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This essay argues that theatre and performance scholars should use theories that can be scientifically validated whenever possible. Scientists cannot arrive at objective knowledge, but through the process of falsification they can narrow their range of possible interpretations to provide explanations that best suit the evidence and counter the arguments of others. The cognitive sciences are now providing falsifiable explanations for many theatre and performance phenomena, such as attention, empathy, and conceptualization. In contrast, many of the theories current in our discipline, including those reliant on psychoanalysis and poststructuralism, are not open to the protocols of good science. On the basis of falsifiablity, the essay demonstrates the superiority of two theories from cognitive science over approaches current in our discipline with regard to the problem of how spectators understand theatrical doubleness and action on the stage. It also suggests that a-scientific theories can be useful for scholarship when they are in accord with good science and allow us to extend the range of our discussions and conclusions.
This essay argues that cognitive linguistics—conceptual blending theory (CBT) in particular—links language, cognition, and the body in ways that impact practical and theoretical issues in performance. An unpacking of the first sentence of Richard III demonstrates the use of CBT as a tool in dramaturgical or textual analysis. Through an analysis of a casting choice in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, the essay argues that CBT provides a way to understand what is meant when theatre scholars or practitioners say that one thing “works” and another does not. The embodied interplay between actor/character and spectator is illuminated by research on mirror neurons. The author argues that mimesis is better understood as occurring between actor and spectator, rather than actor and character. Finally, the essay re-imagines what constitutes character—and its relationship to actor—in light of research on phantom limbs.
The academic disciplines of theatre history and performance studies have yet to confront or make use of the growing trend toward Darwinian thinking in the social sciences, particularly psychology and anthropology. This essay focuses on exploring the application of memetics—a branch of cultural evolution theory—to theatre and performance history by using the phenomenon of wild animal shows, specifically big cat exhibitions, as a case study. A meme is the cultural equivalent of the "selfish" gene: a unit of imitation, representation, or information that forms the basis of a cultural inheritance system. A Darwinian historiography reframes causal factors as "selection pressures" and the culture of any particular time and place as a changing physical and social environment to which spectatorship, performance practices, and representational contents adapt over time. Memetics takes seriously the possibility that cultural traits such as performance traditions and genres evolve according to criteria that only make sense when viewed as if the adaptations benefited the memes' own replication, frequency, and survival over time. Where evolutionary psychology and other cognitive approaches emphasize the innate cognitive biases of our social minds, memetics would trace the inherited cultural lineage of specific attitudes, beliefs, and practices, all of which are realized in the social sphere as information that has been replicated and transmitted.
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s 1804 engraving of a human eye that encompasses a theatre auditorium points to a neglected aspect of the history of Western theatre architecture: eighteenth-century architects in France drew spatial concepts and geometric forms from optics and applied them to reformist theatre designs. This borrowing from optics shows that the stage incorporated the representation of space that dominated Enlightenment natural philosophy, and it implies that theatre spectatorship sustained a mutually formative relationship with materialist theories of consciousness. This relationship, moreover, was not confined to Enlightenment France. An analysis of Edmund Husserl’s twentieth-century phenomenological writings reveals that a set of architectural traits—an architectonics—permeates his model of the conscious mind. The spectatorial orientation of the subject that organizes Husserl’s work suggests that phenomenology aligns the theatrical frame with the conditions of knowledge in general.
Drawing on recent developments in phenomenology, cognitive science, and anthropological ecology, this essay explores an enactive approach to a meta-theoretical understanding of acting as a phenomenon. In contrast to representational and/or mimetic meta-theories of acting, which construct their views of action from a position as an outside observer to the process/phenomenon of acting, an enactive view provides an account of acting from “inside” the process itself—that is, from the perspective of the actor as enactor/doer. Acting is not to be viewed as embodying a representation of a role or a character, but rather should be understood as a dynamic, lived experience in which the actor is responsive to the demands of the particular moment within a specific (theatrical) environment.
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