Situating the provocation

Embodiment in this article is defined as ‘the body-in-space, the body as it interacts with the physical and social environment’ and Ben Spatz's elaboration that this includes ‘thought, mind, brain, intellect, rationality, speech, and language … everything that bodies can do’.Footnote ⁶ In reflecting on what the notion of embodiment has come to encompass for theatre and performance research, I consider the role of embodied knowing, of performance skills and techniques that create a tacit reservoir of knowledge for explicit action and are taught, shared, honed and practised across generations. As Joseph Roach explains, ‘embodied techniques live on in the communicable practices of master teachers and their students’.Footnote ⁷ This viral process continues to work in many instances of in-bodied ways of knowing, processing and learning, which arguably both constitute, and are created from, some of the primary mechanisms of cognition. This example is only one of many that demonstrate the process of how practice is considered as a hallmark of embodied cognition for and by theatre and performance researchers. Another example may be the ever-evolving opportunities for practice to generate research in various approaches to and through performance and related methods of practical exploration in various artistic processes.Footnote ⁸

Yet if practice continues to evidence embodied cognition in theatre and performance in this way, researchers play into what Tim Rohrer identifies as ‘the counter-Cartesian philosophical account of mind, cognition and language’.Footnote ⁹ In other words, the commonplace use of embodiment, and in this commonplace use of the term ‘embodiment’, cognition as a process does not automatically follow, nor does an explicitly conceptualized argument that mental and physical processes are, or should be, seen as inseparable. The greater predicament, then, is that that this perspective of practice may imply that embodiment is precisely that: a counter of mental processes. Through this implication, a preference of the body over the brain or mind is created if researchers are not careful, even if their intention may be to demonstrate the value of practice within the process or processes of cognition. This is not because theatre and performance research are currently limiting mental processes to the brain, but rather, in part, due to finer distinctions that are sometimes missed in interdisciplinary perspectives between the roles of the body, the brain and the mind.

If embodiment continues to be offered as a Cartesian counterpoint and not as its own dynamically integrative structure that is inclusive of and expands to both a performer's entire body, including their brain organ, and their larger environment, then researchers risk perpetuating dualisms through contradiction or neglect. Within embodied cognitive research, Shaun Gallagher clearly states that even in the most radical accounts of embodied cognition, the brain is acknowledged.Footnote ¹⁰ However, it is imperative to realize and explicitly note at this point that mental processes are not strictly brain-bound in embodied cognitive perspectives, and that in certain embodied accounts within the science thereof, there are no distinctions between mental and physical processes, since the mind is taken to be created through a reciprocal relationship between the body, which has a brain organ, and the environment the body operates within, which has sociocultural factors which ultimately shape affordances of cognition and, inevitably, of what each body can do.Footnote ¹¹

Ironically, the scientific theories that theatre and performance research turns to within the broader framework of embodied cognition actively advocate for a recognition of this dynamic, even if the degree to which the environment and body are seen as imperative may vary. Within the sub-framework of ecological enactivism in embodied cognition, the environment not only shapes cognition, but also creates it.Footnote ¹² In more rigorous ecological arguments, environments have a consciousness and cognitive life that are independent of the individual within the environment.Footnote ¹³ In autopoietic and sensorimotor accounts of enactivism, the body as a biological and neurological entity takes centre stage, and the environment plays second fiddle. Herein, the skeletal–muscular system in sensorimotor enactivism, and cellular systems in autopoietic enactivism, function as the ‘brain’ of the body. Adversely, radical enactivism (REC) distinguishes itself from autopoietic, sensorimotor and ecological frameworks, by arguing that the body and environment equally share the responsibility of creating cognition and consciousness, preferencing neither ‘physical’ nor ‘mental’ processes.Footnote ¹⁴ In this instance, Spatz's definition of embodiment provided earlier in this article, entailing all that a body can do, should be duly noted.

