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  • Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies ed. by Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook
  • Rick Kemp
Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies. Edited by Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook. Performance and Science Interdisciplinary Dialogues series. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; pp. 256.

There is much in this book to intrigue, inform, and inspire scholars, students, teachers, and practitioners of theatre and performance. Editors Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook provide accessible introductions for those who might be new to the intersection of cognitive science and theatre, while individual chapters advance the knowledge that arises from this confluence by engaging with specific topics in detailed and provocative ways. The chapters are written by authors of diverse provenances, including dance, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and narratology, alongside theatre and performance studies. The book also includes helpful appendices in the form of abstracts of influential references that informed the chapter authors' writing, and fascinating "After Words" in which practitioners talk about how their work responds to concepts from cognitive science.

The book is organized in three sections that align with its subtitle. The first draws on the methodology of cognitive linguistics, which, rather than conceiving of language as a set of abstract representations, locates it within the context of our process of embodied meaning-making in our environment. Cognitive narratologist Barbara Dancygier addresses theatre's "interaction between the material, the embodied and the linguistic" (39) in her essay, a multimodality that she identifies as both the source of its potential for meaning and also of its complexity. One of her illustrative examples draws from Julius Caesar, the focus of Laura Seymour's chapter in which she weaves fascinating connections among the actions of kneeling in the play, early modern hierarchical power relations, our cognitive schema of up/down, and contemporary staging choices. Following this, cognitive scientist Vera Tobin investigates irony in its multiple forms, creating a sophisticated account of its role in acting and theatre. Tobin highlights theatre's culturally situated and embodied nature while reflexively using theatrical examples to explain the complex cognitive perspective-taking involved in irony.

This section of the book concludes (as do the others) with a response from a respected scientist or philosopher, in this case cognitive scientist Mark Turner. In a bracingly honest reflection on the respective limitations of the various methodologies of cognitive science, Turner points out that one can view "anything we do in human life [as] connected to theatrical performance, complexly, and that the gradient distinctions between official theatre and actual life are sometimes vanishingly small" (69). This assessment leads him to acknowledge the value of theatre to a cognitive scientific study of thought and communication.

In the second section, three chapters place the body in performance in the conceptual contexts of embodied cognition and enactivism. These analyses propose, respectively, that thinking is an action of the whole organism in its environment, and that cognition is a relational, active process. Neal Utterback describes actor-training activities that he has created to assist novice actors in developing the psychological and emotional resilience necessary to give their best work when under pressure, drawing from sports psychology and cognitive scientific research. Edward Warburton uses an enactivist analysis of dance practice to propose that context and situation ground meaning and feeling in the activities of memorizing and marking (otherwise considered to be simply technical activities). Christopher Jackman uses psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's now famous concept of flow to reframe an understanding of psychophysical skill in actor training. The response to this section is by cognitive scientist Catherine Stevens, who links concepts from the chapters to her own research and that of other scientists, proposing ways that the insights of these scholars from theatre and performance studies can not only benefit practitioners, but also researchers in other fields.

The final section addresses the phenomenon of ecologies: the idea that cognition is not something that takes place only in the brain, but arises from interactions among elements of distributed systems both within and outside the body. Lynn Tribble playfully begins her exploration of this phenomenon by describing a television cooking show in which the expertise of trainee chefs is, to varying extents, dependent on their physical environments...

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