Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices is an anthology that explores how we, as embodied subjects, create emotional meaning for one another through the arts and culture. Editors Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason invited contributors from fields including theatre, dance, film, and psychology to discuss communication through creative bodily expression and to explore the question, “How does art (in the broadest sense of cultural works produced with creative intent) mean?” (11). The book prompts an interdisciplinary understanding of the ways in which human intersubjectivity might be governed by our ability to express and sense emotion through empathetic movement.

The anthology's authors are interested in the notion of “‘embodied knowledge’” (17), or in the ways in which cognition is not only expressed through the body but also how the body is, in turn, a means of generating knowledge. As Reynolds and Reason explain, interest in embodied cognition in the humanities has emerged from the intersection of a corporeal turn in cognitive science and a cultural turn in sociology and history, while recent neuroscientific explorations of the mirror neuron system have sparked discussions about a neural substrate of the human tendency to simulate unconsciously movements observed in others, and thus to engage in kinesthetic empathy. Most of the authors in this volume draw inspiration from the mirror neuron research trend to examine an individual's ability to shape cultural meaning through movement, thus contributing to conversations about the value of cognitive science in theatre and performance studies.

Kinesthetic Empathy is divided into five parts (each with three essays): “I. Mirroring Movements: Empathy and Social Interactions”; “II. Kinesthetic Engagement: Embodied Responses and Intersubjectivity”; “III. Kinesthetic Impact: Performance and Embodied Engagement”; “IV. Artistic Enquiries: Kinesthetic Empathy and Practice-Based Research”; and “V. Technological Practices: Kinesthetic Empathy in Virtual and Interactive Environments.” A shared concern for intersubjective “distance” in social environments and the “interface” that unfolds between actors or dancers and spectators in performance unites the various chapters. Nicola Shaughnessy's “Knowing Me, Knowing You: Autism, Kinesthetic Empathy and Applied Performance” and Bonnie Meekums's “Kinesthetic Empathy and Movement Metaphor in Dance Movement Psychotherapy” explore the use of movement in psychological therapy settings, but the authors' experiments with the “space between” movers in social situations might also be applied to other contexts in which training in nonverbal engagement might be applicable, such as actor training, drama therapy, or ethnography. Similarly, Tal-Chen Rabinowitch, Ian Cross, and Pamela Burnard demonstrate in “Musical Group Interaction, Intersubjectivity and Merged Subjectivity” how musical collaboration allows participants to build group affiliation and interpersonal trust through movement, imitation, and synchronization.

In “Affective Responses to Everyday Actions,” Amy E. Hayes and Steven P. Tipper argue that emotions do not simply elicit motor responses (such as facial expressions), but that motor processes themselves can actually evoke emotional experience. Their notion of “perceptual fluency” (71) is based in part on James Gibson's ecological approach to visual perception and Alva Noë's philosophical theory of “action in perception” (46), both of which relate to how we comprehend the opportunities for action offered by our perceptual environment. Adriano D'Aloia, in “Cinematic Empathy: Spectator Involvement in the Film Experience,” and Guillemette Bolens, in “Kinesthetic Empathy in Charlie Chaplin's Silent Films,” both describe how cinematic experimentation with creating “‘proximity at a distance’” (94) can invoke perceptual, emotional, and cognitive levels of feeling—for example, how a spectator's gaze might be manipulated by a director or actor in order to “fill the gap” (101) between the fictional world and reality, thus provoking a stronger empathetic response. In “Effort and Empathy: Engaging with Film Performance,” Lucy Fife Donaldson utilizes Laban Movement Analysis, the notation system commonly associated with dance that has found its place in theatre, to establish the ways in which inner emotional life is made manifest through external movement on film, and thus bridges performer and spectator experiences. These discussions provide some useful theoretical and methodological frameworks that can be applied to the interactive aspects of acting and other phenomenological considerations in theatre and dance.

The concern with distance might also be applied to the practice of breaking the theatrical “fourth wall” in order to alter traditional performance spaces and elicit greater audience participation, as well as to signal the audience's implication in the staged action. In “Re-Thinking Stillness: Empathetic Experiences of Stillness in Performance and Sculpture,” Victoria Gray relates her personal experience as a trained dancer struggling with simultaneous impulses to keep moving and to remain still. She and scenographer Joslin McKinney (“Empathy and Exchange: Audience Experiences of Scenography”) both emphasize the importance of stillness (an often overlooked feature of kinesthesia) for drawing an audience in and allowing a spectator to attend to and to reciprocate more nuanced expression. Additionally, the notion of audience implication introduces some ethical considerations, described by Rose Parekh-Gaihede in “Breaking the Distance: Empathy and Ethical Awareness in Performance” as the “Inverted V-effekt” (177)—the opposite of Brecht's Verfremdunseffekt: How can conflation of the self with the Other be avoided through kinesthetic empathy, paradoxically bringing an audience closer by creating respectful distance? This discussion is relevant not only to theatrical performance, but also to any encounters with others where ethical sensitivity is necessary.

One of the difficulties I had in reading Kinesthetic Empathy was the growing sense that merely writing or talking about embodied knowledge constructs a barrier to deeper understanding of the real value of nonverbal and nondiscursive expression. It was not until I “experienced” Reason's essay, “Photography and the Representation of Kinesthetic Empathy,” that I felt able to participate in the themes of bodily engagement that were articulately, yet unsatisfyingly, described in other chapters. In presenting Chris Nash's experimental photographs of dancers, Reason invites the reader to interact on a more visceral level with the potentiality of movement suggested by Nash's photography—movements not captured, but rather layered through digital manipulation to represent kinesthetic empathy itself. Similarly, Sarah Whatley, in “The Poetics of Motion Capture and Visualisation Techniques: The Differences Between Watching Real and Virtual Dancing Bodies,” examines how motion capture technology can be used not to “freeze” movement, but instead to experiment with the opportunities for kinesthetic engagement that emerge out of stillness.

Together, these short essays present an interdisciplinary exploration into the role of kinesthetic empathy in social interaction, and ways that it might be applied as a tool for creating and understanding art. I would have been interested to learn more about the neuroscience of kinesthetic empathy—mirror neuron research provides inspiration for the essays, but more engagement with that scientific work would have provided more depth and complexity. Overall, Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices provides an engaging introduction to the possibilities of merging theatre and performance studies scholarship, the arts, and cognitive science.