Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being ed. by Nicola Shaughnessy (review)

A recent surge of interest in cognitive sciences has led to a variety of interdisciplinary forays that attempt to bring the emerging science of those fields into productive conversation with performance studies. To use Nicola Shaughnessy’s recurrent dance metaphor, the disciplines (multifaceted in their own rights) are already dancing together, and much as two dancers can, these interactions have the potential to skillfully create something more complex and rich in their reciprocal exchange than they might normally do independently. Of course, this is not to suggest an easy union of disciplines. Although a wealth of potential may flow from the blended space among disciplines, attention must be paid to how these interactions unfold. Indeed, Shaughnessy points out in her introduction to this edited collection that beginning on even ground, the dynamic can easily arrange itself hierarchically or that the engagement with another field can be all too shallow with, for example, a theatre scholar extrapolating wildly from a provisional scientific finding without a complete sense of how that same finding is situated within its own field. Knowing this, the editor arranges a measured though nonetheless enthusiastic collection of essays that both provide incisive examples of this kind of cross-disciplinary work and lay out the “choreography” for others to follow.

Shaughnessy divides the collection into four sections, each thematically grouped and given an introductory framework, helping to present both unique work and show the steps that can enable future engagements between cognitive studies and performance studies. The first section, “Dances with Sciences,” acts as a demonstration of scholarship developed in the middle space among disciplines, encouragingly asserting that the benefits of more integrated engagement flow in both directions. Anna Furse’s essay “Retracing Our Steps,” for example, offers insight into an unfolding process that brought together dancers, visual artists, a cognitive neuro-scientist, and a psychotherapist in the pursuit of a better understanding of embodied memory. Furse invites contributions from the disciplines within the cognitive sciences without attempting to entirely adopt the structure of scientific research; instead, she invites a dialogue to form around her project, informed by voices coming to the same process from very different angles.

Increasingly, cognitive sciences view the mind and body as an integrated unity, the two overlapping considerably and having, at most, fuzzy borders. This presents a conception of the mind/body as, rather than split, integrated into an “embodied consciousness.” Amy Cook introduces the next section, “Touching Texts and Embodied Performance,” by articulating a need for a similarly blended way of approaching other seemingly discrete concepts. Naomi Rokotnitz’s essay “Between Faulty Intellects and Failing Bodies” proposes such a blend when she considers how theatre and science might benefit each other. She writes that “I maintain, by investigating actors and spectators, we may both generate and gather affective-evidence that cannot be tested in a laboratory” (118), conceiving of a very specific kind of theatre lab. Here, Shaughnessy’s collection shows that the increasing contact between performance studies and the cognitive sciences reveals the permeability of the conceptual borders separating these disciplines.

The implications of an embodied consciousness and our evolving sense of how it operates in the world has profound implications for how we conceive of processes like emotion, imagination, memory, and perception. As Rhonda Blair notes throughout her introduction to the third section of this collection, “The Multimodal Actor,” cognitive sciences present a paradigm shift in what it means to be in the world (135). The essays in this section respond to this shift by considering pragmatic concerns for actor training while trying to grapple with a conception of the performing self that is inflected by emerging science. Neal Utterback, for example, relays his extended experiment with actors in which they explored the linkages between memory and physical embodiment. His findings suggest the deep connections among the body, mind, and the external world are of such strength that this interplay should be the...