Performing Psychologies: Imagination, Creativity and Dramas of the Mind ed. by Nicola Shaughnessy and Philip Barnard (review)

Performing Psychologies: Imagination, Creativity and Dramas of the Mind constitutes the latest volume in Methuen Drama's ongoing series Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues, which broadly explores the intersections among various forms of performance and scientific disciplines such as neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology. This volume has uniquely paired its editors from across the disciplines: theatre and performance scholar Nicola Shaughnessy teams with Philip Barnard, a researcher in cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, to curate a collection of essays on the theme of diverse psychologies. With each chapter presenting various case studies in relation to topics such as madness, autism, dementia, trauma, and psychotherapy, this collection excels at presenting a wide range of approaches to reading performance in relation to how the mind makes meaning out of lived experience, focusing on marginalized psychological states in relation to performance, therapy, and applied theatre.

In their jointly written opening chapter, Shaughnessy and Barnard situate their editorial purpose around "understanding the relations between mind, body and environment [which] are endemic to the principles and practices of cognitive and affective approaches to theatre and performance" (3). Rather than relying upon cognitive linguistic theories that have characterized early scholarship within the "cognitive turn," the essays that comprise Performing Psychologies instead engage with the "5 E's" of recent cognitive theory: embodiment, embeddedness, enaction, extension, and ecologies. Readers unfamiliar with these concepts will not find explicit explanation of them in this collection; however, the subsequent chapters implicitly illuminate these concepts by reading specific performances and forms of practice through the lens of cognitive and affective meaning-making. Readers who have found themselves skeptical of the cognitive turn in earlier iterations may find themselves reassured by Shaughnessy and Barnard's approach to bridging the disciplinary gap between the arts and sciences. Eschewing the call to empiricize the arts through scientific frameworks such as falsifiability, the editors argue for the singular potentiality of performance to fill distinct gaps in scientific discourse through its ability to engage first person perspectives, illuminate questions of civil/human rights in scientific practice, and involve neurodiverse communities in research. Defining performance as a "cognitive and affective medium" (12), Shaughnessy and Barnard valorize the unique ability of performance to explore and engage neurodiversity through its holistic and embodied capacities, challenging the hegemony of scientific discourse in hopes of creating a "heterogeneous trans-disciplinary field of collaborative aesthetic and scientific investigations in which new methods are emerging for knowledge creation" (16). In this way, the essays that follow in this volume re-center questions of the intersection of science and the efficacy of performance on the experience of embodied, individual subjects who constitute neurodiverse communities.

While the table of contents structures the volume's essays along four evocative, albeit vague categories ("Contexts," "Interdisciplinary Perspectives," "Practices and Responses," and "Changing Minds"), the chapters that comprise Performing Psychologies struck this reader as arranging themselves along a few key psychological states that are excavated from different perspectives. Chapters 2, 7, and 10 each address the concept of madness, speaking to recent discourses in "mad lit"; Shaughnessy's comparative analysis of different productions of Hamlet troubles the traditional gendering of Ophelia's madness and evokes theories of cognitive ecologies by rereading her suicidal descent as the product of her maddening environment. Chris Dingwall-Jones's essay similarly interrogates the gendered construction of madness, but does so by examining the mid-1990s plays of Sarah Kane and Sarah Daniels, deftly arguing for their respective destabilization of the sanity/insanity binary through the use of space. Chapters 4 and 10 both tackle the subject of autism, albeit through very different approaches. Speaking across the disciplines, psychologist Ilona Roth presents a nuanced performance analysis of experiments designed to assess qualities of "atypical imagination" in autistic children. She aptly models how psychological methodology can be problematized through performance critique and ultimately points to better forms of practice, demonstrating how science itself can...