Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre

Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre Phenomenology, Cognition, Movement

Stanton B. Garner, Jr.

Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance Series Editors Bruce McConachie University of Pittsburgh Department of Theatre Arts Pittsburgh, PA, USA Blakey Vermeule Department of English Stanford University Stanford, CA, USA

This series offers cognitive approaches to understanding perception, emotions, imagination, meaning-making, and the many other activities that constitute both the production and reception of literary texts and embodied performances. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14903

Stanton B. Garner, Jr.

Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre Phenomenology, Cognition, Movement

Stanton B. Garner, Jr. Department of English University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN, USA

Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance ISBN 978-3-319-91793-1    ISBN 978-3-319-91794-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91794-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950067 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Emily von Fraunhofer / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre is a study of movement and movement perception in theatrical performance. Aligning itself with scholarship on kinesthetic empathy in dance studies, it explores the ways in which we inhabit the movements of others inside and outside the theatre, and the ways these movements inhabit us. Because this book is an extension of my 1994 book on theatre phenomenology, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama, it owes a debt to those who have developed this field in the years since that book’s publication. Eirini Nedelkopoulou contacted me in 2011 to ask if I was interested in contributing a chapter to an edited volume on performance phenomenology, and while the project I embarked on expanded beyond the scope of what became Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations (2015), that volume and its contributors have done much to bring phenomenological performance studies into the twenty-first century. George Home-Cook and Jon Foley Sherman have written important recent books in this field, and both were a resource to me as I wrote my own. Although we have met only through email, let me also acknowledge Maxine Sheets-­ Johnstone, whose pioneering book on the phenomenology of dance preceded the emergence of theatre phenomenology and whose extensive writings on movement over the last half-century have demonstrated the centrality of this dimension of human and animal life. Theoretically and methodologically, Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre joins the burgeoning interdisciplinary dialogue between phenomenology and cognitive science in philosophy and the empirical sciences. In so doing, it harks back to my first book, The Absent Voice: Narrative v

vi  

Acknowledgments

Comprehension in the Theater, which described (not always convincingly, I feel) the cognitive dynamics of memory and anticipation. My turn when I completed this book to the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty was motivated by my dissatisfaction with the cognitive models I had been compelled to use, which treated cognition as an information-processing system, and by my growing suspicion that the book I had just finished was phenomenological at heart. In an irony I had no way of knowing at the time, my turn to a phenomenology of embodiment in the late 1980s and early 1990s paralleled a similar turn in cognitive studies by those proposing an enactive, embodied way of understanding cognition. Many of the figures in this movement were inspired by phenomenology, and they welcomed the exchange between empirical and experientially based methodologies. Excited by this dialogue, I am grateful to those scholars working in cognitive theatre studies who welcomed, challenged, and supported a phenomenologist fellow-traveler: Rhonda Blair, Amy Cook, Rick Kemp, Jon Lutterbie, Bruce McConachie, and Lyn Tribble. I have benefited from their interdisciplinary knowledge of fields not their own, their patience with a sometimes novice, and their willingness to entertain a different but compatible perspective on areas of common interest. Because this book foregrounds corporeal variation in its analysis of movement and movement perception, I value the conversations and interactions I have had with those who live with and have thought deeply about disability: Carrie Sandahl, Leonard Davis, Janet Erkkinen, Randy Isom, Rob Spirko, and Hannah Widdifield. I have benefitted considerably from discussion on disability aesthetics with colleague and art historian Timothy W.  Hiles, whose interests intersect with mine across media. Others who have encountered disability and deepened my intimacy with it include my parents Katherine H. Young and Stanton B. Garner, my stepmother Lydia M. Garner, and my parents-in-law Richard E. Maerker and Sylvia L. Maerker. Disability transforms the world and one’s movements through it, and I have been graced by resourceful, often cantankerous witnesses to this formidable realm during the past fifteen years. I thank Eric Bass, Marla Carlson, Rachel Ann Finney, Christina Schoux Casey, Kerri Ann Considine, Amy J. Elias, Gabriel J. Escobar, Brad Krumholz, Kirk Murphy, and Matthew Pilkington for conversations about this book, the issues it addresses, and the productions I write about in it. Saul Jaffé and Mary Swan provided extensive information on Proteus Theatre’s production of Merrick, the Elephant Man and made a significant contribution to my thinking about able-bodied actors portraying disabled characters. Dan Zahavi

 Acknowledgments    

vii

responded to email questions on Edmund Husserl and the phenomenology of disability with useful reading suggestions, and Christian Keysers shared his thoughts on the neuroscience of attention and motor resonance, along with scientific readings related to this subject. The following individuals provided insightful written comments on material that appears herein: Nic Barilar, Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish, Warren Kluber, Brandon Woolf, Peter Zazzali, and the two anonymous readers who reviewed my manuscript for Palgrave Macmillan. Earlier drafts of material in this book were presented at the following working groups sponsored by the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR): Methods and Approaches: Cognitive Science in Theatre, Dance, and Performance (Cognitive Science in Theatre, Dance and Performance Research Group, Nashville, 2012); Postdramatic Theatre and Form (Portland, OR, 2015); and Violent Bodies, Violent Acts (Atlanta, 2017). I am grateful to the organizers of these groups for facilitating scholarly exchange on topics important to my research and to the participants for their stimulating discussion and feedback. A brief passage in my introduction was previously published in a Theatre Survey book review, and material from chapters “Movement, Attention, and Intentionality” and “Language, Speech, and Movement” appeared in earlier form in Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. I thank the editors of these journals for permission to reprint. I want to acknowledge Phillip Zarrilli and Jed Diamond for their special contributions to this book. Phillip, whose theatre scholarship and practice also embrace the dialogue between phenomenology and enactive theory and who is currently completing a book on phenomenology and acting, has encouraged my project from its inception. Over the last several years he and I have exchanged pieces of our works-in-progress, and I have valued his responses and support. Jed, who heads the University of Tennessee MFA Acting program and is an outstanding actor himself, has shared his insights into theatre, acting, and the dynamics of embodiment over breakfasts and at many other times since well before this book was conceived. As someone who shares my fascination with King Lear, Jed organized an informal acting workshop on the play’s blinding scene in which I was able to deepen my understanding of this sequence’s phenomenological and sensorimotor dynamics by acting the roles of Cornwall and Gloucester and observing their traumatic encounter from all sides. I thank Luke Atchley, Miguel Faña, Ben Pratt, Preston Raymer, Hannah Simpson, and Lauren Winder for joining us in this workshop.

viii  

Acknowledgments

I wrote the majority of this book during a sabbatical after stepping down from a five-year term as department head. I thank former Arts and Sciences Dean Bruce Bursten for helping to arrange this sabbatical and my colleagues in the English Department for making this a department I could relish leading. Judith Welch heads an invaluable administrative staff, and it is hard to imagine what life would be like without her and them. Allen R. Dunn, who replaced me as head, has been unwavering in his support and eager to talk about my project, especially when the subject turns to ethics. I value my drama colleagues Misty G.  Anderson, Heather Hirschfeld, and Robert E. Stillman, my current and recent graduate students in drama, theatre, and performance, and the amazing faculty and students in the Theatre Department, who keep me grounded in performance. The resident Clarence Brown Theatre Company, led by Artistic Director Calvin MacLean, is a continuing and invaluable source of excellent theatre. Current Dean Teresa M. Lee and her team in the College of Arts and Sciences were a pleasure to work with during and after my time as department head and continue to support my work. I am considerably indebted to the Interlibrary Services staff of the John C. Hodges Library for securing research material that our collection does not have and the Library Express staff for bringing me the library books I needed (and taking them back when I was done with them). Outside the university, I am grateful to the staff of the Billy Rose Theatre Division Theatre on Film and Tape Archive and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division Audio and Moving Image Archive at the New York Public Library for their help during two research trips. The performances I studied in these collections were crucial to the writing of this book. At Palgrave Macmillan, Tomas René was enthusiastic about this project from the moment I contacted him, and I appreciate the care he took in guiding my manuscript through the review and contract process. Vicky Bates, Mahalakshmi Mariappan, and copy-editor  Elizabeth Stone  were important participants before and during the production process. Special thanks to the Palgrave design team, who turned an image I suggested into a dynamic and electrifying cover for a book on movement. As theatre and dance scholars know, performance photographs tend to freeze movement, fixing the dynamism of action within static, sometimes posed images. This fact explains why there are no theatrical images in my book, much as I would have loved to have them there. In contrast, the cover image for this book (from a long-exposure photograph of fire movement by Emily von Fraunhofer) is electric and alive; it almost vibrates. The shadowy outline of

 Acknowledgments    

ix

a figure in the background orients this dynamism to the human form, which—motionless here—is animated in performance. My final debts are the greatest of all. Alison Maerker Garner and Helen Elizabeth Garner have been a part of this project from the start, and the book that emerged is underwritten by their love and support. As a professional musician, music teacher, writer on music pedagogy, and trained dancer, Alison is an intellectual companion as well as life partner. It has been a joy sharing insights and perspectives on performance, movement, skill acquisition, and art in the years since we first met. Helen, who came into the world fifteen years before this book will, opened a world of movement to me as she learned to crawl and walk, developed language and skills, and deepened her cognitive mastery of her environment. She and her mother are constant reminders that movement, movement perception, and intersubjectivity are situated, communal, and affectively resonant. I gratefully dedicate this book to them.

Contents

Introduction   1 Watching Movement   1 Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre   5 Empathy, Otherness, and Disability   8 Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences  14 Spectatorship and Mimesis  24 Bibliography  32 Movement and Animation  37 Moving in the World  37 Qualities of Self-Movement  41 External Movement Perception  48 Animating Objects  55 “You perceive she stirs”  60 Bibliography  72  ovement, Difference, and Ability  75 M Moving Differently  75 Norming Movement  79 I can/I cannot  86 Spectatorship and Ability/Inability  93 Bibliography 106

xi

xii  

Contents

 ovement, Attention, and Intentionality 109 M Moving in the Theatre 109 Attending to Movement 112 Intentionality and Movement Perception 119 Post-Intentionality 129 Bibliography 142 Kinesthetic Resonance 145 Kinesthetic Sympathy 145 “Mirroring” Movement 153 Resonance in the Theatre 161 Multi-Directional Resonance 171 Bibliography 180  anguage, Speech, and Movement 185 L Moving Words 185 Utterance and Articulation 187 Sounding Brando 195 Language and Kinesthesia 200 Acting with Words 207 Verbal/Kinesthetic Immersions 211 Bibliography 220 Empathy and Otherness 223 What Is Empathy? 223 Empathic Solicitation 228 Empathy and Alterity 234 Acting Disabled 242 Deep Mimesis 248 Bibliography 262 Index 267

Introduction

Watching Movement This is a book about movement and movement perception: about the centrality of movement to human life and the embeddedness of theatre in this sensorimotor reality. Because theatre—like all performance—is a domain of spectatorship and embodiment, this book addresses the questions of how we perceive the movements of others in this environment and outside of it, how we enact movement as part of our sensorimotor engagement with the world, and how the perception and execution of movement are entwined. Phenomenological in a collaborative and eclectic sense, it considers these issues through the lens of experience and through the accounts of movement, embodiment, and movement perception in phenomenology, cognitive science, neuroscience, acting theory, dance theory, philosophy of mind, and linguistics. In specific, this book pursues an insight that has developed within and between these disciplines in recent years: that one of the ways we apprehend the movements of others is by vicariously enacting these movements at pre-conscious and conscious levels. Inevitably, then, this book is about empathy and other responses to the actions of others: what these responses are and what they are not, what they do and what they do not do. Contemporary interest in these connections was encouraged by the discovery of what have come to be known as “mirror neurons” by neuroscientists in the early 1990s. These neurons, which fire in the same way when © The Author(s) 2018 S. B. Garner, Jr., Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre, Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91794-8_1

1

2  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

goal-directed movement is observed and when it is executed, were discovered in the pre-motor cortex of macaque monkey brains, and equivalent neural networks were later identified in humans. In the rush of excitement that followed their popularization in the early 2000s, mirror neurons were hailed as universal keys to action understanding, imitation, language acquisition, and empathy. In the years since their discovery, researchers have provided fuller insights into how these cells work, and some of this research has challenged or qualified the initial claims made on their behalf. But despite the controversies that continue over its relationship to other cognitive mechanisms and its role in action understanding, the discovery of a neural mechanism that links motor execution with motor perception continues to focus attention on the cognitive processes linking one’s movements to those of others. The idea that human beings take on, are inhabited by, or resonate with the movements of others is not a new one, nor is it restricted to neuroscientific accounts of cognitive resonance. In his Principles of Psychology (1890), William James wrote: “We may then lay it down for certain that every representation of a movement awakens in some degree the actual movement which is its object; and awakens it in a maximum degree whenever it is not kept from so doing by an antagonistic representation present simultaneously to the mind.”1 Developmental psychologists study imitative behavior in neonates, marine biologists look at movement synchronization in fish schools, and anthropologists study mimetic enactment in states of spirit possession. In the performing arts, the term kinesthetic empathy has served as a focal point for practitioners and scholars interested in the empirical and experiential connections between observing and enacting movement. Kinesthesia (from the Greek words meaning “to move” and “sensation”) denotes the experience one has of one’s movements as a result of the sensations generated by one’s muscles, joints, tendons, and the vestibular and other systems involved in balance and orientation. Referring to this lived movement sense, it differs from the term kinetic, which refers to movement, or motion, as an objectively describable phenomenon. The concept of kinesthetic empathy, which originated in scientific studies of involuntary motor mimicry in the nineteenth century and philosophical treatises on the kinesthetic aspect of aesthetic experience, was taken up in the twentieth century by dance studies, where it has continued to be analyzed and refined in studies such as Susan Leigh Foster’s Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (2011) and the research of Dee Reynolds, Matthew Reason, and others associated with the 2008–2011 “Watching

 INTRODUCTION  

3

Dance: Kinesthetic Empathy” project in the United Kingdom.2 As Reynolds and Reason’s 2012 edited collection Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practice demonstrates, the idea of kinesthetic empathy is now being applied to fields outside of dance studies. Reynolds and Reason write: “We feel comfortable … in stating that kinesthetic empathy is a key interdisciplinary concept in our understanding of social interaction and communication in creative and cultural practices ranging from entertainment and sport to physical therapies.”3 Much of this recent interest in kinetic embodiment has been informed by the mirror-neuron research mentioned above. More than twenty-five years have passed since the initial discovery of mirror neurons, and it is more than eighty years since New York Times dance critic John Martin, building on work of late nineteenth and early twentieth century aesthetician Theodor Lipps, introduced the terms inner mimicry and kinesthetic sympathy to describe the audience’s response to modern dance. The intensified interest in these two areas since the early 2000s has established an unprecedented convergence between science, philosophy, and the arts. It has also deepened and complicated our understanding of the operations identified by these terms. Alongside the critical responses of scientists and philosophers to what one might call “mirror-­ neuron overreach,” Foster and others have challenged Martin’s claims that kinesthetic empathy provides universal access to the embodied experience of others. The result is an understanding of mimetic embodiment more in tune with historical, cultural, and individual difference. With their shared interest in embodiment, observation, action, and intercorporeality, the convergence of neural mirroring research and a rejuvenated interest in kinesthetic empathy has proved validating and theoretically productive to performing arts scholars and practitioners. In the opening lines of Mirrors in the Brain—How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, Giacomo Rizzolatti (one of the scientists who discovered mirror neurons in macaque monkeys) and Corrado Sinigaglia cite the director Peter Brook: In an interview some time ago, the great theatrical director, Peter Brook, commented that with the discovery of mirror neurons, neuroscience had finally started to understand what has long been common knowledge in the theatre: the actor’s efforts would be in vain if he were not able to surmount all cultural and linguistic barriers and share his bodily sounds and ­movements with the spectators, who thus actively contribute to the event and become one with the players on stage.4

