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12 - Staging Cognition

How Performance Shows Us How We Think

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2021

By
Amy Cook
Edited by
Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr
Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

Chapter 12: This chapter shows how theatre operates as a kind of cognitive prosthetic, helping us stage and imagine what we are not yet able to see around us or within us. Committed to embodied and extended theories of cognition, the chapter examines the relationship between the stories told onstage across the centuries and the shifting conceptions of the self and the other. Through a kind of wormhole between King Lear, the pageant wagon of the medieval period, and the off-off-Broadway theatre of today, the chapter connects the theatrical innovations around personation, or the taking-on of a character, in these different periods to argue that the theatrical conventions that set up the relationship between character and actor display a changing notion of the self. This shifting of theatrical conventions generates discomfort at first, as spectators learn to consume stories in a new way; and the discomfort unveils what we need to learn next.

Keywords

characterembodied/distributed cognitionliturgical dramaShakespeareTarget Margin Theatre
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science , pp. 176 - 187
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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References

Suggested Reading

Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. New York, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cook, Amy. Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science. New York, 2010.Google Scholar
Cook, Amy. ‘Bodied Forth: A Cognitive Scientific Approach to Performance Analysis’. In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, ed. George-Graves, Nadine. Oxford, 2015.Google Scholar
Cook, Amy. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Ann Arbor, MI, 2018.Google Scholar
Crane, Mary Thomas. Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory. Princeton, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crane, Mary Thomas. Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in 16th-Century England. Baltimore, MD, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dancygier, Barbara. The Language of Stories. Cambridge, 2012.Google Scholar
Hutchins, Edwin. ‘The Cultural Ecosystem of Human Cognition’. Philosophical Philosophy 27, no. 1 (2014): 36.Google Scholar
Johnson, Steven. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. New York, 2001.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, 1980.Google Scholar
Noë, Alva. Varieties of Presence. Cambridge, MA, 2012.Google Scholar
Noë, Alva. Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. New York, 2015.Google Scholar
Spolsky, Ellen. ‘The Biology of Failure, the Forms of Rage, and the Equity of Revenge’. In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Zunshine, Lisa. New York, 2015.Google Scholar
Stevenson, Jill. Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medieval York. New York, 2010.Google Scholar
Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. London, 1997.Google Scholar

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