Practice, Research, and Cognition in Devised Performance (Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues)

This interdisciplinary study explores devised performance and practice research at the intersection of the cognitive sciences and arts. It interrogates relationships between epistemology and cognition, action and aesthetics, and first-person experience and third-person investigation. Pairing practice research methodologies from theatre and performance with cognitive and neuroscientific approaches—both theoretical and empirical—it reveals new insights into the practices of collective creation in theatre. To foreground the insider knowledge inherent to practice research, the main case studies are works created and performed by Maiya Murphy’s international movement-based devising collective, Autopoetics. Autopoetics’ work is contextualized in reference to major international devising companies, dance companies, and interdisciplinary research projects including Complicité, Frantic Assembly, Forced Entertainment, Tectonic Theater Project, The Necessary Stage, Company Wayne McGregor, Australian Dance Theatre, Choreography and Cognition, Motion Bank and Watching Dance: Kinesthetic Empathy. Practice, Research, and Cognition in Devised Performance proposes a model for breaking down disciplinary silos to freshly access the processes of collaborative practice and invigorate research in the humanities and arts.

Maiya Murphy is Associate Professor in the Theatre Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore, Singapore. She is the author of Enacting Lecoq: Movement in Theatre, Cognition, and Life (2019), along with essays in Theatre, Dance, and Performance Training, New Theatre Quarterly, Theatre Survey, The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, and Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance.

Amy Cook is Dean of the School of Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College, Boston, USA. She is the author of Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science, (2010) and essays in, among others, Theatre Journal, TDR, SubStance, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theatre, the Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition (forthcoming). She was the co-chair of the Working Group in Cognitive Science and Performance for American Society for Theatre Research from 2010-2014.

Nicola Shaughnessy is Professor of Performance at the University of Kent. She is Director of the Research Centre for Cognition, Kinesthetics and Performance and is leading the AHRC funded project 'Imagining Autism.'
She is the author of Applying Performance (2012), Gertrude Stein (2007) and co-editor of Margaret Woffington (2008).

John Lutterbie was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Theatre Arts and the Department of Art at Stony Brook University, USA. He was the director of the International Network for Cognition, Theatre and Performance and with Nicola Shaughnessy was the series editor of the Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues series.