Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, and: Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (review)

Can cognitive studies “save” the humanities? This question has been asked in academic forums and has even been debated in more mainstream publications such as the New York Times (2010). Both Performance and Cognition and Engaging Audiences, two of the first books to link recent developments in cognitive science with performance, demonstrate that cognitive science, while it may or may not be able to save the humanities, can help us rethink many of our assumptions about performance. Both these books apply recent discoveries about conceptual blending, empathy, emotional contagion, and action observation to performance, offering us new conceptual frameworks with which to analyze performance.

Performance and Cognition is a collection of articles divided into four sections: “Performance Theory and Cognition,” which focuses on the theories underlying a cognitive approach to performance; “Drama and Cognition,” which demonstrates several ways cognitive models can be used to interpret dramatic texts; “Acting and Cognition,” which offers us new ways of thinking about the actor’s process that have the potential to revolutionize actor training; and “The Spectator and Cognition,” which helps us rethink spectatorship in productive ways. As a whole, these articles dismantle many of the binaries that have hampered our thinking about performance: real/not-real, passive/active, actor/character, intellect/emotion, self/other, and mind/body. The stated goal of the book is “to invite theatre and performance scholars to incorporate many of the insights of cognitive science into their work and to begin considering all of their research from the perspective of cognitive studies” (ix), which will then allow us to rethink “our assumptions about perception, creativity, imagination, identity, [and] representation” (xi). In this regard it is entirely successful.

In the first section, the most generative ideas come from the notion of an embodied mind, from the fact that scientists now acknowledge “the mind-brain’s dependence on the body’s concrete situatedness within the physical and social worlds that encompass it” (32). This allows us to break down the Cartesian mind/body duality, which has been so harmful to the humanities in general and to performance studies in particular, and to focus on the “experience of the body in the world” (2). F. Elizabeth Hart uses this to reconcile “things and language” since “language and discourse are themselves embodied” (31) and to analyze performance not as a sign, but as a thing in and of itself.

McConachie’s article in this section argues that cognitive science provides a useful tool for understanding what is “universal” and what is “culturally specific” about spectators’ approaches to, and understanding of, a theatrical event — a discussion that he carries further in Engaging Audiences, and one that is extremely useful in analyzing intercultural performance and spectatorship. He writes about the ways in which human beings “utilize their capacity for empathy to understand, explain, and predict the practices, emotions, and beliefs of others” (54), which is to say that intellectual understanding has an emotional component, and that empathy is a precursor to understanding. Because the brain is plastic, learning is not additive; rather, by forging new neural pathways, learning literally changes the brain. This, then, not only situates performance as an important agent of social change, but explains how that change occurs from a cognitive perspective.

In the section “Drama and Cognition,” the most generative ideas come from Naomi Rokotnitz’s analysis of The Winter’s Tale. Spectator engagement in performance is usually theorized in terms of semiotic decoding or psychological identification. However, as McConachie and Hart point out in the introduction, “cognitive science suggests that empathy and emotional response are more crucial to a spectator’s experience than the kind of decoding that most semioticians imagine” (5). Recent scientific experiments in emotional...