Articulating embodiment, cognition and creativity in performance: Three case studies

Abstract

This thesis examines ideas about psychophysicality in performance, through a twin focus on the work of performers themselves, and work coming out of cognitive studies. It centres on a paradigm in which indirect languages of action support performers’ creativity. I follow Jerzy Grotowski and others in describing it as a via negativa (VN). In treating performance as inherently unknown or unknowable, VN approaches seek to foster psychophysical processes of (non)doing-(non)knowing for creative purposes. These approaches have become a dominant mode of performance investigation in contemporary training and practice. They vary widely, drawing on a variety of traditions including somatic movement work, philosophy and cognitive studies. Yet the central principle remains that much of what matters about performers’ work is unknown; and that what little is usefully known is ever-shifting. I examine this principle and its practice in dialogue with a framework developed from cognitive studies and philosophy, which Paula Niedenthal and colleagues call Embodied Cognition (EC). My EC framework includes the idea drawn from philosophy of Extended Mind, that cognition is inseparable from the social and physical environments in which it takes place. That is, psychophysicality participates in ‘cognitive ecologies.’ I offer a series of three case studies of VN cognitive ecologies, as articulated in performance texts by Kristin Linklater and Jacques Lecoq, as well as a number of practitioners working in the area of VN breath work. Throughout, my methodology centres on close readings of languages of psychophysical movement and experience, to interrogate in particular core VN notions of mindful or attentive sensing and skilled awareness. I discuss these in the light of definitions of EC as multi-sensory and frequently implicit or non-conscious and non-deliberate, but also available to explicit processing in important ways. The central claim is that the VN principle is primary, but that greater discursive clarity and specificity in relation to key VN concepts can be developed through collaborative work between performance practitioners and cognitive studies. I argue, further, that rigorous VN performance languages that emerge from such collaboration, like those already developed by Lecoq, Linklater and others, both already underpin VN practice and have important perspectives to share with scholars of cognition and others working psychophysically.