Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The part contextualises the paradigm of enaction in cognitive science within similar paradigm shifts that have occurred in other disciplines (including sociology, biology and theatre) when those scholars recognised that dynamic systems theory altered key relationships between its parts and the whole. It investigates what mirror neurons and motor cognition generally can tell us about the cognitive and emotional transactions that couple spectators and actors and the implications that this science has for the experience of spectating. The part presents the example of the New York Public Theatre's controversial production of Julius Caesar in 2017 to ask what it means to make meaning in the theatre in her 'Emergence, meaning, and presence: An interdisciplinary approach to a disciplinary problem. It examines the ethical and political possibilities of theatrical ostranenie (Shklovsky's term for making familiar matters strange) in his 'Aesthetics and the sensible.'.