4  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

Although not all who embraced the discovery of mirror neurons would subscribe to the universalism of Brook’s comment, his response to this discovery was shared by many involved in the arts of movement and imitation, particularly those who have embraced the cognitive turn in theatre studies. Bruce McConachie’s Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (2008) discusses mirror mechanisms along with emotional contagion, facial recognition, and other imitative/ empathic components of social cognition in the theatre. Rhonda Blair’s The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience (2008) includes mirror-neuron research in its analysis of cognitive neuroscience’s contribution to actor training. And in Embodied Acting: What Neuroscience Teaches Us about Performance (2012), Rick Kemp applies mirror-neuron research to the actor’s process of identifying with characters. All three of these studies are appropriately cautious when it comes to applying neurological claims that are subject to disagreement among scientists. Because the concept of kinesthetic empathy pre-dated the discovery of neural mirroring mechanisms, dance theorists have tended to consider neurological findings, when doing so, within this framework. They have also integrated this research within a broader range of methodological approaches—physiological, philosophical, historical, and cultural—for thinking about movement observation and enactment. Of particular interest to my work here, many of their accounts have a strong phenomenological emphasis, one based on experiential, historically situated accounts of dancers, choreographers, and spectators.5 Ann Cooper Albright writes: “Over the course of the last thirty years, phenomenology has replaced aesthetics as the philosophical discourse of choice for dance studies, prodding scholars to think about a broad continuum of moving bodies within the cultures they inhabit.”6 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s landmark study The Phenomenology of Dance (1966) claimed philosophy for dance and dance for philosophy, and her subsequent work and that of others has deepened the phenomenological understanding of expressive movement. The Winter 2011 issue of Dance Research Journal was devoted to the topic “Dance and Phenomenology: Critical Reappraisals.” Several of the essays in this issue explore the limits of phenomenology as a theoretical point of view, but it is remarkable (as editor Mark Franko notes) that “phenomenology rarely if ever absents itself from the terms of dance analysis, despite the attempt to subtract it.” Franko also observes that “The upsurge of interest in the topic of kinesthetic empathy is reframing perspectives on phenomenological inquiry.”7

 INTRODUCTION  

5

Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre Inspired, in part, by Foster’s work and the “Watching Dance: Kinesthetic Empathy” project, the last ten years have seen an emergence of kinesthetic research in performance studies, particularly in the United Kingdom. Since 2010, for example, the Research Centre for Cognition, Kinesthetics and Performance at the University of Kent has brought together scholars and practitioners who are interested in a range of issues connected to kinesthetic performance. For the most part, however, theatre has held an uneasy position in this important area of research. The relative scarcity of kinesthetically oriented theatrical studies, I suggest, reflects our underdeveloped understanding of theatre, particularly dramatic theatre, as a kinetic and kinesthetic form. While it is easy to recognize the movement dimension in highly physicalized theatre forms such as Kabuki, commedia dell’arte, and the acrobatic performances of Cirque du Soleil—in the Biomechanical theatre of Vsevolod Meyerhold and the immersive productions of Punchdrunk or Sound&Fury—the movement dynamics of less physically overt theatre styles and traditions are less immediately apparent. Indeed, one of the most pervasive modern traditions—theatrical realism—may seem predicated on suppressing a kinesthetic sensibility. Realist stage settings often inhibit movement as much as they enable it, and the actor/characters who inhabit these environments are restricted by historically and socially specific movement conventions. When Nora Helmer breaks into a frenetic tarantella in Act 3 of Ibsen’s A Doll House, she violates not only the propriety governing female movement but the kinetic circumscriptions of the realist mode as well, which has restrained her up to this point like the corset she wears. In a sequence such as this, Bert States’s observation that realism represents an “imprisonment of the eye” could be generalized to include the moving body as well.8 When Nora’s tarantella erupts in the midst of the measured movement practices that surrounds it, dance emerges, momentarily, in the context of theatre. In fact, though, Ibsen’s play has been “moving” from its opening moments, and it continues to move to its end. Navigating their circumscribed but concentrated action fields, Ibsen’s actor/characters move within, at the edges of, and beyond the kinetic conventions of their social world. They express themselves, consciously and unconsciously, in ­mannerisms and gestures. Their bodies move deliberately and in response to their physical environment and those who share it. They are sometimes

6  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

still, though this stillness can be tense with movements intended, suppressed, released through speech. And speak they do. Another impediment to theatrical applications of kinesthetic empathy is the centrality of spoken language to most forms of theatre. The prevailing model of kinesthetic empathy—and neurological models of motor perception, which the concept sometimes incorporates— is directed toward physical movements, and it provides less insight into how speech and language might function in a broader account of sensorimotor experience. Here, too, dramatic theatre is particularly disadvantaged. In practice, the more theatre art forms accentuate the physical aspects of performance (mime is a good example), the more they reward the existing study of kinesthetic empathy. Conversely, the more these forms incorporate spoken language alongside physical movement, the more obviously they require an expanded and refined kinesthetic vocabulary. Addressing this need, Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre offers a theoretical account of the sensorimotor and kinesthetic processes joining theatre spectators and performers in a dynamic of shared enactment. It takes up the existing work on kinesthetic empathy in dance studies, discussions of movement and movement perception in theatre studies, and the extensive insights on these subjects provided by phenomenology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and linguistics. In doing so, it insists that our response to others’ movements forms part of our broader sensorimotor attunement with our environment. Experience is fundamentally dynamic, and movement is the medium through which humans perceive and encounter their world. Underlying this fact is the phenomenon of animateness. The word animate, when used as an adjective, means “endowed with life, living, alive; (esp. in later use) alive and having the power of movement, like an animal.”9 The etymological linking of these meanings underscores the phenomenological inseparability of aliveness and movement. When we speak of someone or something (a statue, abstract painting, piece of music) as “animated,” the liveliness to which we refer manifests itself as movement, actual or potential—hence the technique of cinematic and other forms of animation, which brings still images to life by making them move. The fact that animate in this sense functions as a transitive verb (“to give life to, make alive or active”) supports the idea that humans have an active role to play in the animateness surrounding them.10

 INTRODUCTION  

7

If kinesthesia is the lived experience of one’s movements, then such experience, I argue, forms part of our fundamental attunement to the movements of our world. This phenomenological claim is supported by research in the cognitive sciences and the practice-related insights of dance and acting theorists. Shifting the focus on kinesthetic spectatorship to the experiential dynamic in which it arises allows us to reframe issues such as the role of mirroring activities in motor apprehension, intersubjectivity, and empathy. As long as this conversation is conducted only in neuroscientific terms, the correlations between functional magnetic resonance imaging and phenomenal experience remain indeterminable. Descriptions of empathy and motor resonance that rely exclusively or largely on mirror-­ neuron research must rise and fall with scientific claims and challenges. Understanding that one’s engagement with one’s own movements and the movement of others has its own experiential structures, on the other hand, allows us to orient our investigation toward the givenness of kinesthetic encounters. A phenomenological turn may not resolve what philosophers call the “hard problem” of consciousness—how do cognitive operations generate lived experience?—but it does provide a necessary other perspective for thinking about this question.11 I will have more to say about this shortly. One of this study’s contributions to the discussion of movement and movement observation in the theatre is that it explores the role of language as kinesthetic phenomenon. It does so based on two recognitions. For one thing, embodied utterance is gestural: it mobilizes the body’s musculature in intentionally directed, meaning-bearing acts. Our attention to the content of what is said in particular language encounters may eclipse the dynamics of its production, but this does not change the fact that utterance is a sensorimotor activity. With its traditional reliance on vocal training and its projective modes of address, theatrical speech foregrounds its corporeal delivery in ways that underscore its kinetic and kinesthetic foundations. For another thing, language is saturated with virtual movement. Language embodies actions and agents in its words and linguistic structures, and as an experience-conveying medium it generates its own sensorimotor realities. With their rival form of perceptual address, the movement/gestures embodied in language form part of the broader movement field that theatrical audiences inhabit and engage with. In theatre, the movements manifested by language counterpoint, reinforce, and interact with the physical movements; at times—the Messenger’s narrative of Oedipus’ self-blinding in Sophocles’ Oedipus

8  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

Rex, for instance—recounted movement eclipses onstage movement. Given that our kinesthetic responses to recounted movements bear similarities to the way we respond to physically observed movements, any notion of kinesthetic empathy in the theatre must take into account the stage’s multiple modes of presencing and enactment. By including language, I also introduce narrative and imagination to the investigation of movement perception.

Empathy, Otherness, and Disability If Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre examines the kinesthesia half of “kinesthetic empathy” by situating the concept in our broader sensorimotor attunement to the world and expanding it to include the movement fields of utterance and language, it also joins the longstanding theoretical discussions concerning empathy in performance. “Empathy” is a widely applied concept these days, but it is also a contested one. Much of this results from the term itself, which means different things to different people and has proved difficult to define with consistency or precision. In addition to resonance mechanisms, “empathy” is regularly used to signify sympathy, compassion, identification, engulfment, perspective-taking, and mindreading. Underlying most conceptions of empathy is the idea that individuals recognize and vicariously share the experience and point of view of others. In his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith described this using the term sympathy: “As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.”12 For Smith, this apprehension relies heavily on imagination, which allows us to place ourselves in another’s situation and conceive what it would be like to undergo the other’s experiences. His descriptions of actual sympathetic encounters, however, have a corporeal force that sidesteps mentalization: When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer. The mob [sic], when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in his situation.13

 INTRODUCTION  

9

Over a century later, Theodor Lipps used the giddying spectacle of an acrobat balancing on a high wire to argue for an organic connection between the visual and the kinesthetic. The term from philosophical aesthetics that Lipps used to describe this connection—Einfühlung, or “feeling into”—was translated into English as “empathy” by Edward Titchener in 1909. Scientists and philosophers disagree about the operations involved in empathy, and they disagree about the priority that these operations assume in empathic encounters. Given the further muddying introduced by the term’s psychological, therapeutic, ethical, and popular uses, there were moments in the writing of this book when I entertained the thought of sidestepping the term empathy entirely as an experiential and analytic category for the study of theatrical spectatorship and restricting myself to less loaded descriptive/analytic terms. But “empathy” cannot be dispensed with so easily. The concept is deeply embedded in theatre, dance, and performance theory; aesthetics; philosophy; cognitive science; and psychology, and it has occasioned a rich tradition of phenomenological inquiry, where it is frequently described under the broader rubric of intersubjectivity. Moreover, the literature on kinesthetic empathy has played a crucial role in my research, and I want the book that results from it to contribute to this important interdisciplinary area. So, while Kinesthetic Spectatorship focuses on the broader subject of sensorimotor experience, perception, and motor resonance in the theatre—with the word “empathy” not in its title—I address the phenomenon of empathy in the book’s final chapter. Readers who expect a global or integrative theory of empathy at that point will be disappointed. What this book offers, instead, is a perspective on theatrical empathy from a sensorimotor point of view attentive to the phenomenological and cognitive complexities of actual theatrical encounters. In offering this perspective, I do not mean to imply that all empathy is sensorimotor in origin or kinesthetic in the way it manifests itself. From the point of view of neuroscience, motor resonance has been shown to be one neural route to empathy among others. Cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind distinguish between “motor empathy,” “emotional empathy,” and “cognitive empathy,” and the experiments designed to study these phenomena often reinforce the distinctiveness of these ­categories. Outside the laboratory, however, our relations with others are multi-­channeled and holistic; they mobilize all our capacities and engagements. These engagements are animated: they take place within an inter-

10  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

subjective field constituted in terms of actual and latent movement. When we see anger in someone, we see it in the way she tightens her facial muscles, holds her body, directs her voice, walks or does not walk. This is especially true in theatre, where kinetic acts are foregrounded within the dynamic of display. The fact that we typically engage such acts while seated does not negate the kinesthetic nature of this encounter; as I will argue, sitting and not-moving exists on the movement continuum. While motor engagement in its many facets may not be the only way to think about empathy, in other words, it allows us to access a dynamic dimension of the self–other interaction, which includes (but does not subsume) other dimensions of empathy, including emotion. This last point is worth underscoring, since the notion of sharing another’s feelings has tended to dominate discussions of empathy. Considering the sensorimotor grounding of theatrical and other forms of spectatorship returns movement to the empathic equation, and it highlights the role of movement in seemingly different cognitive operations. What we think of as “empathy” is a dynamic, interactive process rather than a state of mind or feeling that one accomplishes then resides in atemporally. A different obstacle to the study of empathy is the specter of universalism. This specter can be found in the unexamined assumption that empathy provides unproblematic access to the minds and experiences of others. After centuries in which this assumption prevailed, we know that it is not true, that our ability to apprehend and empathize with others is conditioned by variables of culture, history, gender, race, and embodiment. The differences opened up by these variables raise difficult questions about accessibility, knowability, and identification, and they challenge any notion that empathy and kinesthetic engagement are automatic, total, or unmediated. When we claim to empathize with someone else, we run the risk of universalizing what we feel and mistaking our projections for actual, intersubjective apprehension. Others are hard to know, and the history of I– you (and we–you) encounters is littered with examples of appropriative empathy. The present study endorses and builds on the work of Foster and others who have challenged universalizing notions of empathy in dance studies and the work of neurologists who have demonstrated the variability and situatedness of neurological mirroring mechanisms. An important task of anyone writing about empathy and the mechanisms underlying it, this work indicates, is to delimit its achievements and qualify excessive claims made on its behalf. Crucial to doing so, I believe, is rigorous

 INTRODUCTION  

11

engagement with the issue of difference. Phenomenologically and cognitively, we come to know others by navigating a perceptual field of commonalities and differences. Denying a solipsism that would leave us imprisoned in our own worlds and a boundarylessness that would have us merge with those we encounter, we negotiate what we know, what we do not know but can, and what we cannot know and never will. The limitations and possibilities attendant on this situation complicate the phenomena of movement perception and kinesthetic resonance. What does it mean to say that we resonate with the movements of others? Do we actually inhabit their movements in an experiential sense, or do we vicariously activate our own motor repertoires and experiences? How do we engage with sensorimotor performances that are radically different from ours? If my sensorimotor capabilities and practices differ markedly from another’s, what happens when my sensorimotor orientation to the world encounters hers? As a vehicle for understanding the role of difference in sensorimotor encounters, Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre foregrounds the phenomenon of disability in its analysis. The variability of embodied subjectivity that disability highlights puts many of the assumptions concerning movement perception, kinesthetic resonance, and empathy to the test. As we will see in the chapter “Kinesthetic Resonance”, Martin’s writings on kinesthetic empathy in the 1930s assume a normative body; when disability appears in his discussion it is marked as a deficit or threat. A related form of ableism can be found in medico-scientific, psychological, and even phenomenology studies of movement that describe perceptual and motor dysfunction using the language of pathology. Most accounts of movement experience and movement perception, of course—including many of the ones referred to in this book—ignore disability entirely by taking ablebodiedness as an epistemological, cognitive, and experiential norm without considering alternative forms of embodiment and motility. Marginalizing or eliding disability in these ways impoverishes our understanding of those who fall into this category, but it also impoverishes our understanding of those who do not. Impairment and physical limitation are not restricted to the “disabled,” nor is the ability to execute movement the sole property of those we consider “able-bodied.” Incorporating disability by examining its role in movement and movement perception opens important insights into the ways we move through the world. It also gives us a sensorimotor perspective on the difficult question of how, and how much, we can know those who are different from us. While I reject the

