Theatre and Embodiment

The call for papers for this symposium stated, "At the heart of the theatrical act is the simultaneous live presence of the actor and the audience. Given the primacy of the theatrical act, how do we understand those bodies as communicating meaning?" For the past two decades, research in cognitive science and neurosciences has been my way into this topic. This essay gives an overview of some aspects of the science and describes how they can help us understand the operations of bodies in theatre and performance, and also make us more articulate and effective artists and scholars.

The science isn't fixed and stable; new findings build on preceding theories and discoveries. There isn't a single methodology—though there is general agreement that Descartes's mind-body split was wrong, and that emotions and the body are essential to, not distractions from, cognition. There is a broad array of applications; while some theatre people do scientifically structured research, most of us use the science to illuminate the particular performance problem or theory we're working on. Further, it is useful when various fields in science, arts, and humanities engage with each other, particularly when they're exploring the same questions (for instance, psychologists, cognitive scientists, cognitive linguists, literary scholars, and theatre artists are all interested in how language works). Using the science isn't necessarily essentializing; rather, the study of how bodies, brains, and cognition work in humans as a species provides a common ground, based on material evidence, for moving on to examine how these manifest in different historical and cultural contexts. In fact, if cognition is embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted—as 4E (see the "4E" Cognition section later in this chapter) and situated approaches to cognition assert—cognitive systems are in fact inseparable from cultural systems.

Some Recent Cognitive Science(s)

Particularly pertinent is neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's assertion that reason in the fullest sense grows out of and is permeated by emotion, that emotion is consistently affected by reason and conscious cognition, and that it all is a manifestation of the body (of which the brain is an organ). The brain is a definable organ, but mind is "a process, not a thing."¹ Further, mind is not the same thing as consciousness, since most of the crucial functions of mind (such as homeostatic regulation, proprioception, and kinesthetic response) occur un- and subconsciously. That is, unconscious mind is much more than what is defined in the Freudian or psychoanalytic sense, since as much as 98 percent of the brain's functioning is "outside of conscious awareness."² The "self," insofar as it is something we experience, is dynamic and fluid, a neurophysiological process that rises to awareness only as a small part of a large organic event; as neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux says, the self is "not real, though it does exist."³ From this perspective, our sense of self is a process that arises from the workings of our synapses, the gaps between neurons bridged by chemicals or an electrical impulse; thus, nature (genetic makeup) and nurture (experiences) are different ways of doing the same thing—wiring synapses in the brain that ultimately manifest as "who we are." Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis describes how body-states become linked with conscious responses to or interpretations of them⁴ (i.e., body, feeling, and intellect are aspects of a single, complex organic process). Crucially, Damasio asserts that reason in the fullest sense grows out of and is permeated by emotion (for neuroscientists, a preconscious neurophysiological body-state), and that these body-states are conditioned by reason and conscious cognition.

The level of the explicit or autobiographical self is the one at which we basically tell ourselves stories about who we are; it is how we imagine our experience in order to ascribe meanings to it. Thus, while we cannot directly control how our brains get "wired," we can examine how interpretations of experience—basically, how we imagine our experience—affect these constructed senses of self and our situations. Our conscious sense of self is necessarily fictional to some, even to a large degree, for it...