Thus if theatre and performance research is to continue appropriating notions of embodiment from embodied cognition, it should begin with the admission that by its own definition, all research, and not only related or produced practices, is an embodied act. By this account, embodiment is not the synonym for practice as which it is often employed. Nevertheless, I recognize that discussions which evidence practice through embodied cognition may be born from slightly more complex dynamics. The influence of political agendas within research, specifically those that hold power over humanities subjects such as performance and theatre, cannot be negated. It will not help anyone to slight the struggle of having to validate theatre and performance practices within academies to funding bodies. Therefore cautioning researchers against using harder sciences to justify artistic processes may be a more intricate issue than dismantling the power dynamics between arts and science through inciting a systemic or ideological revolt.Footnote ¹⁵ It cannot be denied that more traditional or conventional ways of producing research (i.e. outside and independent of practice) are still privileged by many academies. Therefore it is not difficult to see the allure of cognitive-based science being able to validate performance practices. However, this should not incentivize researchers using interdisciplinary frameworks to these ends to generously reinterpret theories of cognition without critical analysis.

Theatre and performance researchers would benefit from clearly distinguishing between each of the sub-frameworks of embodied cognition recognized in this article, amongst the others that may continue to surface as research develops within the field.Footnote ¹⁶ Researchers have the responsibility of contextualizing their perspectives on embodied cognition appropriately if embodied cognition is the discipline they are turning to for scientific ‘answers’ to processes in theatre and performance. A failure to overtly consider different takes on embodied cognition and the distinctions they offer in many existing publications sometimes appears to create an argument that might have been better served had another perspective been thoroughly explored.Footnote ¹⁷ For example, while sensorimotor and autopoietic accounts are frequently favoured, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin's radically enactive cognition (REC) may be more useful for practitioners than Varela, Rosch and Thompson's often-favoured autopoietic account.Footnote ¹⁸

REC unequivocally divorces itself from classic cognition by dismantling notions of inference and representation, which are the pillars of classic cognition, and are still upheld to various degrees within both sensorimotor and autopoietic accounts. Briefly explained: classic cognitivists argue that because the brain has no direct access to the outside world, all information received through the sensory system is only inferred information, which then, through an assimilation of data, creates an internal representation of the external world (i.e. through an internal model) in the brain.Footnote ¹⁹ Amongst many other issues that extend beyond the scope of this article, such an account of information processing continues to pinpoint the brain as the hub of mental and physical activity, directly feeding the idea of a ghost in the machine.Footnote ²⁰

Therefore the belief that cognitive science itself motivates and explains takes on embodiment, which is foundational in theatre and performance scholarship, should be reconsidered. In 2006 Elizabeth Hart wrote that ‘Merleau-Ponty's embodied consciousness is a cannily accurate description of what the scientists now see as the material grounding of knowledge, of the mind–brain's dependence on the body's concrete situatedness within the physical and social worlds that encompass it.’Footnote ²¹ However, it is necessary to note that, to date, such scientists remain on the fringes of cognitive science.

Science and art, fact and theory, cognition and embodiment

Within the humanities, universal truth and essentialism are not readily welcomed. As such, there are possibilities for often contradictory and alternative perspectives and ideologies to work together and with equal relevance in theatre and performance research. But within scientific domains, if something is replicated over multiple times and produces the same results, it moves into the realm of indisputable truth, whether appropriately so or not.Footnote ²² If theatre and performance research is to move forward with the ethical rigour advocated in this article, the only indisputable fact regarding embodied cognition in cognitive science is that it has come to mean that ‘cognition … is not separable from physicality’.Footnote ²³ In more simple terms: the brain needs to be in a body to function. Within cognitive science, this statement does not imply that the body itself or any physical processes constitute, aid or facilitate cognition. It is also important to unambiguously state that most of what interdisciplinary perspectives in theatre and performance discourse currently promote as being evidenced by embodied cognitive science exists within the realms of philosophies of mind that continue to be debated within and between neuroscience, psychology, ecology, biology and genetics. Embodied cognition is in no way the lingua franca of current cognitive science, which remains dominated by classic cognitivism and computational accounts of the brain. Such accounts actively oppose embodied cognition and related accounts of consciousness.Footnote ²⁴

It is not my intention here to imply that theory and philosophy are useless until proven as scientific facts. My intention is to emphasize that researchers should remain cognizant of what embodied cognition and cognitive science respectively advocate as factual, and therefore what theatre and performance researchers respectively disseminate as the ‘science’ of cognition and embodiment for their faithful audiences.

