Abstract
The introduction discusses the importance of movement and movement perception to theatrical spectatorship. The idea that humans vicariously enact the intentional movements of others has been developed in dance studies under the rubric “kinesthetic empathy” and by neuroscientists who have studied mirror neurons in monkeys and humans. Integrating phenomenology and the sciences of mind, this book looks at the theatre spectator’s kinesthetic engagement with actors in dramatic and non-dramatic performance. As a way of incorporating sensorimotor difference into its account of kinesthetic spectatorship, the book addresses issues of disability and able-bodiedness as these pertain to movement and movement perception. Finally, the introduction advocates the productive collaboration of phenomenology and cognitive science, including recent theories of enaction and embodied cognition.
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- 1.
William James, Principles of Psychology, 2: 1134 (emphasis in original).
- 2.
Tiffany Watt Smith surveys nineteenth-century research on involuntary mimicry in “Theatre and the Sciences of Mind.”
- 3.
Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason, Introduction to Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, 17–18.
- 4.
Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain—How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, ix.
- 5.
For an overview of some of the major scholarship in this area, see Karen Barbour, “Beyond Somatophobia: Phenomenology and Movement Research in Dance.”
- 6.
Ann Cooper Albright, “Situated Dancing: Notes from Three Decades in Contact with Phenomenology,” 8.
- 7.
Mark Franko, “Editor’s Note,” 3.
- 8.
Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre, 69.
- 9.
Oxford English Dictionary.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Philosopher and cognitive scientist David J. Chalmers writes: “It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does” (“Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” 201).
- 12.
Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 11.
- 13.
Ibid., 12.
- 14.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 141.
- 15.
Lennard Davis, Bending over Backward: Disability, Dismodermism, and Other Difficult Positions, 31.
- 16.
Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, 2.
- 17.
Robert F. Murphy, The Body Silent, 90.
- 18.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 139.
- 19.
Carrie Sandahl, “Considering Disability: Disability Phenomenology’s Role in Revolutionizing Theatrical Space,” 19.
- 20.
In his 2012 overview of phenomenological work in theatre and performance studies, Stuart Grant calls this recent interest a “renaissance” (“Genealogies and Methodologies of Phenomenology in Theatre and Performance Studies,” 11).
- 21.
For an overview of twentieth-century theatre phenomenology, see Stanton B. Garner Jr., “Theatre and Phenomenology.”
- 22.
I address this dialogue more fully in Stanton B. Garner Jr., “Watching Movement: Phenomenology, Cognition, Performance.”
- 23.
For a discussion of this, see Dermot Moran, “Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy and the Critique of Naturalism.” Husserl, it is important to note, did not reject the natural attitude; rather, he proposed grounding this attitude in a phenomenological account of consciousness and world.
- 24.
Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind, 4–6.
- 25.
Shaun Gallagher and Francisco J. Varela point out: “It is nothing short of ironic that just when many phenomenologists were trading in their volumes of Husserl and Sartre for the texts of poststructural analysis, and thus abandoning the very notion of consciousness, philosophers of mind, who had started their work on ground circumscribed by Ryle’s behavouristic denial of consciousness, were beginning to explore the territory left behind by the phenomenologists” (“Redrawing the Map and Resetting the Time: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,” 95).
- 26.
Alva Noë, “Critique of Pure Phenomenology,” 231.
- 27.
See Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 66–98; Francisco J. Varela, “Neurophenomenology”; and Jean Petitot et al., Naturalizing Phenomenology: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Neurophenomenology, which was introduced by Varela in the mid-1990s, integrates phenomenological descriptions of experience, dynamic systems theory, and experimental brain science. Subjects in neurophenomenological studies are trained to provide reliable and consistent descriptions of their experience, and these descriptions are used to identify phenomena for further experimentation and to facilitate the interpretation of neurobiological data. In its collaborative use of first- and third-person perspectives, neurophenomenology represents a more genuine rapprochement between science and phenomenology than Dennett’s heterophenomenology, which insists on the priority of neutral, third-person analysis. For a critique of Dennett’s project see Gallagher and Zahavi, Phenomenological Mind, 19–21.