12  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

universalist position that all experience is essentially the same, I am equally skeptical of the relativist claim evident or implicit in certain currents of identity studies that experience is hermetically sealed within individual or group identities. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposed in The Visible and the Invisible, we are attuned to one another, implicated in one another, as part of an innate intercorporeality (intercorporéité); our experiences, however different, are grounded kinesthetically as they are in other ways (cognitively and linguistically, for example).14 Social life—and its elaborated manifestations, such as theatre—hinge on the fact that another’s experience is to some degree comprehensible to me. By directing attention to our sensorimotor resonance with others, kinesthetic responsiveness provides an important tool for plumbing this apprehensibility and discerning its limits. If we acknowledge that sensorimotor resonance and the higherorder empathic projections it enables are never identical to the experiences they respond to, we can investigate the far more interesting questions of how we constitute a world that includes other people through our perceptual and kinesthetic engagements with it and how we come to know what disability theorist Lennard Davis calls the “commonality of bodies within the notion of difference.”15 Socially constructed categories of difference, such as disability, complicate the self–other encounter and the terms we use to discuss it. As Disability advocates and theorists have demonstrated, “disability” is an ideological, political, medical, and institutional category as well as—or more than—a physical condition. To quote Davis again: “The object of disability studies is not the person using the wheelchair or the Deaf person but the set of social, historical, economic, and cultural processes that regulate and control the way we think about and think through the body.”16 Disability is also, for those who embrace the term, a vehicle for solidarity, activism, and self-expression. Anthropologist and Disability activist Robert F. Murphy writes, “Disability is not simply a physical affair for us; it is our ontology, a condition of our being in the world.”17 The stigmatizing and empowering effects of this identification have consequences for those it encompasses in terms of how people with disabilities experience themselves and their relationship with others. As a way of acknowledging this influence, I will use the capitalized “Disability” to refer to the social category and the identitarian movement that has emerged over recent decades to contest its objectifications, while using the lower-case “disability” (and other terms, such as “inability,” “impairment,” and “divergence”) to designate sensorimotor and cognitive difference. I do this with

 INTRODUCTION  

13

the understanding that these levels are not independent of each other: that being viewed as Disabled by an ableist world is a form of sensorimotor disablement in its own right. For people who are identified with their impairments, disability is subjectively inseparable from Disability. As a way of integrating disability into a theory of movement perception, I highlight the issue of sensorimotor difference in many of the performances I discuss. Five productions involving disability are central to the chapters that follow: Sandglass Theater’s puppet play about dementia, D-Generation: An Exultation of Larks (2013); Deaf West Theatre’s revival of the musical Spring Awakening (2014); an evening of performances by Oakland’s AXIS Dance Company, a physically integrated company of performers (attended in 2015); Sam Gold’s Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (2007), with wheelchair-bound actress Madison Ferris as Laura Wingfield; and Proteus Theatre Company’s innovative one-man show Merrick, the Elephant Man (2007), which featured an able-bodied actor. With each of these productions—and other theatrical moments I discuss throughout this study—I explore kinetic and kinesthetic-based attempts to navigate the disabled–nondisabled divide. One of my contributions to the discussion of knowability, kinesthetic resonance, and empathy here and elsewhere in my book as these pertain to sensorimotor difference is phenomenological. Working from the perspective of kinesthetic experience, I examine the claim, put forward by some, that phenomenology erases difference, by considering this tradition’s attitudes toward disability. Taking Merleau-Ponty’s famous statement that “[c]onsciousness is originally not an ‘I think that,’ but rather an ‘I can’” back to its original formulation by Edmund Husserl, I show that Husserl conceived the phenomenon of I can in relationship to an equally fundamental I cannot.18 I propose that this counter-phenomenon be developed beyond Husserl’s limited application of it that I can and I cannot be understood in dialectical relation to each other. Building on Sara Ahmed’s critique of Merleau-Ponty’s I can in Queer Phenomenologies, I argue that I cannot be broadened to include those inabilities and inhibitions that are imposed from without—the gender-imposed inhibitions that Iris Marion Young identified in her influential 1980 essay “Throwing Like a Girl,” for instance, or the constraints that ableist society imposes on those who are differently embodied. But the limits that I cannot ­represents are also, I maintain, intrinsic to embodiment itself in a more fundamental way than Husserl’s ableist perspective allowed him to acknowledge. Recognizing that my own movements and my perception of others’ are

14  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

constituted, in part, by what I cannot do, know, or share provides a foundation for including difference within an understanding of sensorimotor enactment, resonance, and empathy. As I hope to demonstrate in the following chapters, a sensorimotor analysis sensitive to difference challenges the absolutism of disability/able-­ bodiedness binaries without denying the ideological and sociopolitical realities these categories point to. I understand how fraught this project is given longstanding discussions of Disability and other identity-derived categories of experience. I do not propose to speak for those who are Disabled; when I present this experience, it is through the written accounts of those who live it. The perspective I take in the performance encounters I describe is that of a largely able-bodied-up-to-this-point male who has had intimate contacts with disabled individuals over his lifetime, lived through episodes of impairment, and become more deeply acquainted with I cannot as he gets older. There are some things I know about being disabled (small “d”), some I am almost certain to learn, and many more I will never know. But the reality of living in a world populated by others with variable embodiments and sensorimotor/cognitive capacities is something everyone shares whether they acknowledge it or not. Embracing this reality, I have written a book less about disability than about the productive challenge disability presents to traditional models of phenomenal experience, cognition, and aesthetic reception. As Carrie Sandahl writes, “Disabilities are states of being that are in themselves generative and, once de-stigmatized, allow us to envision an enormous range of human variety—in terms of bodily, spatial, and social configurations.”19 Given the fact we are all “other” to everyone else in varying degrees, the issue of how we encounter difference—what we have access to and what we do not—is as important as the issue of difference itself. As I hope to show, theatre and other forms of performance offer a space where such encounters are foregrounded, questioned, and enabled.

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences As the earlier sections of this introduction have indicated, this book is a continuation of my longstanding interest in the phenomenology of theatre; those who are familiar with my earlier book Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama will see many of the same preoccupations revisited with the perspective of twenty four additional years spent thinking and writing about theatre. As in that earlier

 INTRODUCTION  

15

study, I approach the performing body as an experiential reference point of the performance space it inhabits and bodies forth, and as a phenomenological component of the audience’s perceptual field. The notion of kinesthetic spectatorship that I develop here allows me to explore this twinness with a differently attuned phenomenological attention. Because “kinesthetic empathy” and other models of motor resonance seek to understand the mutual relation of movement perception and enactment— the act of perceiving movement is accompanied by a virtual enactment of it—a focus on sensorimotor perception opens up additional layers in the actor–spectatorship relationship. Coming to terms with the phenomenology of movement and movement perception has allowed me to understand this relationship in more richly dynamic terms. As even a cursory look at the field demonstrates, the last ten years have seen a resurgent interest in phenomenological approaches to performance.20 In addition to the dance scholarship alluded to earlier, scholars and practitioners in theatre and performance studies have taken up phenomenological questions and methodologies. This interest has proceeded from, and in tandem with, the performative, corporeal, and experiential “turns” in theory and practice of the arts, and it has been inspired by experimental forms of technologically mediated, immersive, and participatory performance. I cannot do justice to the range of new work in this area, but I will single out a few exceptional books: Susan Kozel’s exploration of human bodies and digital technologies, Closer: Performances, Technologies, Phenomenology (2007); George Home-Cook’s study of theatrical listening, Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves (2015); Jon Foley Sherman’s A Strange Proximity: Stage Presence, Failure, and the Ethics of Attention (2016); and Maaike Bleeker, Sherman, and Eirini Nedelkopoulou’s collection Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations (2015), which brings together some of the most exciting performance-directed phenomenological work being done today.21 Those doing this work draw upon classical tradition of phenomenology—Edmund Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, and Erwin Straus—but they also interrogate this tradition and its conceptions of subjectivity, perception, and embodiment in light of contemporary theory, new performance practices, and our increasingly technologized, intermedial life-world. Scholars and performers have also explored the practical question of how one does phenomenology, generating valuable insights into the processual nature of phenomenological inquiry, the modes of attention and inscription best suited to capturing the nuances of ­experience,

16  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

and the differences between phenomenological descriptions and first-­ person impressions. One of the most important insights to emerge from this “new-wave” research is that performance itself is an important way of doing phenomenology. I am indebted to all of this work for carrying the phenomenological study of performance into a new millennium and for refining the terms that earlier scholars developed. I am indebted, as well, to scholars in such fields as anthropology, geography, and architecture for similarly important insights and applications. The expanding interdisciplinarity of phenomenological analysis is one of its most significant developments. In the chapters that follow I join a particularly influential interdisciplinary conversation: the growing dialogue between phenomenology and what is broadly defined as the cognitive sciences.22 This dialogue is both inevitable and methodologically fraught. It is inevitable because phenomenology and the cognitive sciences (in which I include cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, neuroscience, and cognitive linguistics) deal with similar and overlapping phenomena. It is methodologically fraught because the two traditions have historically defined themselves in opposition to each other. Husserl grounded his phenomenological philosophy on a critique of naturalism, the objectifying belief underlying positivist science that the world exists as something distinct from the perceiving subject.23 Applying his critique to all disciplines that treat phenomena, including consciousness, as entities that can be measured, analyzed, and manipulated, Husserl presented phenomenology and what he considered naïve empiricism as antithetical. For their part, scientists in the decades that followed usually dismissed phenomenology as empirically unsound, dependent on introspective rather than scientifically verifiable procedures and claims. This apparent incompatibility has been reexamined in recent decades by proponents on both sides of the phenomenology–cognitive science divide. As Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi note, this rapprochement has been supported by three developments in the cognitive sciences, all of which undermined the computational and cognitivist models that dominated studies of cognition to that point.24 One development was a revived interest in phenomenal consciousness and the methodological question of how one studies this scientifically.25 A second development was the emergence of embodied and enactive approaches to cognition, which rejected the mind–body dualism that continued to underwrite the cognitive disciplines. The third has to do with advances in neuroscience since the early 1990s. With the advent of technologies such as functional magnetic

 INTRODUCTION  

17

r­ esonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET), scientists have been able to generate highly detailed images of neural activity within and across specific brain regions. Not only does this experimental information suggest neurological correlates to the experiential processes that phenomenology and the philosophy of mind examine, but the scientists who design, conduct, and interpret brain-imaging experiments often depend on the reported experiences of experimental subjects. Given these parallel and intersecting developments, an approach such as phenomenology, which derives descriptive models of experience from rigorous procedures, has an important contribution to make to cognitive research. A number of philosophers with backgrounds in phenomenology have embraced this rapprochement from the other direction. Abandoning “pure” phenomenology—which hinges, as Alva Noë describes it, on the assumption “that phenomenology is free standing in the sense that phenomenological facts are logically and conceptually independent of empirical or metaphysical facts”—these philosophers propose different ways of accommodating phenomenology to the naturalized world that science and other objectifying disciplines examine.26 Daniel C. Dennett’s notion of “heterophenomenology,” which advocates a third-person approach to consciousness instead of the autophenomenology that traditional phenomenology is rooted in, is an early shift in this direction, as are the efforts of Francisco J.  Varela and others in the late 1990s to “naturalize” Husserlian phenomenology under the rubric “neurophenomenology.”27 More recently, philosophers have used phenomenological accounts of cognitive processes to confirm or challenge the models of science and analytic philosophy; examined phenomenological assumptions in light of these models; and opened new areas for dialogue. The robustness of the conversation is evident in the growing number of books and articles that explore these convergences.28 My own engagement with the cognitive sciences is methodological and pragmatic. Having previously argued for the complementarity of phenomenology to other disciplines and approaches, I proceed with the conviction that phenomenology and the cognitive sciences are natural collaborators in the investigation of experience. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty drew upon psychological and neurological case studies, such as Kurt Goldstein and Adler Gelb’s 1920 study of Schneider, a German man who sustained brain injuries during World War I. And Vittorio Gallese, one of the scientists who identified monkey mirror neurons at the University of Parma, contributed his understanding of Merleau-­Ponty to

18  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

the team’s conceptualization of what they had discovered.29 As these instances suggest, phenomenology and the cognitive sciences serve an importantly heuristic function for each other: phenomenological accounts of experience can guide empirical investigation, while empirical findings in the cognitive sciences can suggest new angles and possibilities for phenomenological inquiry. The fact that neurological systems function in specific, measurable ways during movement observation and enactment, for example, attests to the pre-conscious correlates of perceptual and sensorimotor experience. Understanding how these systems work can direct us to aspects of lived experience that otherwise may not have been readily apparent. At the same time, disciplined attention to the phenomenology of movement and perception reveals experiential nuances that neuroscience is unable to discern. Within the limits imposed by their different methodologies, in other words, phenomenology and the cognitive sciences can productively constrain each other by presenting evidence that the other would benefit from considering. Orthodox practitioners in both disciplines will reject such constraints, but the theoretical and methodological reciprocity between these different approaches to the study of mind has demonstrated its power to advance cognitive science, phenomenology, and the conversation between them. In my efforts to integrate phenomenology with insights and models drawn from the cognitive sciences, the work of scientists and philosophers studying embodied cognition and enactive perception, which I referred to earlier, has proven particularly congenial. The embodied approach to cognition, which originated in the 1980s, rejected the prevailing model of cognition as a largely disembodied set of operations based on the manipulation of symbolic representations of the external world. Mind and world in this model were understood to be separate from each other, and the brain was approached as a largely autonomous organ, processing information as a computer would. Rejecting this radically Cartesian model, the theory of embodied cognition understands the mind as inseparable from the body and its sensorimotor encounters with its environment. Cognitive operations do not exist prior to or independent of embodiedness; rather, they are dependent on the body’s situatedness in the world. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch explain this connection between the body and its environments: “By using the term embodied we mean to highlight two points: first, that cognition depends upon the kinds of experiences that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and second, that these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves

 INTRODUCTION  

19

embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context.”30 Humans have the cognitive structures they do, in other words, because of the bodies they have and the world they inhabit. As the proponents of embodied linguistics maintain, the sensorimotor base of human cognition is similarly embedded in conceptual thought and language.31 The embodied model is often combined with an enactive approach to perception. Enactivists reject the idea that perception consists of internal representations of a pre-given external world, arguing instead that perception arises in the dynamic, situated coupling of embodied subject and environment.32 When I look at an object, I do not passively receive its features as if I were a camera obscura with an inverted image projected onto an inside surface; rather, I constitute—or disclose—it as an object of perception through a process of skillful engagement. As Noë argues, perceiving is a form of action. Sensorimotor capability and the knowledge one acquires through its use are, according to this view, fundamental to our perceptual interaction with the world around us. When I look out my office window, I know that the buildings closest to me are built on the same scale as the buildings off in the distance—even though the former appear larger than the latter—because I know that if I walked toward one of those far-off buildings the relative scale of the two would readjust itself in predictable ways according to my movement and changing location. Were I to take this walk as a way of demonstrating this phenomenon, my excursion would entail countless information-eliciting movements: turning my head and upper body, scanning the scene and the buildings in question with my eyes, navigating my way across a changing, familiar landscape and through the obstacle-filled movement field of students on their way to class. In this example, as in perception generally, the ­environment I perceive and navigate “affords” me opportunities for sensorimotor engagement, to use environmental psychologist James ­ J. Gibson’s influential term. On a more intimate level, when I pick up a book and look at it, I do not perceive it all at once; rather, I scan it with my eyes as I hold it and turn it over. Noë, alluding to Merleau-Ponty’s resonant phrase “palpation with the eyes,” characterizes vision as “touchlike.”33 Perception in the enactivist model is fundamentally dynamic: it takes place in time and manifests itself in an unfolding relationship between perceiver and environment. Perception and action do not exist prior to their enactment; on the contrary, they emerge in a temporal process through their dynamic execution. To understand this process, proponents of embodied enaction often employ dynamic s­ystems

