ABSTRACT
This part of nine essays examines the many ways that cognitive science has assisted and informed theoretical, critical and historical scholarship in theatre and performance studies. While most of the chapters in our book thus far have relied on insights from embodied areas of cognitive science, several of these essays venture into the fields of enactive and distributed cognition. The first essay, in fact, underlines the importance of systems theory for the epistemology of enactivism and the second primarily explores insights from the philosophy of phenomenology into understanding theatrical spectating as enactive. The science on how spectators actually attend to a performance – the focus of the third essay – nicely complements the second chapter. Spectator attention necessarily leads to meaning-making in the next essay. This is followed by two chapters oriented towards emotional experience – the first about the enjoyment of rasa by audiences at performances of traditional Indian theatre and the next about the emotion of shame that shapes the experience of many traditional tragedies. Performances about ageing bodies and ethical responsibility centre the next two essays, in which a son struggles to help his old father with his bowel problems as an impassive Christ looks on and a dancer has a lively conversation with her complaining legs, arms and feet. A final chapter uses distributed cognition to answer historical questions about the likely staging of four different kinds of theatre, ranging from ancient Roman comedy to contemporary puppet performance.
