Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies eds. by Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook (review)

At its heart, Theatre, Performance and Cognition investigates "stories told by bodies onstage" (1). Editors Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook bring together a diverse collection of essays that serve three different audiences: theatre and performance scholars, performance practitioners, and scientists. Each section is made up of an introduction to the cognitive science employed in the section, three essays, and a response by a prominent scientist/philosopher. Blair and Cook's general introduction persuasively points to the future and past success of integrated cognitive science/theatre research. Additionally, the editors defend and differentiate scientific and theatre/performance methodologies, pointing toward best practices for their combination, while outlining some of the most impactful theories of cognition for the field of theatre and performance. Blair and Cook make obvious the symbiotic potential of questions asked in two seemingly divergent fields.

"Part 1: Cognitive Linguistics, Theatre and Performance," focuses on how theatre communicates to an audience through multiple modalities inflected by language. Each chapter explores a different perspective on how language does not simply communicate thinking but shapes how thinking occurs in conjunction with the body and environment. For example, Barbara Dancygier's "Multimodality and Theatre: Material Objects, Bodies and Language" demonstrates how language becomes tied up in other modalities, like the use of props and bodies in space, to express literary meaning. One salient example Dancygier employs is Caesar's mantle, which she convincingly argues operates as a material metonymic device that makes present the murder of Caesar in Shakespeare's play. Vera Tobin's "Performance, Irony and Viewpoint in Language" accomplishes a similar goal by connecting the cognitive understanding of verbal irony's operation to the very operation of theatre qua theatre. Tobin argues that irony is created through viewpoint or perspective, an operation always already instantiated by the theatrical stage, thus making clear through cognitive science the long-standing tradition of understanding theatre and irony as being closely related.

Whereas Part 1 demonstrates the potential of cognitive science to contribute to the work of dramatic theory, history, and criticism, "Part 2: Bodies in Performance" directly addresses performance practice through enactivism and embodied cognition. Enactivism is defined in Edward C. Warburton's "Becoming Elsewhere: ArtsCross and the (Re)location of Performer Cognition" as "the function of the mind … to guide action … in the context of a real-world environment" (94). Blair and Cook summarize the definition of embodied cognition, which: "insists that what we call 'thinking' does not happen in some separate brain but is a function of a living organism in its environment" (76). Warburton argues for a particular dance technique (marking) as a means to reduce cognitive load and increase a dancer's capacity for creativity and expressiveness. Neal Utterback's "The Olympic Actor: Improving Actor Training and Performance Through Sports Psychology" addresses the necessity of working on the "pre-theatrical—pre-technique, pre-rehearsal and pre-performance—individual" (82) through techniques and practices that prepare an actor to experience the stress and anxiety of working on the stage. Specifically, Utterback suggests three practices used readily in sports psychology—power posing, mental imagery, and self-talk—as a basis for his theory of actor training. The final chapter in the section, Christopher J. Jackman's "Training, Insight and Intuition in Creative Flow," provides a theoretically rich exploration of cognitive science's perspective on "flow" as applied to acting, a state often described as being automatic, unselfconscious, transcendent, extremely focused, or present.

The third section of the book, "Part 3: Situated Cognition and Dynamic Systems: Cognitive Ecologies," takes on the impact of environment on cognition, or rather, as the title suggests, cognitive ecologies. The first article, Evelyn B. Tribble's "Distributed Cognition, Mindful Bodies and the Arts of Acting," provides an excellent transition from Jackman's essay in the previous section. Tribble utilizes cognitive science to take on the notion that actors should not think, and suggests a...