- 28.
See, for example, the essays in Shaun Gallagher and Daniel Schmicking, eds. Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. The journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, which fosters dialogue between phenomenology, empirical science, and analytic philosophy of mind, was established in 2002.
- 29.
Merleau-Ponty , Phenomenology of Perception, 105–40, 157–60; Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others, 16–17.
- 30.
Francisco J. Varela et al., The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Sciences and Human Experience, 172–73.
- 31.
See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; Johnson, The Body in the Mind; and Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh.
- 32.
For a discussion of the enactive approach, see Francisco J. Varela et al., Embodied Mind: Cognitive Sciencers and Human Experience, esp. 147–84; Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 13–15, 204; and John Stewart et al., eds., Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science.
- 33.
Alva Noë, Action in Perception, 73.
- 34.
Thompson, Mind in Life, 14.
- 35.
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 129–30.
- 36.
Christian Jarrett, “Mirror Neurons: The Most Hyped Concept in Neuroscience?”
- 37.
Alain Berthoz, The Brain’s Sense of Movement, 7.
- 38.
Daniel M. Wolpert et al., “Perspectives and Problems in Motor Learning,” 487.
- 39.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement, xix.
- 40.
Noë, Action in Perception, 1.
- 41.
Hart addresses the compatibility between phenomenology and cognitive sciences in “Performance, Phenomenology, and the Cognitive Turn.” Lutterbie, who has a background in phenomenology, alludes to this approach in Toward a General Theory of Acting, which proposes a theory of acting based on dynamic-systems theory. Zarrilli has incorporated enactive theory with a long-standing interest in phenomenology. See, for example, Psychophysical Acting: An Intercultural Approach after Stanislavski, “An Enactive Approach to Understanding Acting,” and “The Actor’s Work on Attention, Awareness, and Active Imagination.”
- 42.
In an important article entitled “Phenomenology as a Form of Empathy” Matthew Ratcliffe argues that the phenomenological stance enables a distinctive form of empathic engagement with experiences such of those of psychiatric illness. By suspending, or calling into question, the shared world that we habitually accept as a basis for understanding another’s experience, the phenomenological attitude “allows us to contemplate the possibility of structurally different ways of ‘finding oneself in the world’” such as psychiatric illness (473). Ratcliffe refers to this apprehension as “radical empathy.”
- 43.
On the notion of theatrical presencing, see Garner, Bodies Spaces 43, 230. Cormac Power develops this idea in Presence in Play: A Critique of Theories of Presence in the Theatre, 176–91.
- 44.
Jean-Louis Barrault, Reflections on the Theatre, 61.
- 45.
Richard Schechner, “Anna Deveare Smith, Acting as Incorporation,” 63.
- 46.
When the performance segments I discuss are available digitally, I provide information so that those reading this book can access them.
- 47.
Janelle Reinelt, “What UK Spectators Know: Understanding How We Come to Value Theatre,” 337.
- 48.
See Garner, Bodied Spaces, 12–13.
- 49.
Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre, 72.
- 50.
My work on spectatorial mimesis throughout this book owes a debt to Bruce Wilshire’s phenomenological study Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor, which explores the audience’s mimetic investment in the actor’s performance. As his phrase “mimetic engulfment” indicates, however, Wilshire’s spectatorship is passive rather than dynamic, involving the “quasi-hypnotic” fusion of self and other (xv). The spectatorship I describe in the present study, by contrast, is active and interactive.
- 51.
Aristotle, Aristotle’s Poetics, 7.
- 52.
Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 69. Walter Benjamin wrote of the “mimetic genius” of dance and “other cultic occasions” (“On the Mimetic Faculty,” 334).
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Garner, S.B. (2018). Introduction. In: Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91794-8_1
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