20  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

t­heory, which is highly compatible with phenomenological understandings of experience, to explore the operations of the cognitive-perceptual system. Noë’s citation of Merleau-Ponty in the previous paragraph affirms the deep compatibility between embodied enactivism and the phenomenological project. Both approaches see consciousness as embodied and enworlded, and both understand perception as constituting a world in which it is always already inherent. Phenomenology played an important role in Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s initial formulation of enaction, and the phenomenological description of experience remains essential to the enactive model. As Thompson insists in his later book Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, “once science turns its attention to subjectivity and consciousness, to experience as it is lived, then it cannot do without phenomenology, which thus needs to be recognized and cultivated as an indispensable partner to the experimental sciences of mind and life.”34 A methodological eclecticism involving these two approaches requires that one be sensitive to the different modes of investigation each employs; as Thompson’s term “partner” suggests, we should appreciate their integration as a dialogue rather than a synthesis. What is groundbreaking here is the conversation itself and the relationality it addresses. After years of parallel but mutually exclusive investigations, the inclusion of phenomenology in enactive cognitive science represents the first sustained attempt to take seriously Husserl’s claim that science is “rooted, grounded in the life-world.”35 I have also benefitted greatly from the empirical and theoretical work of cognitive scientists who would not necessarily place their work under the enactive umbrella, particularly Marc Jeannerod and others working in the area of motor cognition. To understand our perceptual predilection for animated over non-animated movement, I cite Gunnar Johansson’s point-­ light display experiments from the 1970s, and I draw upon other empirical studies of how humans experience and perceive movement. I also address neuroscientific research on the human mirror system because of its focus on the neural mechanisms linking action execution and observation. While the disproportionate attention that mirror neurons attracted when they were first publicized led one science journalist to refer to them as “the most hyped concept in neuroscience,” the evolving understanding of how and under what circumstances they function correlates in useful ways with non-neurological insights into the importance of intention to perception and kinesthetic mirroring, the personal and cultural variable that ­condition

 INTRODUCTION  

21

these responses, and the relationship between movement and ­emotion.36 This latter association is particularly important. As I argue throughout the following chapters, movement and affect are inseparably involved with each other. Emotions manifest themselves in movement, while movements themselves are affectively charged. In the words of Alain Berthoz, “there is no perception of space or movement, no vertigo or loss of balance, no caress given or received, no sound heard or uttered, no gesture of capture or grasping that is not accompanied by emotion or induced by it.”37 If a study of kinesthetic empathy is to be true to experience and avoid the charge of “motor chauvinism,” in other words, it must take the dynamic body’s multiple ways of experiencing itself into account.38 As I hope to demonstrate in the remainder of this book, a dialogue between phenomenology and cognitive science provides an opportunity for phenomenology to refine and extend its descriptive models of perception and embodiment. In specific terms, enactivism challenges traditional phenomenology to bring forward and develop its own dynamic account of embodied experience. Some canonical phenomenological studies—such as Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann’s The Structures of the Life-World (1973)—omit movement entirely from their descriptions of lived experience. Reflecting a kind of movement blindness, phenomenological accounts of perception such as this are often static in nature, positing an immobile, largely passive perceiving subject that brings the world to consciousness from a position of immobility. The following chapters draw heavily on the work of Husserl, whose philosophy of world constitution accords a primary place to kinesthesia, and Merleau-Ponty, who made movement central to the phenomenon of perception. I am also indebted to the writings of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, who sees movement as the central feature of animate being. As Sheets-Johnstone writes in the introduction to her book The Primacy of Movement, “movement offers us the possibility not only of formulating an epistemology true to the truths of experience, but of articulating a metaphysics true to the dynamic nature of the world and to the foundationally animated nature of life.”39 Embodied enactivism reinforces Sheets-Johnstone’s insight by insisting on perception’s sensorimotor engagement with its environment. The world, Noë reminds us, makes itself available to perception through physical movement and the interactions it affords.40 The enactive approach, in other words, provides an additional incentive for phenomenology to leave the study, get up and move.

22  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

The chapters that follow attempt to understand and contribute to a movement-oriented phenomenology. They do so by considering the stage as a kinetic/kinesthetic medium, one defined in terms of movement, movement perception, and the kinesthetic experience that integrates these. Underlying this investigation is the assumption that theatre makes use of sensorimotor and other phenomenological/cognitive processes that are employed in non-theatrical situations but refracts them through the aesthetic conditions imposed by spectatorial and representational conventions. As I have stated, my study draws upon traditions that are not overtly phenomenological, including the cognitive sciences, acting theory, dance theory, philosophy of mind, and linguistics. In its dialogue with cognitive sciences, it joins the work of F. Elizabeth Hart, John Lutterbie, and Phillip B. Zarrilli, all three of whom have addressed this dialogue from one methodological vantage point or another.41 This and the other dialogues I have referred to, however, are bound throughout this book to my own phenomenological immersion in the issues I write about. Attending plays and other performances, often more than once; viewing filmed theatrical productions when live ones were unavailable; working with actors; examining my experience and perception of movement; watching kinesthetic resonances come and go; observing at close hand and listening to accounts of the movement experiences of others, including those with disabilities; subjecting my certainties and assumptions to doubt—these are the phenomenological underpinnings of this book. Along with my uses of phenomenological models and non-­phenomenological research, in other words, my account of movement and movement perception is grounded in experience, observation, and the actuality of individual theatrical performances. Reflecting my conviction that theatre and performance theory benefit from the rigorous experiential descriptions that can complicate their methodologies and models, these observations and self-examinations are in many ways the heart of the book, and I employ the first-person mode of reporting more radically than I have before in a formal study of this nature. I am grateful to those who have shared their own experiences of movement inside and outside the theatre, especially those who helped me more deeply understand the theatre’s sensorimotor experience from the actor’s point of view. The I employed throughout this book’s discussion of movement and movement perception has different referents depending on the context in which it is used. This double-reference is strategic. Most of the time, as in this introduction, the first person denotes a particular I: Stan Garner,

 INTRODUCTION  

23

author of this book and subject of particular experiences, some of which are recounted in the course of my argument. With its unique life trajectories, body history, habits of perception and thought, and social positioning, this personal I marks the personal dimension of experience inside and outside the theatre. It also designated a position in the field of interpersonal encounter where differences in movement experience and perception throw each other into relief. At other times, the first person designates a hypothetical I, a point of view that subsumes the strictly personal within shared structures of experience and can also be designated by the third-­ person one. The descriptions I offer under this I draw upon personal experience considered phenomenologically, but they are not limited to this. In an effort to ground my general claims and minimize the risk of partiality, I have sought corroborating forms of evidence: other experiential accounts, established phenomenological and non-phenomenological models, and critiques of these models. I trust that the context in which each I is employed will make clear whether I am referring to the personal or the hypothetical—whether I move refers to me or to a generalized subject of commensurate abilities. At the same time, I welcome the occasional ambiguity that my bi-referential use of a single pronoun invites. My own experiences are intricately involved in the generalized accounts I offer, and I would occlude this relationship by insisting on too sharp a distinction between these experiences and the common structures I identify. The inherence of the perceiver in the phenomenon perceived is one of the things that separates phenomenology from objectivist forms of psychology. Inherence implies partiality, but when partiality becomes aware of itself it opens consciousness to the possibility—and the challenges—of alterity.42 In all accounts of movement experience and perception, I recognize the divergence of those who encounter the world through different perceptual/kinetic modalities, and I refer to their experience when appropriate. Much of what I thought I knew about movement has been revised as a result of my investigation of movement and movement perception. This investigation has led me in unexpected directions and to unanticipated perceptual and kinesthetic phenomena—hence my decision to replace the term kinesthetic empathy in the book’s title with the more inclusive, and open-ended, kinesthetic spectatorship. But at the end of this extended process my core beliefs about performance phenomenology have only intensified. These beliefs include the following: (1) that performance and spectatorship are deeply implicated in each other through the intercorporeal dynamics of perception, enactment, and embodiment; (2)

24  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

that theatrical experiences are generated through acts of “presencing” rather than invariable presences; (3) that language is a mode of embodiment in the theatre as well as outside of it; and (4) that theatre phenomenology and the study of theatrical cognition ground their most powerful insights in the close examination of actual performance moments.43 It is my hope that the following chapters justify these claims by deepening my attention to what actor and mime artist Jean-Louis Barrault termed “Presence in motion.”44

Spectatorship and Mimesis As the preceding sections of this introduction make clear, my intention in writing this book is to situate empirical models of sensorimotor cognition within the phenomenological dynamics of movement and movement perception. My procedure is accumulative, starting with the experiential foundations of movement and movement cognition and building to broader questions of resonance, language, empathy, and ethics that rest, in part, on this base. The chapter “Movement and Animation” examines the fundamental structures of self-movement and external movement perception. It considers the centrality of movement to animacy and the perception of animacy in living and non-living elements of one’s environment, and it explores the perceptual predisposition of human beings to recognize biological movement and involve themselves kinesthetically with movements that fall within a repertoire of familiar sensorimotor experience. The chapter applies these insights to theatre by exploring the phenomenology of animacy in performing objects and the kinesthetic dynamics of stillness and movement in relation to actors onstage. The chapter “Movement, Difference, and Ability” considers a number of theoretical and methodological questions concerning the phenomenological study of movement and proposes strategies for negotiating the categories of normality and difference. Advocating a methodological practice that embraces divergence, it offers a phenomenological foundation for engaging what we know and fall short of knowing in the kinesthetic experiences of others. The chapter “Movement, Attention, and Intentionality” explores two important elements of kinesthetic spectatorship: attention and intentionality. Looking at key ways in which theatre engages movement differently than it is engaged in non-performance situations, it considers the relation of focal and marginal attention, the selectivity of theatrical attention, the

 INTRODUCTION  

25

centrality of intentionality to action recognition, and the role of affect in the execution and perception of movement. After expanding the intentional model to include micro-intentions and what developmental psychologist Daniel N. Stern calls “interintentionality,” the chapter concludes with a discussion of contemporary performance attempts to establish a “post-intentional” theatre. The chapter “Kinesthetic Resonance” focuses on our vicarious engagement with the movements of others. It traces the concept of kinesthetic empathy in dance studies and the parallel work on human mirroring in neuroscience and suggests how these complementary explorations can be understood in relation to each other. Adapting these general phenomenological and cognitive models to the experiential field of actual performance, and building on specific encounters inside and outside the theatre, it argues that kinesthetic activity in the theatre is situational, interactive, and variable. The chapter “Language, Speech, and Movement” explores the function of language and verbal performance in the kinesthetic interchange between actors and spectators. Drawing upon the work of cognitive scientists and linguists, it considers the ways that language and verbal utterance condition theatrical kinesthesis. In addition to examining the linguistic embodiment of action (particularly through action verbs), the chapter looks at the kinesthetically important relationships that can be established between language, speech, and gesture. The chapter “Empathy and Otherness”) examines the phenomenon of empathy from a sensorimotor and kinesthetic point of view. It begins by considering the components of empathy and looking at different definitions of empathy within the philosophical, scientific, and phenomenological traditions. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s Infinity and Totality, it considers the place of alterity in empathic interactions and what it means for spectators and actors to navigate otherness and difference empathically. The chapter concludes by addressing the issue of actors taking on, or performing, characters from different identity communities. Employing Richard Schechner’s notion of “deep mimesis,” it offers a kinesthetic perspective on the issues at stake in the controversial practice of non-disabled actors taking on disabled roles.45 The theatrical and other performance terrain covered by these chapters is rich and varied. In addition to the productions mentioned earlier and other productions attended and remembered, my exploration of movement and movement perception in the theatre led me to theatre, puppet, dance, and mime performance, the 2016 Stella and Stanley Shouting Contest in New Orleans, and a variety of traditional and experimental

26  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

productions ranging from the 1976 Royal Shakespeare Company Macbeth with Judi Dench in the role of Lady Macbeth to Complicite’s immersive 2015 production The Encounter.46 With few exceptions, all of the plays, theatre/dance/performance works, and productions I write about are ones that I have seen live or digitally. Although I am aware that watching a theatrical or dance performance on DVD or on the internet is not the same as watching it live, my experience working with recorded versions of performances I have seen live convinces me that the former can convey many of the latter’s kinesthetic dynamics. The movement-based approach that these chapters develop will resonate, I hope, with actors and those who train them. Whether an actor is trained in a Stanislavski-derived tradition or more explicitly physical traditions such as those developed by Meyerhold, Jerzy Grotowski, Jacques Lecoq, Anne Bogart, and Tadashi Suzuki, he or she understands in a profoundly physical way that performance is inseparable from movement. Dancers, musicians, singers, acrobats, mime artists, jugglers, preachers, shamans, and athletes understand this as well, of course. Until recently, however, those who theorize dramatic theatre have tended to neglect this theatre’s sensorimotor grounding. The neglect of movement experience has been particularly pronounced when it comes to audiences and our understanding of dramatic spectatorship. One reason for this is that our phenomenological understanding of spectatorship is still relatively young: much remains to be understood about the audience’s modes of attending theatrical performance, and until recently spectator and reception studies tended to focus on disembodied mental operations. Another likely reason is that most—though by no means all—dramatic theatre is conducted with audience members seated in relation to the onstage action. Yet while spectators may suspend certain motor engagements with the outside world when they take their seats—are, in fact, socialized to do so in many theatre cultures—they continue to move and to perceive movement around them and on stage. Sitting and the act of “not moving” are kinesthetic phenomena, in other words, and spectators (seated or not) are an essential part of the theatre’s sensorimotor field. The audience absorption that conventional dramatic theatre often aspires to should not disguise this fact. In order to address the frequent neglect of movement and motility in accounts of theatrical spectatorship, I focus on the spectator’s experience in the chapters that follow. The spectator, I contend, is the missing piece in our understanding of theatrical movement, the element that allows us to recognize movement as a dynamic circuit rather than a unidirectional

 INTRODUCTION  

27

display. By insisting on the spectator’s participation in this circuit, my analysis parallels the work of other recent scholars who have studied spectatorship through audience-based research. Janelle Reinelt describes this work as “the kind of research that tells us what spectators experience, how they make meaning or feel in relation to theatre, and how they come to value ‘assisting at performance.’”47 Kinetic Spectatorship complements this research by suggesting the movement-oriented phenomenological underpinning of the experiences such participants identify. Employing a cognitively informed phenomenological approach, it develops two seemingly incompatible insights: (1) that these experiences have common structures and features and (2) that they are highly individual, to the point that no two experiences are identical. This—as I have posited elsewhere—is both the task and the promise of phenomenology: to identify the shared variables that render difference and individuality conceivable.48 Some final reflections before turning to the main body of this study. By making the spectator–actor interaction central to my discussion of theatrical experience and grounding this interaction in the field of movement observation and enactment, I propose a more kinesthetically oriented, enactive way of understanding theatrical mimesis. Traditionally, the term mimesis has been used to describe two things: the act of imitation and a representational correspondence between a work of art and the world it depicts (typically a relationship of fidelity or exactitude). The two meanings are intimately related, of course, in that imitation aspires to resemblance as this concept is dictated by cultural, aesthetic, and other conventions. Since Plato, Aristotle, and Aristotle’s neoclassical successors, traditional discussions of theatrical mimesis have centered on representation—in other words, on the relationality between imitation and the imitated, copy and original. When agency is considered in mimetic representation, the emphasis in conventional mimetic theory shifts, as Bruce McConachie has pointed out, to those who “do the imitating”: playwrights and actors.49 The spectator-directed approach that I employ here undermines the representational bias by including the audience as co-enactors of dramatic and theatrical mimesis. Recognizing, resonating with, and vicariously enacting the actions we observe or hear about on stage, we join the actor in constituting the mimetic field.50 Like the actor’s, our mindful bodies play the performance’s unfolding sensorimotor score. While this phenomenological/cognitive dynamic does not sidestep representation, it undermines the assumptions that have historically ­ underwritten mimetic theory. When an infant sticks out its tongue in

