Toward a General Theory of Acting: Cognitive Science and Performance by John Lutterbie (review)

Three publishing events signaled the increasing importance of perspectives from cognitive science to theatre and performance studies: the publication of Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart’s edited collection of essays, Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn in 2006; a December 2007 special issue of Theatre Journal with five diverse essays reflecting in a variety of ways on the relationship between performance and cognition; and Palgrave MacMillan’s 2008 launch of a new book series, “Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance” (edited by Bruce McConachie and Blakey Vermeule) which now includes 10 titles published between 2008 and the present.

John Lutterbie’s Toward a General Theory of Acting: Cognitive Science and Performance is one of the most recent additions to the Palgrave MacMillan series, and a most welcome one. Since I was first introduced to contemporary cognitive science in the 1990s through seminal publications such as The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience by Francisco J. Varela, Evan T. Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch (1991), I have been waiting for someone to author a book like Lutterbie’s, which would provide both a comprehensive as well as accessible account of how insights and perspectives from cognitive science might help contemporary actors to better understand, reframe, and reflect upon their work.

Lutterbie’s book is comprehensive on two levels. First, when compared to the earlier accounts by Rhonda Blair (2008) and Donna Soto-Morettini (2010) that focus primarily on Stanislavskian-based character acting, Lutterbie’s book is comprehensive with regard to both acting processes (training, rehearsal, improvisation, devising, as well as performance), and the range of (Western) approaches to acting discussed: his book addresses realist character acting, nonrealist acting, as well as devised/postdramatic performance. In chapter one Lutterbie’s key argument is that “when speaking of cognitive processes involved in acting, the type of theatre does not matter. To talk about acting […] is to talk across all three categories of theatre” (27). It also means to speak across all the specific “dominant approaches to the training of acting” (13) he briefly surveys in this chapter — Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Brecht, Artaud, Grotowski, Chekhov, LeCoq, and some of the major American Stanislavskian-derived approaches. What is most important is not Lutterbie’s brief recapitulation of the work of each practitioner/theorist, but the concluding few pages on “common ground” among them where he articulates some of the shared concepts, terms, and metaphors used by these practitioners to mark the actor’s work (71–73). Lutterbie’s purpose is not to choose or reify any single approach or “theory” of acting, but rather to interrogate, clarify, and “tease out the significance” of these common concepts and terms “by using cognitive sciences, not in order to ground them in empirical studies but in order to provide definitions that are useful to the actor and the teacher of acting” (73).

The second way in which Lutterbie’s book is comprehensive is in its attempt to construct a “global theory of acting” in which he examines the processes, structures, and phenomena that constitute the actor’s embodied/experiential work as actor and as human being in a “global” manner. He provides a general/global theory of acting that cannot be reduced to any specific approach to acting or specific acting theory discussed in chapter one.

The basis for Lutterbie’s “global theory” is the third of three approaches to the study of the mind from cognitive science as defined by Evan Thompson: (1) cognitivism, where the mind is metaphorically conceived “as digital computer”; (2) connectionism, where the mind is thought of as “a neural network”; and (3) embodied dynamicism, where the mind is “an embodied dynamic system” (2007:4–13). Given the processual, experiential nature of acting when considered as a human phenomenon, Lutterbie chooses to elaborate his “general theory of acting” from embodied dynamicism or Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) because it offers “an explanatory power commensurate...