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Imaginative play for a predictive spectator: theatre, affordance spaces, and predictive engagement

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Abstract

This article proposes how theatre, as a site of expert adult imaginative play, provides a unique window into how E-cognition can advance our understanding of imagination as a lifelong practice. I characterize theatrical activity as highly developed actions and strategies for wielding bodies, objects, and environments as imaginative practice. Through an enactively based case study of the play Provenance by Autopoetics (2018), I reveal how creation and performance processes literally and epistemically engineer novel niches for the spectator. This case study investigates how Provenance’s recurring theatrical device of newspaper manipulation constitutes a cognitive device for an affordance-oriented and predictive spectator. As I track the priorities and processes of these longstanding play development and performance techniques informed by the theatrical tradition of Jacques Lecoq (1921–1999), I suggest how concepts such as affordances, affordance spaces, predictive engagement, and the free energy principle are apt conceptual tools for understanding how these practices engender imaginative encounters. I follow this analysis by suggesting, via the free energy principle’s conception of “models,” that there may be cognitive consequences to the possible changes experienced by the spectator that exceed theatrical experience. I conclude this discussion by pointing toward how my 4-E inflected insights on the imaginative practices of Provenance may be applicable to imagination and pretense in other arenas not just behind but also beyond the footlights.

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Notes

  1. These voices join a growing list of theatre and performance scholars who have explicitly made use of Gibson’s concept of affordances in analyses of performances as ecologies. Examples include Evelyn B. Tribble’s look at the affordances in Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (2011), Teemu Paavoloainen’s reframing of performer-object interaction in key Western twentieth-century performance traditions (2010, 2012), Arseli Dokumaci’s retheorization of disability and theatre (2017), Xristina (Christina) Penna’s elaboration of affordances in her scenographic practice (2017), and Frank Camilleri’s revisioning of actor training and performance (2019 and 2020).

  2. All translations from the French original text are the author’s.

  3. This particular conceptualization of it comes from a conversation with expert teacher of the Lecoq pedagogy, Thomas Prattki.

  4. This points to the strength of Chemero’s concept of “affordances 2.0.” Even when the literal identity of the animal does not change within Lecoq’s identification process, the functional identity of the animal changes from human (step 1) to sensorimotor conduit (step 2) to theatre creator (step 3). As the functional identity of the animal changes, the affordances change.

  5. While there is a certain resonance here between “solicitations” and theatre scholar Gareth White’s notion of “invitations,” they are not quite the same. White applies “invitation” to moments in theatre where the spectator is called to literally participate in the action of the play, marking a distinction between “immersive theatre” and the traditional sit-and-watch spectatorship that Provenance embraces (2013, 4). For this case study, I am seeing solicitations as primarily cognitive solicitations.

  6. My theorization of this case study as a “niche” is indebted to Penna’s theorization of her “contraptions” as affordance-based “niches” (2017).

  7. Scholars in the cognitive humanities have incorporated this concept into cognitive accounts of the reader (Kukkonen, 2020, 140–141) and spectator (McConachie 2008, 173; Lutterbie 2020, 166–169).

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Acknowledgements

This article has benefitted from presentations and feedback at the 2019 Cognitive Futures in Arts and Humanities Conference (Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, Mainz, Germany) and the 2019 Bodies of Knowledge: Cognition and the Arts II Conference (Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia). Attending these conferences was made possible through funding from the National University of Singapore. The production that served as the main case study was supported by the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts’s Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Fellowship awarded to Laura Hayes. The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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    Maiya Murphy

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Murphy, M. Imaginative play for a predictive spectator: theatre, affordance spaces, and predictive engagement. Phenom Cogn Sci 21, 1069–1088 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09783-6

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