ABSTRACT
Recent years have seen instances of trans-disciplinary activity combining concepts and techniques from theatre and performance with scientific methodologies to advance knowledge and understanding in a variety of arenas. Our intent in this part is to provide detailed examples of the development of ‘two-way traffic’ between the cognitive sciences and theatre and performance studies. The part’s title deliberately echoes the field of Translational medicine, which is a rapidly developing inter-discipline in biomedical research that involves collaboration between multiple scientific disciplines. The aim of the field is to facilitate the discovery of new diagnostic tools and treatments by using what is known as a ‘bench-to-bedside’ approach. The bench in this description is a laboratory bench; our goal here is to demonstrate that theatre and performance can be thought of as laboratories for life – places where humans can safely experiment with provisional versions of social interaction. In contrast to the mediated reality of screen drama, rehearsal studios and performance venues create sets of conditions in which planned or improvised behaviour create embodied meaning. As I’ve described elsewhere, performers employ most of, if not all, the cognitive activities that are involved in daily life. Theatre and performance-training methods have developed techniques that enable performers to consciously generate behaviour that is normally involuntary in daily life. They do so within multiple intersecting constraints, such as the narrative of a written play, the personality of a fictional character, the theme of a devised or dance piece or a particular style of performance. These constraints enable audience members to focus their attention on ‘what if’ scenarios of life, perceiving real bodies in ways that stimulate their cognition in ways very similar to social encounters in daily life. One of the barriers to the empirical examination of the living skills embodied in theatre and performance has been the difficulty of communicating exactly what those skills are to investigators in other fields. Both terminology and concepts in training and analysis are highly specialised and vary between different methods and schools of thought. Consequently, they obscure fundamental principles of the human behaviour that is the subject of theatre and performance. The rapidly growing research field that this book represents has begun to address this issue through applying cognitive science to theatre and performance. In this part, we hope to demonstrate how the knowledge gained from doing so can be transposed to other fields.