Consequently, it should not be forgotten that classic cognitivists also base their perspectives of cognition in philosophies of mind. For this reason, what the brain-as-machine metaphor implies, how it is susceptible to change, and how this has come to be perpetuated as the most likely account of cognition, should also be critically considered.Footnote ²⁵ Matthew Cobb provides a historical overview of conceptions of the brain which explore how this metaphor has inevitably shaped ways of thinking about minds and brains ‘that are not always helpful’.Footnote ²⁶ According to Cobb's findings, in 1655 Danish anatomist Nicolaus Steno was the first to suggest that if the brain was to be understood, it would be useful to approach it as a machine so that it could be taken apart ‘to see how it works’. In Steno's frame of reference, ‘the only machines that existed were based on either hydraulic power or clockwork’. Since then, the brain-as-machine has been influenced by the development of electricity, and in the 1950s progressed to ‘concepts … from computing’.Footnote ²⁷ In this metaphor, the body becomes ‘hardware’ and the brain is seen as ‘software’, perpetuating dualisms that theatre and performance research hope to actively dismantle.Footnote ²⁸

The embodied nature of thinking and doing

In what may be further dualistic ways of understanding processes, the sense of a performer working in an embodied way now works side by side with another counterpoint and binary: a sense of being disembodied. Disembodiment has seemingly come to encompass practices, methods or research approaches that are referred to in passing and in print as such because they seem to rate low on the amount of ‘doing’ they require. At its best, this way of explaining practices, methods and research approaches perpetuates conceptual ways of thinking that hark back to Cartesian ideals. At its worst, describing primarily mentally based activities as being disembodied, and primarily physically based activities as embodied, runs the risk of becoming akin to the brain-as-a-machine metaphor. As Amy Cook mentions, the way meaning is created through structures like metaphors and symbolic language has profound implications for how processes are understood.Footnote ²⁹ That said, metaphors and symbolic ways of understanding often complex processes should never be mistaken for explanations of those processes per se.Footnote ³⁰

As a performer and theatre-maker, I value how ‘getting up and doing’ can make a difference to the experience of a rehearsal, to crafting choreography, to blocking a scene, or to feeling the way movement can change the affective experience of dialogue. Nonetheless, I also know that while this happens, I am facilitating a rich mental process that is not separate or secondary to the physical activity taking place. Similarly, when I ‘sit and think’ or ‘read and research’, I am using my mind's eye, my fingers to jot down thoughts, my spine to keep me upright, and the same affective system is activated, stimulated by the same imagination I employ while ‘in action’.

If researchers continue to play out the notion of embodiment as they do, they should at least acknowledge that within the frameworks they advocate, all experience, perception and cognition are mediated through a body and are therefore embodied.Footnote ³¹ I have yet to discover any experience amongst people that has taken place without an embodied entity; that is, without a body, whatever its limitations and privileges, directly involved in knowledge production, creation and reflection.

Thus it should not be disputed that all research and processes of researching are embodied. To what extent or degree is perhaps a different argument. Cook echoes this sentiment when she states that ‘[t]he problem is not with making our thinking or our performing more “embodied”. The challenge is coming up with the language to articulate what it has been all along but we have missed some of the nuances because our language looks for bodies and minds’.Footnote ³² McCaw suggests that this issue within language is ‘an irresolvable conundrum’.Footnote ³³ Kemp elaborates on the conundrum by explaining that ‘[m]ost practitioners and teachers talk about the “internal” and the “external” even when they desire an integration of both’.Footnote ³⁴ In a counterargument, it could be conceded that this way of speaking or phrasing processes is, or at least has been, a useful way of shifting attention in instances where some senses and ways of experiencing may be given more value than others, and therein dominate the student or performer's perceptions of a technique or task. However, this is a meta-problem of the Cartesian residue. Students and performers are still told by their facilitators, teachers and directors to ‘get out their heads’ in order to do, or off their feet in order to think.Footnote ³⁵ Vocabularies stemming from somaticisms in the performing arts are still filled with the importance of the bodymind, or words of encouragement to stop using ‘rationality’ and to instead amplify ‘right-brained’ creative states.Footnote ³⁶ Simultaneously, intricate differences should be acknowledged between the concepts of mind and thinking, and interrelated tensions specifically within somatic frameworks, where finer details of attention and affect come into play, which no doubt influence the structure of these vocabularies. Yet such instructions and ways of phrasing arguably reinforce the dualistic split at hand.Footnote ³⁷ Researchers would be better served by reimagining what is possible moving forward, than by employing oppositional approaches in an effort to tip historical scales, and therein unintentionally uphold problematic dualisms.