28  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

response to its mother doing the same, is this representation? It may be, but only in a sensorimotor, enactive, and richly intersubjective sense. Shifting the focus from representation to imitation and from playwright and actor to spectator reclaims a more performative, perception-oriented notion of mimesis. This understanding—that mimesis is a sensorimotor act grounded in perceptual contact with the world—is evident in many of the term’s non-aesthetic uses. Biologists use mimesis to refer to species imitating or mimicking other species; Renaissance rhetoricians to refer to speakers imitating the words, gestures, and mannerisms of another; and anthropologists such as Michael Taussig refer to cultural groups taking on the embodied signatures and practices of other cultural groups. This latter usage informs the performance anthropology of scholars such as Joseph Roach, whose study Cities of the Dead examines the circum-­ Atlantic mimetic exchanges evident in New Orleans Mardi Gras and other cultural performances. A more robustly enactive, intersubjective understanding of mimesis brings out the spectatorial component in Aristotle’s discussion of the term in chapter four of The Poetics: “For the process of imitation is natural to mankind from childhood on: Man is differentiated from other animals because he is the most imitative of them, and he learns his first lessons through imitation, and we observe that all men find pleasure in imitations.”51 This chapter—which comes after a more formal discussion of the means, objects, and manner of imitation and is followed by the elements and genres of imitation—describes mimesis as a meaning-invested activity of observation and enactment, an innately human disposition to take the world in, make it one’s own, and perform it back. While Aristotle’s attention is on the poet as ultimate maker of the mimetic artifact, his recognition that mimesis is originally the property of a perceiving, cognitively attuned subject opens the space for a mimetic understanding of theatrical spectatorship. This opening takes us into the actual world of performance—bodies moving in proximity to each other, gestures, sounds, and objects—that The Poetics goes to great lengths to hold at bay. It returns theatre—and dramatic theatre as its popular incarnation—to dance and other movement-­ intensive performance forms. As Hans-Thies Lehmann notes, the word mimeisthai, from which “mimesis” was derived, meant “to represent through dance.”52 From the perspective outlined in this book, a kinesthetic account of theatrical spectatorship unifies mimetic and ostensibly non-mimetic performance in the dynamic world of movement, perception, and others.

 INTRODUCTION  

29

Notes 1. William James, Principles of Psychology, 2: 1134 (emphasis in original). 2. Tiffany Watt Smith surveys nineteenth-century research on involuntary mimicry in “Theatre and the Sciences of Mind.” 3. Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason, Introduction to Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, 17–18. 4. Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain—How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, ix. 5. For an overview of some of the major scholarship in this area, see Karen Barbour, “Beyond Somatophobia: Phenomenology and Movement Research in Dance.” 6. Ann Cooper Albright, “Situated Dancing: Notes from Three Decades in Contact with Phenomenology,” 8. 7. Mark Franko, “Editor’s Note,” 3. 8. Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre, 69. 9. Oxford English Dictionary. 10. Ibid. 11. Philosopher and cognitive scientist David J. Chalmers writes: “It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-­processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does” (“Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” 201). 12. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 11. 13. Ibid., 12. 14. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 141. 15. Lennard Davis, Bending over Backward: Disability, Dismodermism, and Other Difficult Positions, 31. 16. Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, 2. 17. Robert F. Murphy, The Body Silent, 90. 18. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 139. 19. Carrie Sandahl, “Considering Disability: Disability Phenomenology’s Role in Revolutionizing Theatrical Space,” 19.

30  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

20. In his 2012 overview of phenomenological work in theatre and performance studies, Stuart Grant calls this recent interest a “renaissance” (“Genealogies and Methodologies of Phenomenology in Theatre and Performance Studies,” 11). 21. For an overview of twentieth-century theatre phenomenology, see Stanton B. Garner Jr., “Theatre and Phenomenology.” 22. I address this dialogue more fully in Stanton B.  Garner Jr., “Watching Movement: Phenomenology, Cognition, Performance.” 23. For a discussion of this, see Dermot Moran, “Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy and the Critique of Naturalism.” Husserl, it is important to note, did not reject the natural attitude; rather, he proposed grounding this attitude in a phenomenological account of consciousness and world. 24. Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind, 4–6. 25. Shaun Gallagher and Francisco J. Varela point out: “It is nothing short of ironic that just when many phenomenologists were trading in their volumes of Husserl and Sartre for the texts of poststructural analysis, and thus abandoning the very notion of consciousness, philosophers of mind, who had started their work on ground circumscribed by Ryle’s behavouristic denial of consciousness, were beginning to explore the territory left behind by the phenomenologists” (“Redrawing the Map and Resetting the Time: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,” 95). 26. Alva Noë, “Critique of Pure Phenomenology,” 231. 27. See Daniel C.  Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 66–98; Francisco J. Varela, “Neurophenomenology”; and Jean Petitot et  al., Naturalizing Phenomenology: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Neurophe­ nomenology, which was introduced by Varela in the mid-1990s, integrates phenomenological descriptions of experience, dynamic systems theory, and experimental brain science. Subjects in neurophenomenological studies are trained to provide reliable and consistent descriptions of their experience, and these descriptions are used to identify phenomena for further experimentation and to facilitate the interpretation of neurobiological data. In its collaborative use of first- and third-person perspectives, neurophenomenology represents a more genuine rapprochement between science and phenomenology than Dennett’s heterophenomenology, which insists on the priority of neutral, third-person analysis. For a critique of Dennett’s project see Gallagher and Zahavi, Phenomenological Mind, 19–21. 28. See, for example, the essays in Shaun Gallagher and Daniel Schmicking, eds. Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. The journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, which fosters dialogue between phenomenology, empirical science, and analytic philosophy of mind, was established in 2002.

 INTRODUCTION  

31

29. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 105–40, 157–60; Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others, 16–17. 30. Francisco J.  Varela et  al., The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Sciences and Human Experience, 172–73. 31. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; Johnson, The Body in the Mind; and Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh. 32. For a discussion of the enactive approach, see Francisco J. Varela et  al., Embodied Mind: Cognitive Sciencers and Human Experience, esp. 147–84; Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 13–15, 204; and John Stewart et al., eds., Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science. 33. Alva Noë, Action in Perception, 73. 34. Thompson, Mind in Life, 14. 35. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 129–30. 36. Christian Jarrett, “Mirror Neurons: The Most Hyped Concept in Neuroscience?” 37. Alain Berthoz, The Brain’s Sense of Movement, 7. 38. Daniel M. Wolpert et al., “Perspectives and Problems in Motor Learning,” 487. 39. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement, xix. 40. Noë, Action in Perception, 1. 41. Hart addresses the compatibility between phenomenology and cognitive sciences in “Performance, Phenomenology, and the Cognitive Turn.” Lutterbie, who has a background in phenomenology, alludes to this approach in Toward a General Theory of Acting, which proposes a theory of acting based on dynamic-systems theory. Zarrilli has incorporated enactive theory with a long-standing interest in phenomenology. See, for example, Psychophysical Acting: An Intercultural Approach after Stanislavski, “An Enactive Approach to Understanding Acting,” and “The Actor’s Work on Attention, Awareness, and Active Imagination.” 42. In an important article entitled “Phenomenology as a Form of Empathy” Matthew Ratcliffe argues that the phenomenological stance enables a distinctive form of empathic engagement with experiences such of those of psychiatric illness. By suspending, or calling into question, the shared world that we habitually accept as a basis for understanding another’s experience, the phenomenological attitude “allows us to contemplate the possibility of structurally different ways of ‘finding oneself in the world’” such as psychiatric illness (473). Ratcliffe refers to this apprehension as “radical empathy.” 43. On the notion of theatrical presencing, see Garner, Bodies Spaces 43, 230. Cormac Power develops this idea in Presence in Play: A Critique of Theories of Presence in the Theatre, 176–91.

32  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

44. Jean-Louis Barrault, Reflections on the Theatre, 61. 45. Richard Schechner, “Anna Deveare Smith, Acting as Incorporation,” 63. 46. When the performance segments I discuss are available digitally, I provide information so that those reading this book can access them. 47. Janelle Reinelt, “What UK Spectators Know: Understanding How We Come to Value Theatre,” 337. 48. See Garner, Bodied Spaces, 12–13. 49. Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre, 72. 50. My work on spectatorial mimesis throughout this book owes a debt to Bruce Wilshire’s phenomenological study Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor, which explores the audience’s mimetic investment in the actor’s performance. As his phrase “mimetic engulfment” indicates, however, Wilshire’s spectatorship is passive rather than dynamic, involving the “quasi-hypnotic” fusion of self and other (xv). The spectatorship I describe in the present study, by contrast, is active and interactive. 51. Aristotle, Aristotle’s Poetics, 7. 52. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 69. Walter Benjamin wrote of the “mimetic genius” of dance and “other cultic occasions” (“On the Mimetic Faculty,” 334).

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press. Albright, Ann Cooper. 2011. Situated Dancing: Notes from Three Decades in Contact with Phenomenology. Dance Research Journal 43 (2): 7–18. Aristotle. 1968. Aristotle’s Poetics: A Translation and Commentary for Students of Literature. Trans. Leon Golden, commentary by O. B. Hardison, Jr. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Barbour, Karen. 2005. Beyond Somatophobia: Phenomenology and Movement Research in Dance. Junctures 4: 35–51. Barrault, Jean-Louis. 1951. Reflections on the Theatre. Trans. Barbara Wall. London: Salisbury Square. Benjamin, Walter. 1978. On the Mimetic Faculty. In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott, 333–336. New  York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Berthoz, Alain. 2000. The Brain’s Sense of Movement. Trans. Giselle Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bleeker, Maaike, Jon Foley Sherman, and Eirini Nedelkopoulou, eds. 2015. Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations. New York: Routledge.

 INTRODUCTION  

33

Chalmers, David J. 1995. Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3): 200–219. Davis, Lennard. 1995. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso. ———. 2002. Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodermism, and Other Difficult Positions. New York: New York University Press. Dennett, Daniel C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown. Foster, Susan Leigh. 2011. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. London: Routledge. Franko, Mark. 2011. Editor’s Note: What Is Dead and What Is Alive in Dance Phenomenology? Dance Research Journal 43 (2): 1–4. Gallagher, Shaun, and Daniel Schmicking, eds. 2010. Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Dordrecht: Springer. Gallagher, Shaun, and Francisco J. Varela. 2003. Redrawing the Map and Resetting the Time: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 33 (supplement 1): 93–132. Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. 2012. The Phenomenological Mind. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Garner, Stanton B., Jr. 2001. Theatre and Phenomenology. Degrés: Revue de synthèse à orientation sémiologiques, 107–108 (Autumn–Winter 2001): B1–B17. ———. forthcoming. Watching Movement: Phenomenology, Cognition, Performance. In Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance, and Cognitive Science, ed. Bruce McConachie and Rick Kemp. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 1994. Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Grant, Stuart. 2012. Genealogies and Methodologies of Phenomenology in Theatre and Performance Studies. Nordic Theatre Studies 24: 9–20. Hart, F. Elizabeth. 2006. Performance, Phenomenology, and the Cognitive Turn. In Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, ed. Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart, 29–51. London: Routledge. Home-Cook, George. 2015. Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Iacoboni, Marco. 2009. Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others. New York: Picador. James, William. 1981. The Principles of Psychology. 1890. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jarrett, Christian. 2012. Mirror Neurons: The Most Hyped Concept in Neuroscience? Psychology Today Blog, December 10. https://www.psychologytoday.com/comment/269216. Accessed 30 Jan 2018.

34  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kozel, Susan. 2007. Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. Karen Jürs-Munby. London: Routledge. Lutterbie, John. 2011. Toward a General Theory of Acting: Cognitive Science and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McConachie, Bruce. 2008. Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. 1964, ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Moran, Dermot. 2008. Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy and the Critique of Naturalism. Continental Philosophy Review 41 (4): 401–425. Murphy, Robert F. 1990. The Body Silent: The Different World of the Disabled. New York: Norton. Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2007. The Critique of Pure Phenomenology. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (1–2): 231–245. Petitot, Jean, Francisco J.  Varela, Bernard Pachoud, and Jean-Michel Roy, eds. 1999. Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Power, Cormac. 2008. Presence in Play: A Critique of Theories of Presence in the Theatre. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Ratcliffe, Matthew. 2012. Phenomenology as a Form of Empathy. Inquiry 55 (5): 473–495. Reinelt, Janelle. 2014. What UK Spectators Know: Understanding How We Come to Value Theatre. Theatre Journal 66 (3): 337–361. Reynolds, Dee, and Matthew Reason. 2012. Introduction to Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, ed. Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason, 17–25. Bristol: Intellect. Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Corrado Sinigaglia. 2008. Mirrors in the Brain—How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions. Trans. Frances Anderson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press. Sandahl, Carrie. 2002. Considering Disability: Disability Phenomenology’s Role in Revolutionizing Theatrical Space. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 16 (2): 17–32.

 INTRODUCTION  

35

Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 2011. The Primacy of Movement. Expanded second ed. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Sherman, Jon Foley. 2016. A Strange Proximity: Stage Presence, Failure, and the Ethics of Attention. New York/London: Routledge. Smith, Adam. 2002. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. States, Bert O. 1985. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stewart, John, Olivier Gapenne, and Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, eds. 2010. Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Sciences and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Watt Smith, Tiffany. 2016. Theatre and the Sciences of Mind. In Late Victorian into Modern, ed. Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn, and Kirsten E. Shepherd-­ Barr, 364–378. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilshire, Bruce. 1982. Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wolpert, Daniel M., Zoubin Ghahramani, and J.  Randall Flanagan. 2001. Perspectives and Problems in Motor Learning. Trends in Cognitive Science 5 (11): 487–494. Zarrilli, Phillip. 2007. An Enactive Approach to Understanding Acting. Theatre Journal 59 (4): 635–647. ———. 2009. Psychophysical Acting: An Intercultural Approach after Stanislavski. London: Routledge. ———. 2015. The Actor’s Work on Attention, Awareness, and Active Imagination: Between Phenomenology, Cognitive Science, and Practices of Acting. In Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations, ed. Maaike Bleeker, Jon Foley Sherman, and Eirini Nedelkopoulou, 75–96. New  York/ London: Routledge.

