ABSTRACT
At the dawn of 21st century, digital technologies – along with the spread of a globalised corporate empire – have introduced radical changes, not only to the material aspects of communications but also on an epistemic level, affecting the very ways in which human knowledge is produced, expressed, distributed, shared, archived and transmitted. Within this post-modern scenario the performing arts, as artistic practices and academic disciplines, will play a crucial role, though this may be in uncommon ways compared to how we are used to understanding and practising them. Without ignoring the pressure to rethink what knowledge is from a digital technologies perspective, a reassessment of mimesis as an archaic, oral and pre-verbal human skill is urgently needed. Since performance activities, and especially the performing arts, can be viewed as cognitive hybrid practices, they constitute the most important Spiel-Raum (‘room-for-play’) for these leaps in our cognitive past. Evidence to support the thesis is provided through the work of three scholars who have focused on mimesis in different ways: Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘mimetic faculty’; Eric Havelock’s analysis of the Platonic rejection of mimesis; and neuroscientist Merlin Donald’s theory of the evolution of the human mind, in which he locates a pre-verbal stage named ‘mimetic culture’.