I revisit Roach's earlier statement that techniques and knowledges are transmitted between teachers and students in practice.Footnote ³⁸ I take this to be applicable not only for the tacit knowledges perpetuated in performance practices, as he implies, but also for inherited perceptions of embodiment. Such perceptions maintain subtle preferences for the mind, the body, the brain, or even the body as an independent entity from an exterior world. Upon deeper reflection, these perceptions and ways of understanding processes may provide a mirror to a generation of practitioners and researchers who have possibly not yet shaken the ghosts from their own machines.

Dualisms may be seductively simple ways of seeing the world, but they do not serve the progress and innovation that theatre practice and research can and should aspire to, and while I revere Cook's suggestion, it may be that researchers require more than a new language. A radical shift in perspective is required if they are ever going to find this language. Additionally, theatre and performance researchers who operate within scientific paradigms require a rigorous vigilance second to none. Evelyn Tribble and John Sutton politely emphasize this when they advise that researchers should ‘remain aware of ongoing debate and emerging research in the target areas’.Footnote ³⁹ Such vigilance is cultivated by, for example, accepting that scientific knowledge is primarily transmitted through journal publications, the latest of which sometimes already disproves what a theatre and performance book will claim in the immediate future. Researchers who hope to continue operating within these interdisciplinary paradigms therefore have opportunities to reconsider how interdisciplinary knowledge may be disseminated moving forward.

Furthermore, I can appreciate that the parameters which shape interdisciplinary endeavours are shifting and case-dependent, and that the result of this is that knowledge is used and applied with various intentions and to specific ends. However, if theatre and performance research is to continue using developments in cognitive science to evidence its own sensibilities of what constitutes a mind and the role of embodiment, then it also must respect the underlying principles which govern scientific knowledge, which comes down to respecting the dominating or ruling truth and fact, and being able to discern within scientific frameworks themselves what is offered as fact and opinion.Footnote ⁴⁰ On this note, I would strongly caution theatre and performance researchers from adopting or trying to perpetuate ‘outdated’ science under the guise of its former usefulness, unless it is so applied with a historical background explicitly stated for researchers and scholars engaging with the work. While adopting older theories and perspectives may work in contexts of literary studies and other interdisciplinary mergers in performance research, it is not so for science. I need only briefly mention as an example the racial damage phrenology caused in the nineteenth century to illustrate how choosing to do this could unfold in a worst-case scenario.Footnote ⁴¹

Furthermore, what is evidenced and analysed regarding embodied cognition in theatre and performance research may also be critically re-examined in future scholarship and research. There is currently a tendency to rely on proprioceptive accounts of performance in order to motivate a performer's body as the source of cognizance.Footnote ⁴² Yet Gallagher pointedly remarks that embodied cognition involves more than a proprioceptive focus may insinuate, which only provides insights regarding the sensorimotor system and neglects ‘the relevant affective aspects’ of cognition.Footnote ⁴³

To explore and interrogate a holistic account of embodied cognition moving forward, it may be that alternative research regarding affect, feeling and emotion should be considered. In this exploration and consideration, theatre and performance researchers may find that some well-worn frameworks need to be put to rest.

Research regarding both emotion and affect in cognitive science, both embodied and classical, has developed beyond the theories of Antonio Damasio, William James, Paul Ekman, Silvan Tomkins and Carroll Izard.Footnote ⁴⁴ However, I find that their research continues to dominate theatre and performance scholarship.Footnote ⁴⁵

Damasio and his predecessors operate from the perspective that emotions are unconscious occurrences which can be triggered by external stimuli and are largely beyond conscious control. In his basic emotional framework (BET) Damasio offers emotions as universal states that have distinct biological markers which are inseparable from feelings, or what would now scientifically be recognized as affects. BET is an extension of Tomkins, Ekman and Izard's work on emotions in the 1960s.Footnote ⁴⁶

Alternatively, Lisa Feldman Barrett's neuroscientific and psychological research on emotions and affect, which is currently widely cited, began surfacing in academic articles as early as 1998.Footnote ⁴⁷ In her research, Barrett provides evidence to suggest that the perspectives of emotions regularly cited in theatre and performance discourse are more an opinion than a scientific fact. Developments in her and similar, related research on affect have facilitated a greater interest in investigating how affects can be both interoceptive signals (i.e. thirst and hunger) and emotive feelings, and the complex relationship this dynamic can have on how emotions are experienced, as well as how cognition both is and becomes embodied.Footnote ⁴⁸

In Barrett's most recent research, emotions are argued to be social and cultural constructions that have no evidenceable ‘biological fingerprint’.Footnote ⁴⁹ According to Barrett's research, emotions differ from culture to culture, and feelings do not necessarily correspond with the emotions they were thought to. Put another way: the new party line in cognitive science is that emotion is not universal, nor is it dependent on affect, and that not all affects are feelings. Another important outcome of this research is the new-found understanding that emotions and affect are within our conscious control.