Movement and Animation

Moving in the World In the words of Jacques Lecoq, everything moves.1 People move. Animals move. Plants move as they grow, stretch to catch the sun’s rays, sway in the breeze. The earth rushes through space while spinning on its axis, and its tectonic surface shifts in movements both sudden and imperceptible. The air moves—and with it clouds, leaves, and the seagull coasting on a current. Fire mesmerizes when it flickers on a candle wick, awes and terrifies when it rages in the wild. The machines that populate our world move, and move us with them. Gravity keeps things still, fixes them to the earth, but it also moves them: boulders roll down a rock face and onto the highway; that which is up falls down. At the microbial level, bacteria move in our stomachs and in a drop of pond water; at the cosmic level, galaxies rush away from each other as the universe expands. Within and beyond the threshold of awareness, we live in movement. Try tuning in to this movement environment. Take attention away from your thoughts and whatever projects or activities you may be pursuing. Let the movements you see, hear, and feel move to the front of your awareness. Now practice this attention while moving. What discloses itself in this simple phenomenological exercise is the kinetic field we inhabit even before we are born. When I walk, my limbs and body core move in learned coordination, adjusting themselves in myriad ways to resist and channel the disequilibrium of falling. My head shifts © The Author(s) 2018 S. B. Garner, Jr., Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre, Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91794-8_2

37

38  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

and, with it, my visual field. If I am walking on a crowded sidewalk, I experience my movements as part of the larger flow of people, forming ourselves into opposite streams, swerving to avoid those who enter, exit, or cross these streams. My eyes scan this landscape of objects and others, fixing on a face, a storefront, a street sign. Throughout this, I am aware of my breathing, my pulse rate, and the related changes they undergo when I speed up or slow down. Occasionally, I become aware of my body’s deeper kinesthetic sensations: a remembered joke makes me chuckle, my stomach growls with hunger. Reflection reveals additional movement dimensions of my experience. When I speak of my thoughts, emotions, and sensations, I often do so in kinetic terms. Thoughts race through my mind, I struggle with a difficult idea, memories resurface when I seem to have forgotten them. Emotions “move” through my body, and I feel “moved” when they do so. Happiness lifts me up, sadness drags me down, anger courses through my body, and disgust makes my stomach turn. Many of the expressions we use to describe feeling states have a physiological basis: the pain that “shoots” down my arm manifests itself through a sequence of neural activations. We can call this understanding metaphoric only if we recognize that such associations reflect our experience at the deepest levels. No matter how much I try to still myself when alone—lying in bed, listening to music, reading in my chair— the body I inhabit is a kinetic entity, alive with circulatory, respiratory, tactile, and affective energies. As animate beings we experience the world and ourselves within it dynamically, and the perception we bring to language and experiences is inextricably bound up with our sensorimotor life. In Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s words, movement is our “mother tongue.”2 The challenge facing an account of movement and movement perception is to uncover this kinetic/kinesthetic language’s modes of disclosure. As Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka has written, the world that constitutes the prerequisite and milieu for our “pretheoretical life” is not the world we observe and contemplate, but the world in which we move and are active.3 The example of sailing will help clarify what it means to move within this world. When I get ready to sail, I step into a boat that floats on a body of water. If I have chosen a good day for sailing, the air around me moves in the form of wind. The wind, which blows steadily or in gusts, disturbs the surface of the water, which may also be moving in the form of currents. Once I have control of the sail and my hand is on the tiller, I set off, letting the wind release its kinetic energy as it is captured by my sail and redirected. The act of sailing requires steady attunement to the kinetic interactions of wind, water, sail, rudder, boat, and my own body.

  MOVEMENT AND ANIMATION   

39

The ability to coordinate these movements depends on a skillful attunement of body to environment—an experiential knowledge of dynamic forces that links me, in my vastly less accomplished way, to the Phoenicians. If I have not sufficiently attained this knowledge, or if I make an error of judgment, I risk ending up in the water. In sailing, to borrow a metaphor from the activity itself, we navigate our way through and in response to the physical forces that constitute our movement environment. Manipulating rudder and sail while sitting in the boat, I am inhabited by these same forces. As the boat pitches through rough waters, I move as surely as the boat does, and my hair blows with the wind. Because I am an animate being, though, my own movements are phenomenologically different from the movements of air, water, and boat. Unlike these purely physical movements, the movements I generate when I shift my balance, manipulate the tiller, and tighten or loosen the ropes I am holding are self-generated. These movements are intentional, coherent, and environmentally directed. Just as crucially, they are mine. This “mineness” is evident to my external senses: I see the hands that I know are mine pull the rope and the legs that are equally familiar brace to maintain my balance when the boat leans. Subtending this recognition is the more pervasive kinesthetic awareness I have of my body moving itself— evidence from within, as it were. Phenomenologically, kinesthetic perception is an awareness of the body’s responsive, meaningful movement within its environment. This movement can be purposeful and highly directed—as when I saw off a dead tree limb, learn a series of dance steps, or thread a needle—or it can joy in its own spontaneity, as when I splashed around at the beach as a child. At the core of kinesthetic awareness is motility, “the power of active movement.”4 While motility is often used to refer to actual movements, the term also designates the ground of possibility for self-movement. I move because I know myself to be capable of movement. This understanding of motility recalls Edmund Husserl’s I can [ich kann], the perceived ability that is necessary if one is to act. For Husserl, this I am capable of depends on motility and kinesthetic awareness: “Originally, the ‘I move,’ ‘I do,’” precedes the ‘I can do.’”5 Of this kinesthetic I can he writes, I know through experience that the parts of my Body move in that special way which distinguishes them from all other things and motions of things (physical, mechanical motions); i.e., they have the character of subjective movement, of the ‘I move [ich bewege].’ And from the very outset this can be apprehended as something practically possible.6

40  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

Kinesthesis is a primary means by which one constitutes one’s environment: I come to know my world by moving through it, by turning my head to look at things, by picking up objects and moving them. At the same time, this interaction works reflexively by deepening an awareness of my practical kinesthetic capabilities. The reciprocal process of world and self-constitution through movement lies at the origins of human consciousness; as Husserl observes, the “child in its mother’s womb already has kinestheses and through this kinesthetic mobility, its things.”7 For Husserl, kinesthesis testifies to the freedom of a human will that realizes its goal-directed intentions by acting within its field of possibility. What Husserl refers to as the ego has the freedom to “move this Body— i.e., the organ in which it is articulated—and to perceive the world by means of it.”8 The freedom inherent in I can and I move, however, is not unbounded. Habits and past experiences shape the way I move and act; many of my movements are instinctive and involuntary; and I encounter resistances to my movements and actions in my environment and in the limitations of my own body. I will develop Husserl’s notion of the I cannot [ich kann nicht] in the chapter “Movement, Difference, and Ability” as a way of thinking about divergent embodiments. Husserl’s focus on kinesthesis has been carried forward by Sheets-­ Johnstone, whose expansive writings since the late  1960s  represent the most sustained phenomenologically oriented argument for the importance of movement and kinesthetic experience to animate life. For Sheets-­ Johnstone, animation and movement are inseparable. Whether human or non-human, animate beings have the power of self-movement; they discover themselves and their world through movement. Reminding us that infants are born into the world moving, she offers a kinetically oriented account of human development: In the beginning, we are simply infused with movement—not merely with a propensity to move, but with the real thing. This primal animateness, this original kinetic spontaneity that infuses our being and defines our aliveness, is our point of departure for living in the world and making sense of it. [. . .] We literally discover ourselves in movement. We grow kinetically into our bodies. In particular, we grow into those distinctive ways of moving that come with our being the bodies we are. In our spontaneity of movement, we discover arms that extend, spines that bend, knees that flex, mouths that shut, and so on. We make sense of ourselves in the course of moving. We discover ourselves as animate organisms.9

  MOVEMENT AND ANIMATION   

41

Our mastery of our world hinges on tactile-kinesthetic responsivity and our ability to move in relation to our environment. The primal animation that experience discloses cannot be described anatomically or kinesiologically; it can only be recognized by carefully attending to the bodily experiences of movement: to its spontaneity, its kinetic qualities, and its “felt unfolding dynamic.”10 Sheets-Johnstone critiques cognitive scientific and philosophical approaches (including the work of some phenomenologists) for employing language and conceptual schemes drawn from mechanics (such as the term motor), and falling back on what she calls a “pointillist” conception of movement: “individuals move from point A to point B, following along the lines of an intentional arc.”11 Such approaches neglect the experiential givenness of self-movement and the kinetic/kinesthetic consciousness through which the animate subject initiates, inhabits, and carries through its own movements.

Qualities of Self-Movement Animate beings move themselves at multiple levels and in multiple ways. Single-cell protozoa move themselves by cilia and flagella on the surface of their organism and by modifying their shape and the flow of cytoplasm in a kind of crawl. In this biological sense, all organic life is self-moving. In the discussion of human movement that occupies this book, however, I will be using self-movement in a more specific sense. In self-movement I understand myself to be the agent of my movement, and I experience my movement as purposive. Movements so defined can be distinguished from the many other movements that comprise my motility. These include the automatic, largely unconscious movements made by the body’s interior organs, what Drew Leder refers to as “visceral motility.”12 They include, as well, the realm of involuntary movements that human bodies make— sneezing, shivering, leg kicks during a knee reflex test, the motor and verbal tics of Tourette’s syndrome. One can hold off a sneeze for a brief period, but in most instances the sneeze testifies to bodily reflexes outside one’s field of intention. By contrast, the movements that characterize intentional human interaction with the environment—and that most preoccupy theatre and dance as movement mediums—are marked by a sense of agency. With self-movement, I experience myself as the owner and initiator of my movements. Self-movement in this specific sense is characterized by a number of qualities, or aspects. Kinesiologists Barbara A.  Gowitzke and Morris

42  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

Milner list the elements of voluntary movement as follows: initiation; regulation of speed, force, range, and direction; and termination of movement.13 Note the difference between these terms and the objectively measurable ones used in physics to describe objectively observed motion: displacement, distance, velocity, speed, acceleration, and time. While the former terms can similarly be used to describe externally observed movement, they also lend themselves to the experiential dynamics of ­self-­movement. Initiation involves the disposition to move and the muscular activation that actualizes that disposition in movement. We often think of this process as sequential: I decide to move my body to a specific end, and my body responds by carrying out this mental directive. Experientially, though, the initiation of movement does not obey this logic of cause and effect. Merleau-Ponty writes, “In movement, the relations between my decision and my body are magical ones.”14 I have an itch I suddenly want to scratch, I see the auditorium door closing because I’m arriving late for the concert, and I start moving. Termination is what I accomplish when this arc is completed and my body comes to rest. Speed, force, range, and direction—the other four terms in Gowitzke and Milner’s description of voluntary movement—refer to the experiential contours of intentional movement as it unfolds in space and time. The first two refer to the muscular effort that generates and sustains movement: I adjust my muscular contractions to speed up or slow down my intended movement and to modulate the force, or intensity, of these movements in relation to my surroundings. The second two refer to the body’s spatial navigation of its environment: I move within an area or range defined by my material surroundings and by the scope of my intentions, and I direct my movements by means of a steady or shifting body-orientation. To these fundamental movement aspects we can add what dancer and movement theorist Rudolf Laban terms flow: the degree of continuity that movements display within a given kinetic sequence.15 According to Laban, movements can be free (sustained, fluent) or they can be bound (interrupted, discontinuous). This distinction is by no means absolute, however. Erwin Straus considers all self-movement to be continuous: “To speak of individual movements (in the plural) conceals the fact that no single movement starts by itself. We are never at the starting point; the starting point of a movement is always the end point of a preceding movement.”16 Conversely, one can break continuous movement into constituent, individually bound segments. This happens intentionally when mime performers isolate movements in different parts of their bodies during training

  MOVEMENT AND ANIMATION   

43

or when musicians break down a desired movement into submovements before recombining them as part of an enhanced fluency. And it happens unintentionally when performers and athletes have their concentration interrupted in the middle of their performances. The notion of flow also applies to human movement in a more deeply developmental and enactive sense. When we learn to move, we mobilize our bodies in particular ways in order to realize specific intentions. A baby moves its head as a way of directing its attention to external phenomena, moves its mouth in order to feed, contorts its face as a way of expressing displeasure, and reaches for a toy that it wants to explore tactilely. When it learns to crawl, it tries out its head, torso, arm/hand, and leg/foot movements until it can coordinate them in a way that propels its body forward. Although a skill such as crawling (or walking, riding a bike, driving a car) involves multiple submovements that may be continuous and discontinuous with each other, these submovements are experientially integrated within familiar corporeal rhythms. Merleau-Ponty and Soviet neuroscientist Aleksandr R.  Luria used the phrase kinetic melody to describe this coherent, unfolding arc of self-movement.17 Such melodies establish what I and others recognize as my distinctive styles of movement and gesture; in Husserlian terms, they are the ways I manifest my individual I cans and I moves in the world. But the “I” they testify to is deeply situated in its body and its material/social environments. The movements I initiate and develop are conditioned by my musculature, skeletal structure, and neural system, and they are modified by changes to this physiological infrastructure through illness, fatigue, fitness level, age, and impairment. They are also influenced by the material constraints of my surroundings and the task at hand. I may have mastered the ability to ride a bike, for instance, but my kinetic performance will differ depending on the type of bike I am riding and the terrain I plan to cover. Finally, my movements are inflected by the social movement spheres in which I interact. A baby learns to move, in part, by imitating the movements of others around it, and its developing kinetic repertoire is constituted in relation to historical and sociocultural movement practices. I learn to move in a social world that moves in conventionalized ways, and what I consider to be “my” movements develop in kinetic resonance with this world. Terrain, or environment, is an essential component of kinetic experience. As an intentional ability, self-movement is outwardly directed. In moving, I extend my body’s intentions into the world in expressive and practical ways while engaging with the opportunities and constraints that

44  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

the world presents. Movement is responsive—both internally (I tighten my muscles and shift posture in response to an abdominal cramp) and externally (I turn my head to identify the source of a noise that surprises me). Even when they seem internally directed (in the case of the cramp or when I tap my fingers in conjunction with a tune going through my head), my movements manifest a fundamental attunement to my environment and my body’s relation to it. Environment elicits movement and answers it. It does this in overt ways (an oncoming car, a sudden sandstorm), and it does it through the latent movement possibilities it presents to the motile subject. In this sense, self-movement is ecological. James J. Gibson coined the influential term “affordances” as part of his ecological theory of visual perception in order to identify such movement possibilities; as he writes, “The theory of affordances implies that to see things is to see how to get about among them and what to do or not do with them.”18 Affordances, for Gibson, are an interactive product of perception and the surrounding world. Each implies the other. Physical, or objective, space becomes an environment through the orienting presence of a perceiving organism, while the animal or human inhabiting this environment realizes its intentions by responding to the perceived opportunities for meaningful interaction. Self-movement is essential to this ecological dynamic. Not only is movement the vehicle for responding to the kinetic invitations that beckon to me, but my learned repertoire of movement experiences is how I come to constitute an affordance-saturated environment in the first place. A low-lying rock outgrowth affords sitting to the extent that I have mastered the dynamics of sitting and understand, from experience, what supports this action and what does not. Self-movement plays another, equally important role in visual perception, according to Gibson. Unlike the stationary observer posited by ­classical optics, whose eye receives signals from a stationary visual object, Gibsonian optics are based on an observer who is capable of moving through an ambient visual field.19 When I stand still, the house I am looking at presents a visible facet as well as facets that are hidden, unavailable to visual perception. When I walk around the house, though, the hidden facets gradually become visible to me, and what was once a dichotomy (visible versus hidden) is now experienced as a continuum. Perception, in this sense, is contingent upon self-movement. Alva Noë has developed this understanding from an enactive perspective. For Noë, like Gibson, the world discloses itself to perception through sensorimotor interaction: “The world makes itself available to the perceiver through  physical

  MOVEMENT AND ANIMATION   

45

­ ovement and interaction.”20 The sensorimotor skills we employ in m doing so reflect our experiential knowledge of the dependencies, or correlations, linking perceptual objects with our sensorimotor activities. Understanding that a plate appears differently when I tilt it toward or away from me, for example, allows me to perceive the flattened oval shape when I view it sideways yet also retain my knowledge of the plate’s roundness while it undergoes these perspectival modifications. My ability to understand the correlations, or “dependencies,” that allow me to make perceptual sense of the world hinges, once again, on movement. In Noë’s words, “Only through self-movement can one test and so learn the relevant patterns of sensorimotor dependence.”21 Self-movement in this formulation is not to be mistaken as a distinct cause, or vehicle of perception; rather, it belongs to a sensorimotor continuum in which we enact the world and come to know it. In Gibson’s ecological theory, the sensorimotor activity that accompanies vision brings two perceptual fields to awareness. As already noted, it brings my surroundings to awareness as a field of possible affordances. At the same time, my sensorimotor engagement with an environment over there entails an awareness of myself as the embodied “here” of my perceptual encounter. I am aware of my movements through the same optical mechanism that discloses my surroundings: as I walk, I see my legs moving and my arms swinging in coordination with these, and as I turn my head I perceive the physical limits of my visual field that result from my eye socket, my nose, and the fact that my eyes point in one direction (as opposed to a horse’s eyes, which are set on opposite sides of the head). In this sense, my perception of self-movement is kinetic. I am also aware of my movements internally through stimulations of the muscles, joints, and inner ear, and my broader proprioceptive experience. In this sense, my experience of motion is kinesthetic. Given that my attention during self-­generated physical action is directed toward my environment, my awareness of my own movements—what Gibson calls “egoreception”—can be partially or even largely subsumed within my externally directed intentional trajectory (the domain of “exteroreception”).22 To this extent, my experience of motility is self-surpassing, or “ecstatic,” in Drew Leder’s formulation. Describing the act of looking around before hanging a picture on the wall, Leder writes, “My body, as the sensorimotor means of such surveying, yet recedes before this experiential primacy of ends.”23 As the word recedes acknowledges, however, kinesthesis never  disappears. This background awareness of myself as a  moving

