrate how that sense is expressed—and sometimes exploited—to different ends. Di Benedetto employs the word "we" throughout his descriptions of sensory functions, inviting the reader into a shared experience of the body's communication systems and drawing attention to the universality of his model.

Chapter 1 explores how the human body receives stimuli from the outside, neurologically and physiologically. Because the brain responds to perceived stimuli as if they were occurring in the moment and does not distinguish between reality and mimesis at a neural level, Di Benedetto concludes that the "lived quality" of theatrical entertainment can shift audience perception of the world, because each new experience "creates neuronal pathways that forever change the brain" (xii). Although he describes theatrical sensory effects in order to encourage practitioners to make use of this sensorial understanding in their work, he cautions that manipulation of the senses can be powerful and dangerous, both emotionally and physically. Di Benedetto's point, however, is simply to acknowledge that manipulation can occur within a performance setting, not to perform a critique.

Chapter 2 looks at the role of light and movement in physiological perception, suggesting ways that practitioners can keep the audience stimulated and interested in what occurs onstage. Using Wilson's work as a main case study, Di Benedetto looks at various visual stimuli, such as movement, spatial organization, and shadow, to show how crafted images can go beyond representation to affect emotional and cognitive responses. His most surprising insight here is the idea that theatre can fill a need by exercising bodily responses, keeping the audience stimulated in a society that no longer has the fight-or-flight experiences of its biological past. This suggests that theatre has the potential to broaden both biological and social perception.

Chapter 3 explores the sense of touch. Di Benedetto looks at a multiplicity of touch effects, from mirror neurons (part of the body's electrical system that responds to what a person has seen though not directly experienced), which are activated by watching performers touch, to actual physical interactions between attendants and performers. Di Benedetto suggests that touch experiences, because they are imbued with cultural values, can provoke both intellectual and proprietary questions. He cites as an example performance artist Karen Finley, who auctioned off a chance for an audience member to lick chocolate off her body.

Chapter 4 looks at the chemical senses of smell and taste and how they communicate with each other and the body. Because these senses are especially evocative of memory, Di Benedetto explores their use in linking an attendant's past...

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