ABSTRACT

Current trends in the application of cognitive science to our understanding of the actor’s process have resulted in an increased attention to the term embodiment. While colloquially, embodiment has come to imply an expression or representation of a feeling or an idea in a concrete or bodily form, the concept of embodiment is widely utilised in the field of performance to more specifically denote a relationship between the mind and body whereby ‘mind and body are not two entities related to each other but an inseparable whole while functioning’ (Ginsberg 1999: 79). This understanding of embodiment implies that the mind (or ‘bodymind’) is inherently embodied (Shapiro 2010; Gallagher 2005; Wilson 2002; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991), a position also held by the principal theories of embodied cognition. However, while the relationship between the body and the mind is an important starting point for many performance practices, and more specifically the training of actors and performers, this chapter argues that the relationship between the body and the mind is always situated within a ‘world’ or broader context. Thus, the role of the environment within which the performer, their performing, and their performance 1 are embedded or situated within, must be given further consideration when approaching embodiment within an inter- or transdisciplinary context which integrates the disciplinary concerns of cognitive science through an active aesthetic. 2 More specifically, this chapter utilises popular conceptions of embodiment from actor training, as one of the many sub-disciplines of performance and a specific field within which to explore the processual concerns around performance, as they inform the practice(s) of the actor in the act of and preparation for acting, alongside theoretical contributions from embodied cognition as a specific research programme within the wilder field of cognitive science, to problematise how one might approach the doing of embodiment within the framework 138of an active aesthetic. As introduced previously within Bryon’s chapter in this book on ‘performing interdisiciplinarity through an “active aesthetic”’, this edited collection includes different disciplines as they ‘engage across various understandings of “performance”’ (Bryon 2017: 40). In the case of this chapter, I am concerned specifically with acting as one mode of performance making, although the potential applications of this interdisciplinary exchange to a broader field of performance practice are undoubtedly numerous and fruitful, as evidenced by the rapid increase in texts and practices integrating cognitive science and performance over the past 20 years. When drawing upon the field of embodied cognition, the most fruitful ‘practice’ to explore in relation to acting and within the model of an active aesthetic, or ‘way of doing’ in an ‘active field’, might be to consider the experiencer experiencing. Indeed, this chapter will engage directly with the practice of experiencing as an active aesthetic, ‘the doing of a doing […] the practice of the practice’. This appears in both the act of acting and the experience of experiencing as ‘way[s] of doing […] through which a practitioner and their discipline can emerge, often simultaneously’ (Bryon 2017: 40) within the disciplines of acting and embodied cognition.