46  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

organism—an awareness of myself-in-movement—remains the necessary other term of goal-­directed, world-engaging movements. Kinetic, or objective, self-awareness limits itself to the body areas it observes and, by inference, to the body totality I know these areas to be part of. Kinesthetic awareness, by contrast, encompasses my lived body. Kinesthetically, this body does not end with my body’s surfaces. “Reach[ing] out into this world,” in Edward S. Casey’s evocative phrase, kinesthesis extends into the environment through the subject’s intentional arc.24 When a basketball player stands at the foul line, basketball in hand, her eyes measure the distance to the basket while her hands sense the ball’s familiar weight. When she releases the ball, she feels its movement as it arcs through the air, attempting (perhaps) to guide its direction with her body and kinesthetically registering its impact when it clangs against the rim or the gratifying swish when it goes through the net. In these experiences the contained body of physicalist theories of movement gives way to a “body-­ ball-­basket” kinesthetic field. In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty cites a different athletic activity to make a similar point about the body-­ environment kinesthetic field as it reveals itself in intentional movement. Describing a soccer player moving the ball downfield, he notes, “The field itself is not given to him, but present as the immanent term of his practical intention; the player becomes one with it and feels the direction of the ‘goal,’ for example, just as immediately as the vertical and horizontal planes of his own body.” At this moment, he writes, “consciousness is nothing other than the dialectic of milieu and action.”25 As a corollary of this kinesthetic self-extension, the instrumentality that one’s body displays in self-movement also extends beyond this body’s limits. In a well-known passage from The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty observes: “The blind man’s cane has ceased to be an object for him, it is no longer perceived for itself; rather, the cane’s furthest point is transformed into a sensitive zone, it increases the scope and radius of the act of touching and has become analogous to a gaze.”26 This observation is a resonant one for a descriptive analysis of self-movement. With its image of probing it suggests the unity of sensation and cognition within the kinetic/kinesthetic act. Given that the blind individual’s cane is typically used ambulando, we can enfold this sensory reaching within the experiential dynamic of walking. The sensing cane focuses this sensorimotor field while extending the user’s kinesthetic reach into the world. In so doing, it reveals the prosthetic openness of kinesthesia in general. As in the case of the blind person’s cane, this openness is evident in the body/

  MOVEMENT AND ANIMATION   

47

instrument merging that wheelchair users report, in which the wheelchair is experienced as an extension of the user’s body. The prosthetic dimension of kinesthesia is also evident every time one drives a car or sips on a straw. At this point we can return to an earlier example of self-movement— the act of sailing—with a more refined account of the kinetic/kinesthetic qualities that underlie its execution. When I climb into the boat and begin manipulating the tiller and ropes, I move my body and the vessel at the same time. As noted in my earlier description of this, I do so with an awareness of the movements that surround and move me: wind, current, water surface. My movements are close to my body, even tight at times, and I carry them out within circumscribed parameters in order to keep myself and the boat properly balanced. These movements are practiced, though not as automatic as they would be if I were more experienced. To the extent that they respond to the shifting dynamics of wind and water, these movements are also improvisatory. Sometimes I sit relatively still as the boat moves in a confident direction; other times I make slow or rapid adjustments, shifting my weight, coordinating tiller and sail. While these movements are often characterized by continuity or flow, a sudden strong gust can disrupt the melodiousness of my actions. I described my movements in steering the boat as “circumscribed.” These actions take place within what Laban calls the kinesphere, that space surrounding my body that can be reached by extending my limbs. Whenever we move position, we transport the kinesphere to a new location. “We never, of course, leave our movement sphere,” Laban writes, “but carry it always with us, like an aura.”27 As the diagrams that Laban used to illustrate this concept show, the kinetic body that inhabits this space is geometric, articulating a bounded, egocentric space through its skeletal structure and range of mobility. The space inhabited by my kinesthetic body, by contrast, is not bound in this way. Kinesthesia extends my experience of movement into the surrounding environment: like Merleau-­Ponty’s soccer player, my eyes survey my milieu as I sail through it, orienting it in relation to my intention. Similarly, my manipulation of tiller and rope with my hands (and the vessel itself as I shift position) troubles the experiential demarcation between body and boat. The vessel that I operate remains an object in my movement field, often presenting my efforts to direct it with resistances. When the sailing is going smoothly, by contrast, the boat’s prow becomes an extension of my body, and my awareness of movement is as much an experience of boat-and-body

48  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

­ oving as it is of physical manipulations on my part. In Gibson’s words, m “the supposedly separate realms of the subjective and the objective are actually only poles of attention.”28 Originating in the body-subject’s intentional project, human movement accomplishes its goal by surpassing itself, reaching out to an environment it incorporates as kinesthetic field and instrument. Straus gestures toward this idea when he describes our experience of self-­movement “not as muscular action, but as conduct in relation to the world.”29 Central to this relationship is the sensory/affective dimension of self-­ movement. As Brian Massumi observes in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, “[the body] moves as it feels, and it feels itself moving. Can we think a body without this: an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation whereby each immediately summons the other?”30 Sensation and affect motivate movement and shape the way it unfolds. The tension generated by anger or impatience brings me to my feet, draws my arms closer to my chest, and propels me forward with a tight, aggressive stride. Joy, on the other hand, summons more expansive movements and forms of comportment. My hand is differently motivated and displays a different affective style if I am throwing away moldy leftovers, caressing a loved one, or grasping a guard rail when looking down from a twentieth-floor balcony. Sensation and affect, in other words, are not incidental to self-movement. They help constitute the experiential field in which kinetic/kinesthetic experience is enacted, and they are a means by which animate movement directs itself toward its environment.

External Movement Perception Gibson’s ecological psychology, as we have seen, ties visual perception to the perceiving subject’s movement through its environment. Our movement within this embodied field discloses itself to us, in large part, through changes in our optical array. As I walk toward a distant tree, for instance, the tree grows larger as part of the expansion of objects in my visual field. If I slowly turn my head to the right while keeping my eyes directed forward, the tree and other visual objects surrounding it shift to the left while new elements of my surroundings come into view. Instead of being tricked by this apparent movement into thinking that the tree actually moves, my understanding of the movement-perception-environment correlation (Noë’s sensorimotor dependencies) preempts this mistaken apprehension. Here, as in most of Gibson’s examples, I am the one who moves; my surroundings do not.

  MOVEMENT AND ANIMATION   

49

But the situation in which an ambulatory observer navigates a motionless environment is only one movement scenario. More typically over the course of my day, my movements interact with an environment that is itself moving or has the potential to move. This field has its invariants— structures and surfaces that remain in place—but through and around these stable points, taking them up with its energies, is the “Everything moves” that Lecoq referred to. This dynamic world requires and rewards my attunement with it. Sheets-Johnstone writes: “Animate forms are built in ways that are sensitive to movement. Their sensitivity can be doubly reflected; they can be sensitive to dynamic modifications in the surrounding world and to dynamic modifications of their own body.”31 The interactivity of these two modes of awareness is most evident in those instances where my intentional movements are constrained by the movements of others. When I walk in Midtown New York on a weekend afternoon, for example, my movements are coordinated with the movements of those who press in multiple directions ahead of, behind, and to either side of me. Walking in this environment is not the fluid intentional trajectory I accomplish on less crowded sidewalk—an activity I can put on autopilot as I think about other things. Instead, my movements are improvisatory and often sudden, given to shifts of direction and changes of speed as I look for openings or seek to avoid colliding with people coming the other way. In this environment, my kinetic and kinesthetic awareness of my body’s movements are keyed to my visual, tactile, and auditory awareness of the movements that surround me. As the crowd of moving individuals distributes itself into provisional pockets of order—some following the lead of others and walking out into the street to get around slower-moving pedestrians—I navigate accordingly. Cognitively speaking, I inhabit the movements of others: reading patterns, anticipating individual and collective decisions, registering (to my dismay) the decision of one or two to veer unexpectedly across my path. External movement perception becomes the frame within which I undertake and experience my own movements. The ability to coordinate our movements with our perception of external movements in situations such as this represents an important survival skill. Such coordination is what enabled our Neolithic ancestors to chase down prey as it darted away from them or to elude potential predators. It is what allows modern humans to avoid getting into an accident when they drive or being hit by a car when they cross the street. But the interrelationship of internal and external movement perceptions employed in these highly interactive situations underlies ordinary perceptual experience,

50  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

as well. As developmental psychologists have demonstrated, sensitivity to movement dominates our earliest interactions with the world. Infants as young as fourteen hours old are able to imitate the head ­movements and tongue protrusions of adults. In the early 1970s, psychologist T.  G. R. Bower conducted a series of experiments designed to determine when and how infants recognize moving objects in their world as solid, continuous phenomena. In one experiment, he and his co-researchers presented infants between six and twenty-two weeks old with an object that moved along a track, went behind a screen, and emerged on the other side. In one version of the experiment, the object emerged at the expected time, stopped, and returned along the track to its original position. In a second version, an object different in shape, size, and color emerged on the other side of the screen, stopped, and repeated the dual-object journey in the opposite direction. In a third version of the experiment, the object emerged on the other side at a time when it still should have been behind the screen according to its speed before disappearing. This version was conducted an additional time with a different object emerging when the original object should still have been behind the screen. Older infants indicated by their reactions that they recognized that the objects were different; in some instances they looked behind the screen as if looking for the original object. Infants less than sixteen weeks old, on the other hand, followed the moving object when the movement was continuous regardless of whether the object stayed the same or was different when it emerged. In both of the final two versions of this experiment, when the object came out sooner than it should have, they became upset and refused to look any more. Bower concluded that the younger infants responded to changes in motion but not to changes in object features. “They ignore features to such an extent,” he writes, “that I would suggest they respond not to moving objects but to movements.”32 This behavior on the part of very young infants suggests a relationship between internal and external movement perception. Commenting on Bower’s research, Sheets-­ Johnstone observes, “The movement that [the infant] sees resonates dynamically with its own tactile-kinesthetic body. Kinetic events in the world match its own primal animation and burgeoning kinesthetic consciousness.”33 External movement perception has been the subject of a varied corpus of scientific research. Since the publication of Max Wertheimer’s pioneering “Experimental Studies on the Perception of Motion” (1912), much of this research has centered on the phenomenon of apparent motion—visual

  MOVEMENT AND ANIMATION   

51

objects that appear to be moving when in fact they are not. An example of this is stroboscopic motion, which is evident when a rapidly flashing series of lights give the illusion that they are a single light in motion. Based on his experiments, Wertheimer concluded that movement perception results, not from a passive reception of sensory data, but from a dynamism intrinsic to perception itself. Wertheimer’s insights were quickly applied to film, which had been conducting its own exploration of apparent motion since the 1870s through the development of cinematic technology. Other forms of apparent motion include induced motion, in which an object is seen to move as a result of the movement of other objects near it (the moon, for instance, appears to move in the opposite direction when clouds pass in front of it) and autokinetic motion, in which a stationary point of light against a dark background appears to move. External movement perception, in other words, is not a simple matter of converting retinal stimuli into realist representations of the external world, with the eyes serving as recording lenses. To an important extent, the perceiving subject projects movement onto the sensory information it receives, endowing it with continuity and direction. In this sense, movement is a cognitive achievement, something we enact in collaboration with environmental stimuli.34 Motion perception is engaged by all of the motions we encounter in our kinetic surroundings. As animate beings, however, we are particularly attuned to animate movements within this field. Scientists and psychologists studying motion perception distinguish biological motion—the movement of humans and other animate beings—from non-biological motion. Much of the research in biological motion perception has been conducted using point-light displays. These displays, which were introduced by psychophysicist Gunnar Johansson in the early 1970s, are produced by filming a moving human figure with lights attached to his or her joints. Set against a dark background, these lights replace the absent human body, thereby eliminating non-kinetic perceptual information. In a still image, the glowing dots are typically not recognizable, but when viewed in motion—in other words, dynamically—they are immediately recognizable by experimental subjects as a moving figure. This recognition persists even when the number of dots is relatively small, when the image sequence is presented in reverse, and when the moving entity is surrounded by “noise” (dots unconnected to the biological movement). Subjects viewing these displays are even able to determine the sex and age of the moving figure; the emotions, mental state, or intention being expressed in the represented motions; and even the identity of individuals they know or are

52  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

aware of. Though humans respond most strongly and accurately to the motion of other humans, they are also able to recognize the movements of non-human animals. In humans, the perception of biological movement has been shown to be conditioned by experience and expertise: those movements with which a subject is most familiar are perceived most readily and fully.35 The robustness of our attunement to animate, or biological, motion has clear evolutionary and developmental importance. The world of our experience is and has always been populated by other animate beings, and we are neurologically equipped to recognize and interact with them. The ability to distinguish animate motion is necessary for self-protection, nurturance, and reproduction, and but it is also fundamental to collective, social life and to our identity within an intercorporeal world. As neuroscientist Marc Jeannerod writes, “This specificity of the appearance of biological stimuli and biological motion is reflected by the existence of specialized brain mechanisms for the perception and understanding of other people.”36 Newborns recognize biological movement within the first week of life, well before they can distinguish features, and they draw upon this in learning to enact their own movements.37 Individuals rocking in adjoining chairs will spontaneously synchronize their rocking motions. Throughout life—and throughout history—movement recognition is one of the fundamental ways that groups and societies constitute themselves. It is also one of the fundamental means by which socially, culturally, and historically specific movement practices are disseminated and performed. Despite their intrinsic connection, movement perception has received less phenomenological analysis than the corresponding experience of self-­ movement. When movement is considered in traditional phenomenological accounts, the environment in which it takes place is often static and inanimate. If we expand our understanding of human movement to include the perception of other animate beings, however, a parallel phenomenology becomes evident. As with my own intentional movements, I perceive the movements of others (humans and animals) in terms of initiation, speed, force, range, direction, flow, and termination. A diver springing forward from the edge of a platform, a cow grazing in a pasture, and ants swarming around a spilled soft drink move in intentional, outwardly attuned relationship to their surroundings. Purposeful, coherent, and environmentally responsive, their movements are kinetically meaningful to me. I experience these movement differently than I do the purely mechanical movement I encounter in my technological environment: the running