The implications of this research may require theatre practitioners and researchers to confront changes in how they use and explore emotions and feelings. For example, multicultural rehearsal rooms and training spaces may need to acknowledge how cultural understandings of emotions impact what is asked of performers in process, as well as how they are expected to relate to one another in circumstances of emoting. Moreover, if affect is independent of emotion, then arguably the lingua franca of training and rehearsal spaces may also be due for an upgrade. Furthermore, the Stanislavskian-based belief that, as Bella Merlin states, ‘emotions arise when something or someone either stops you from achieving or enables you to achieve your objective’ would not necessarily be accurate.Footnote ⁵⁰ According to this science, what would arise is an actor's affect, and this may have nothing to do with the emotion a director predetermined.

Along with her findings relating to emotions and feelings, Barrett's research evidences that there are no singular brain areas or specific neuronal groups involved in thinking and feeling, despite what many researchers continue to argue. Her findings support and echo neuroscientific research dating back to the 1990s.Footnote ⁵¹ This research uproots deep-seated beliefs that continue to create divides between rationality and emotions – the idea that the hippocampus is the emotional centre of the brain, and that there is an instinctive part of the brain that evidences a primal part of our humanity.Footnote ⁵²

What remains striking about Barrett's body of work is the scientific rigour with which emotion and affect are investigated. By re-creating the foundational experiments run by Paul Ekman and Silvan Tomkins and what has subsequently been perpetuated by Damasio, she has found detrimental flaws in the way the experiments were both conducted and reported, discovering that they had primed their participants and falsified methodologies.Footnote ⁵³ Thus, as far as science goes, Barrett's research is not merely a provocative alternative philosophy; it also presents itself as the new science of emotion.

In both classic and embodied cognitive research respectively, research on emotion and affect that echoes her findings is moving into exhilarating new territories of discovery. If theatre and performance researchers are willing to embrace these developments moving forward, they may find that there are accounts of feeling and its role in cognition that provide modern, engaging ways of understanding affect and emotion for performers and practitioners alike.

Considering future provocations

Moving forward, I suggest that there is much for theatre and performance researchers to contemplate before entering interdisciplinary discussions. Alvin Goldman and Frederique de Vignemont provide four methodically rigorous questions for embodied cognitivists that may prove equally useful for theatre and performance researchers hoping to explore interdisciplinary research with embodied cognition at its heart:Footnote ⁵⁴

1. 1 How is the notion of embodiment being interpreted and applied, and in which sub-framework does it best reside within the larger discipline and framework of embodied cognition?

2. 2 To what degree is the task in focus considered to be embodied?

3. 3 How does empirical research support this interpretation of embodiment and cognition?

4. 4 How do this claim and approach exist outside classic cognition?

In clearly situating what is meant by embodiment, and in knowing the complexities and fine print between and of various frameworks of embodied cognition, researchers working in interdisciplinary ways not only will facilitate clearer intentions, but also may find more opportunities for rigorous discourse. Furthermore, by having a firm grasp of how embodiment is being defined, moving beyond embodiment as a Cartesian counter can begin to take shape. Moving beyond embodiment as a Cartesian counter provides embodied cognition with the potential to be conceptualized as a holistic account of being which accounts for feeling, thinking, imagining, sensing, knowing and doing as equally important within cognition.

By considering these four guiding questions parallel to this article, there are three conclusions to be offered. First, cognitive science is still dominated by computational cognitivists and embodied cognition remains on the fringes of scientific research. Thus the various conceptions of embodied cognition, as well as how they work in relationship or create discord within the larger tapestry of cognitive science, should be carefully considered. Second, mental and physical processes are equally embodied, no matter how great or small. While there may be a case to be made for the degree to which actions, both physical and mental, are embodied, the ‘smaller’ physical and mental actions should not be seen as disembodied by proxy. Lastly, researchers should be explicit about what science has approved and proved, and then keep their fingers mindfully on the pulse.