Theatre/Ecology/Cognition is an innovative and ambitious attempt to use scholarship from the growing field of cognitive studies to understand the relationships between performers and stage objects, as well as the meanings produced by their interactions. Drawing on an exhaustive ensemble of scholars from a wide array of disciplines, including cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, semiotician Jiří Veltruský and psychologist James J. Gibson, chapter 1 theorizes an ‘ecological’ approach to the relationship between performers and their objects (p. 1). Extending cognitive science's contestation of a dualism between mind and body, Paavolainen rejects the similarly dualistic distinction in the common understanding of performers as agents enacting their will upon the objects – props, costumes and set pieces – that they encounter onstage. Instead, he emphasizes the co-creativity of the objects themselves, which offer certain ‘affordances’ – a term the author takes from Gibson – to the actor, guiding their actions with, for example, their shape, flexibility or cultural meaning (p. 29). ‘Once we relax our anthropocentric views of agents and artefacts, and allow for a more fuzzy boundary . . . between ourselves and our environments’, he argues, ‘we begin to fathom the fundamentally distributed character of agency and cognition’ (p. 41). The human beings, onstage and in the auditorium, are merely one part of a larger theatrical ecology.

The remainder of the book is dedicated to case studies re-examining seminal works of the Eastern European avant-garde in light of this new understanding. Chapter 2 looks at Vsevolod Meyerhold's production of The Magnanimous Cuckold. Paavolainen explores the ‘affordances’ offered to performers by Liubov Popova's famous set as well as the cognitive implications of biomechanics (p. 29). He then places both of these within the dominant image schemas (spatial metaphors that are foundational to cognition) of the early Soviet period, using the theatrical ecology thus constructed to explore prominent interpretations of the production.

After briefly outlining the ‘cultural ecology’ of post-war Poland in chapter 3, chapters 4 and 5 examine Jerzy Grotowski's Acropolis and Tadeusz Kantor's Let the Artist Die! along similar lines (p. 92). Tracing the uses of mundane objects and the arrangement of the spectators’ spatial relation to the performers, and the confrontations produced between actors and their characters, Paavolainen links the profound experience of audience members to the construction of a space that is ‘not only distinctly empty of humanity, but also oppressively filled with objects’ (p. 160, small capitals in original). Contrasting Kantor's use of his performers’ bodies (here the author, following Kantor, refers to them as ‘bio-objects’) with Meyerhold's, he argues that the mechanical repetitions of his actors, who ‘behave in a way imposed on them by the reality of the space’ (p. 194, original emphasis), both evoke an ecology defined by oppression while transgressing it by enacting ‘a form of social agency that arises when cycles of imposed use are abandoned for found affordances of resistance’ (p. 206).

While the thoroughness of Paavolainen's review of cognitive-studies literature in chapter 1 is to be commended, some of this work could have been productively moved to the endnotes, which would have clarified and streamlined his argument and made his work significantly more approachable to scholars drawn to the book primarily because of an interest in performing objects or the avant-garde. Nevertheless, the intriguing arguments and compelling readings the author offers make it extremely valuable for anyone interested in cognitive approaches to theatre.