  MOVEMENT AND ANIMATION   

53

of my car’s engine, the whirring dispensers and brushes of the car wash. Though these movement have functional meaning, they lack the agency and self-generated motility that would endow them with intentionality. They move automatically, not animatedly. Or do they, necessarily? Looked at objectively, objects and machines are subject to physical laws but not to the principles that characterize animate motion. Phenomenologically, on the other hand, the line between animate and inanimate is not so clear. We have already considered the dynamic by which inanimate objects are prosthetically incorporated within the experience of self-movement. The boat becomes an extension of my kinesthetic body as I steer it across the water, and the blind person experiences her cane as an extension of her body. Movement perception is marked by a similar fluidity between the animate and the inanimate. Take the example of a pump jack, those praying-mantis like machines that can be seen across Texas, North Dakota, and other oil-producing regions. These machines, which do not require monitoring, use bobbing counterweights to bring oil to the surface, moving up and down with the repetitiveness and precision of industrial mechanization. Looking at them, however—with their head-shaped pulling weight and their leg-like supports—it is easy to imagine them as strange, animate creatures, patiently going through their labors, drawing sustenance (and profit) from beneath the ground. So lifelike are their appearance and motion, I would suggest, that it is hard not to animate them in this way and see their movements as intentional engagements with the ground they stand on. The many names by which pump jacks are known—nodding donkey, horse-head, rocking horse, thirsty bird, grasshopper pump, dinosaur, Big Texan, yes-nodder (Ja-knikker in Dutch)—suggest the irresistibility of this perceptual bringing-to-life. There is, of course, an elective component to this process: one can look at a video of a pump jack moving in motion and shift between seeing it as animate or inanimate. But the roots of this animating activity lie deep within movement perception itself. When subjects perceive human or animal movement in point-light displays, they project not only kinetic coherence but animacy onto the moving dots. Given that there is no actual being, only dots, the recognition of one is a perceptual/kinetic projection. Researchers studying biological movement perception have demonstrated the human predilection for animacy perception of this kind. In one experiment, subjects shown abstract shapes (two triangles and a circle) perceived them as animate when they were moved in a way that suggested they were

54  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

interacting. In another experiment, an object moving in a figure-eight pattern was identified as animate when it was set against the background image of a frozen lake. In yet another experiment, researchers presented subjects with non-human object forms that had been generated to move through an environment. Though the subjects had never seen these forms before, when they saw them move (directly or in point-light versions) they identified them as alive and animate.38 When the sensory and contextual cues are appropriate, in other words, biological movement perception has a predisposition toward animacy, particularly human animacy. As a result of this predisposition, animate movement can be something we constitute, or call into being. In this sense, William Wordsworth provided an insight into the phenomenology of perception when he wrote, in “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” of “all the mighty world / Of eye and ear, both what they half half-create, / And what perceive.”39 Wordsworth called this constituting function “imagination,” and this word can serve our account of movement perception if we purge it of its Romantic associations. Imagination, in the sense I am using the concept here, refers to the perceiver’s necessary contribution to animated movement perception. This perception can be exercised deliberately, as when a child picks up an object and makes it move. Sigmund Freud observed in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny” (Das Unheimliche): We recall that children, in their early games, make no sharp distinction between the animate and the inanimate, and that they are especially fond of treating their dolls as if they were alive. Indeed, one occasionally hears a woman patient tell how, at the age of eight, she was still convinced that her dolls were bound to come to life if she looked at them in a certain way, as intently as possible.40

But this conscious process engages deeply rooted perceptual tendencies that we apply to motion and motion potential more generally and automatically. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s Theseus says of imagination, “Or in the night, imagining some fear, / How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear!”41 As the bush-bear crouches ahead, poised (the nocturnal traveler imagines) to attack, the world looms in primal animacy. The bush returns to itself as the traveler walks by it, but this environment remains charged with latent movement, latent life. All it takes is an unexpected sound or another familiarly shaped object in one’s surroundings for animacy to spring forward again. Our dynamic world is always potentially alive.

  MOVEMENT AND ANIMATION   

55

Phenomenologically understood, human movement experience arises at the intersection of self-movement, the kinetic/kinesthetic encounter with our world, and movement perception, the process that animates the world experientially as it brings it to consciousness. The intimate relation between these modes of movement awareness holds particular importance for theatre, a medium where affectively charged movement is enacted, represented, and perceived. Like dance—but with its own corporeal-­ linguistic resources—theatre embraces kinesis, kinesthetic experience, animation, and movement perception as its sine qua non. Having outlined the variables at play in inwardly and outwardly directed movement experience, I will now turn my attention to the phenomenology of animation in the spectator’s engagement with theatrical performance. This chapter’s final two sections reflect upon the perceptual dynamic of puppet performance and the phenomenon of actors not moving in the theatre. Later chapters will take up the phenomenon of theatrical movement in greater detail by considering the kinesthetic dimensions of spectatorship, the centrality of language as a kinetic/kinesthetic medium, and the role of movement perception in empathy and other modes of intercorporeal attunement.

Animating Objects In his excellent book Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life, Kenneth Gross marvels at the “wonders of puppet motion.”42 Able to fly and float without regard for gravity, puppets can move with a flexibility and speed beyond what the human body is capable of, yet these movements are also marked by awkwardness, rigidity, and a limited range of motion. Lifeless on their own, puppets depend on imparted human movement in order to come to life. The puppeteer’s particular gift, Gross, writes, is “to live his life among inanimate objects that are potentially animate, to be alert to the demands for life that may come from the most ordinary of objects, and to know how to treat them, opening up a space in which they can speak, or to reanimate what once spoke with a different voice.”43 The “uncanny” to which Gross refers in his title is the uncanniness of animation, or what Jiří Veltruský termed vivification: the dynamic principle by which otherwise inert matter is brought to life.44 As the previous section suggests, the magical life that puppetry trades in depends as much on the audience’s animating perception as it does on the puppeteer’s art. How, we should ask, does the puppet come to life for us? One contributing

56  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

factor to the puppet’s aliveness is its evocation of the human figure, especially through its face and eyes. In his study of wayang kulit, the shadow puppet theatre of Java, Jan Mrázek explains that the face and eyes are the last parts of the wayang to be carved because these are what make the puppet appear to be alive.45 There is certainly something uncanny about looking at a puppet hanging limp-limbed on a rack with its blank, painted eyes staring back. But puppets do not always have eyes or faces, and those that do are not truly animated until they are made to move or perceived as motile. To appreciate the importance of movement to animation, we can refer to Ernst Jentsch, whose 1906 study “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” introduced the psychologic concept of Unheimlichkeit and influenced Freud’s better-known essay. Uncanniness, for Jentsch, is associated with phenomena that resist our efforts to incorporate them within our conceptual understanding of how things are. The strongest of these “psychical uncertainties,” he notes, is “doubt as to whether an apparently living being is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate.”46 In both instances, the capacity for selfmovement is crucial to the uncanny sensation. As an example of uncanny living beings, Jentsch refers to conditions, such as epilepsy, in which the body’s movements are perceived as mechanistic rather than intentional. As an example of uncanny objects, he refers to waxwork figures and life-size automata that perform humanlike movements. The kinetic uncanniness of certain objects can be latent, manifesting itself in the possibility, or threat, of movement. The horror one feels in at the sight of a dead body or skeleton, Jentsch suggests, results from the “latent animatedness” we associate with such objects.47 Because the puppet theatre demonstrates the dynamics of animation so clearly, it provides a valuable entry point for a discussion of animated movement and movement perception in the theatre. In order to address these phenomena in concrete performance terms, I will look at Vermont-­ based Sandglass Theater’s 2012 production, D-Generation: An Exultation of Larks. D-Generation was devised using stories generated by people with late-stage dementia. Sandglass’s Eric Bass, Ines Zeller Bass, and Kirk Murphy gathered these stories at a number of care facilities in Vermont using a creative-storytelling method called TimeSlips, which was developed by Anne Basting in 1996 and is now practiced by trained facilitators throughout the country. As part of this method, circles of people with dementia are shown a picture and asked to share what they think is going on in it. Anything they say is acceptable, and every statement they

  MOVEMENT AND ANIMATION   

57

contribute becomes part of the collaborative story. The purpose of this exercise, which involves residents and staff as well as certified trainers, is to direct attention away from the narratives the resident can no longer remember and engage their resources of imagination and creativity.48 D-Generation recreated this environment in puppet format. The production consisted of five rod puppets, approximately two feet in length, which were realistically detailed to resemble elderly people. For most of the play they sat in raised chairs, which were wheeled around by the three puppeteers. While manipulating the puppets and providing their voices, Bass, Zeller Bass, and Murphy also played caregivers to the five dementiacare residents. The play’s action, which consisted of interactions between the caregivers and the residents and sequences focused on individual residents, centered on two creative storytelling sessions and the collaborative narratives produced during these sessions. The play’s interactions were supplemented by video sequences projected on a medium-sized background screen and a sound score featuring music and the occasional voices of family members trying to communicate with the residents.49 At one point in the middle of the play, the residents were shown a toy-theatre stage on which Murphy and Zeller Bass presented the story they had just created using simple stick puppets and cardboard-and-paper props. At several other points, one or more of the puppeteers stepped forward to talk about Alzheimer’s disease and those who have it. Like all puppet theatre, D-Generation depended on animation for its life in performance. What makes this production useful for the present chapter is the deliberateness and imagination with which it explored the phenomenon of puppet animation. Its play with this phenomenon began in the opening moments. The stage at this point consisted of three screens with a small rag doll that appeared to have been dropped on the floor in front of them. When Mary, one of the puppet-residents, was wheeled out in her chair by her caregiver (Zeller Bass), she was handed the doll. Zeller Bass manipulated her arms and upper body so that she gently stroked the doll and, at one point, Zeller Bass’s cheek; the doll remained in her lap throughout the play. The contrast of a moving puppet with a motionless doll had the effect of heightening the animation of the former while leaving the latter a material object of her tender caresses. That Mary was ­herself the object of Zeller Bass’s tender manipulations joined the two in gestures of caring. Zeller Bass’s arms and hands brought Mary to life— vivified her—and in doing so endowed the puppet-resident with the impression of self-movement. But these gestures were also an extension of

58  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

Zeller Bass’s movements, expressing an intentionality sharpened by the puppeteer’s craft. Like the hands of a mime that become a fluttering bird, the kinetic agency of her arms and hands endowed the puppet with a life-­ in-­motion that had its own, seemingly independent animation. Mary came to life through this encounter, but the life she manifested was an expression of Zeller Bass’s. As Gross suggests, this animating influence can be reciprocal: “If the focus is right, if the touch and story are right, you feel the puppet’s life extending backwards into the impulses of a living body, becoming a gesture of that body that itself presses forward into the puppet, even as the puppet’s gestures are its own, with their own impulsive logic.” What we encounter in this reciprocity, Gross claims, is a “double body, animate and inanimate at once.”50 The production maintained its focus on the animating process by foregrounding the puppeteer/caregivers and their relationship with the puppet/residents. The fact that the puppeteers played characters within the play’s fictional setting and addressed the audience in character and as themselves kept their work with the puppets from receding into the attentional background. When the puppet/residents were in their chairs, the puppeteers’ manipulations were largely restricted to upper-body movements (head, arms, and upper torso). When the puppets attempted to raise themselves from their seats, these manipulations became more extensive. At one point in the play, Rose, a resident who took dance lessons as a child, struggled to get out of her chair, stood, and danced in the air. All three puppeteers were required to execute these movements—one taking her head, one her arms, and the other her feet. The slowness and difficulty that characterized her movements resulted, in part, from the fact that she was a puppet; her body and limbs were limited in how they could be manipulated. But her awkward movement style also reflected her character’s age and condition, and it had a certain grace. Bass, Zeller Bass, and Murphy handled the different body areas they were responsible for so that these were coordinated with each other despite their perceived lack of coordination. Rose’s movements were governed and unified by a single intention to move, even if her body did not easily follow this ­intentionality. The labored spectacle of her dance was a poignant contrast to the flow that Rose remembered her younger body having. It stood in counterpoint, as well, to the fluent, precisely executed movements of the puppeteers who brought her artificial body to life. For much of D-Generation, though, the five puppet-residents remained motionless, seated in their wheeled chairs, staring ahead or slightly off in

  MOVEMENT AND ANIMATION   

59

a number of directions. The contrast with typical puppet performances was marked. Usually, puppet plays are governed by movement of one kind or another: individual puppets move, often rapidly, while those who do not seem prepared to do so. When puppets are left motionless for too long, they lose their animation and become, if not dead, then non-alive. Samuel Beckett’s stage direction evokes this puppet-like deflation when Vladimir and Estragon succumb to a moment of despair in Waiting for Godot: “They remain motionless, arms dangling, heads sunk, sagging at the knees.”51 D-Generation used the inertness of puppet motionlessness to evoke broader questions of what it means to interact with those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. In contrast to the three caregivers, who maintained coherent dramatic selves despite the fact that they stepped out of these roles to address the audience, the inner world of the dementia residents was often inaccessible—an “empty hole,” as the puppeteer/caretakers characterized it. When the puppets were seated in their chairs without moving, in other words, their inanimate stares signaled the inaccessibility that frames and often overtakes dementia subjectivity. The impenetrability of their motionlessness was poignantly intensified when the voices of family members addressed them without receiving responses or signs of recognition (“Florence, where are your pearls? You’re not wearing them. Did you forget them? Hi Dad, it’s me, Frank, your son. Don’t you remember me? I’m your son. See, we’re in the picture together.”)52 The relationship between the lifelessness of a non-animated performing object and the fictional vacantness of residents sitting in a dementia care facility was a shifting one, and this variability drew upon the life/ non-life ambiguity intrinsic to puppet art. At one point, a curtain opened to reveal Murphy standing motionlessly holding a slice of birthday cake with a candle in it; Florence and Elwood, two of the puppet-residents, sat in their chairs on either side of him. All three wore party hats with elastic bands under their chins. As the three stared forward, the tableau they formed oscillated in terms of the audience’s animating perception. From one vantage point, what we saw were the residents and their caregiver sharing a moment of stillness; from another, a puppeteer standing between two puppets that he and his co-performers had been manipulating. During an even more remarkable sequence, the question of animation and subjectivity was handed directly to the audience. Before Murphy put on the separate puppet-show for the resident-puppets, dramatizing their first collective story, the puppets were carried into the auditorium and placed on

60  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

spectators’ laps where they could “watch” the makeshift production. As the puppet-show-within-a-puppet-show went on, some of the spectators in the two performances I observed sat awkwardly with their puppets, which rested in their laps like unwieldy, oversized dolls. Other spectators moved their puppets—raised an arm, inclined a head, situated the body so that they could see the performance—and when they did so one could sometimes see the puppets they manipulated flicker into life (not in every case, however: puppetry is harder than it may appear). In these inconsistent states of movement and non-movement, the puppet-residents were there and not there, blind and not-blind to what was being acted out in front of them. As puppets sat in spectator’s laps, “watching” a performance conducted by simple stick-puppets who could only move when the stick they were attached to forced them to, the mystery and art of animation were richly on display.

“You perceive she stirs” What happens when theatrical movement, animacy, and inanimacy are considered in relation to human, rather than object, performers? Ontologically, of course, human performers are different from puppets or marionettes. While the latter can only be animated by external manipulation, the former are biological entities, capable of self-regulating and self-­ sustaining animate existence. Objectively considered, then, actors are alive, puppets are not. To speak of vivification from this perspective makes no sense, since human performers are already vivants. Phenomenologically, on the other hand, this distinction is much more fluid. As we saw in the discussion of D-Generation, puppets acquire performance life through the animating movements of the puppeteer’s body. What may be less evident from this discussion is the fact that human performers can be de-animated in terms of their phenomenal presence onstage. This process was evident in the moment analyzed at the end of the previous section, where Murphy stood motionless between the puppet-residents Florence and Elwood. At no point, of course, did Murphy cross the ontological line separating him from the puppets; whereas their presence on either side of him was grounded in non-conscious materiality, he remained the experiential center of his living non-motion. But just as the puppets retained the traces of their earlier animation, so Murphy acquired something of their inanimacy, as if their material inertness had temporarily stilled his capacity to move. Murphy was momentarily de-animated, in other words—not in the sense

  MOVEMENT AND ANIMATION   

61

that he became an object standing among objects, but in the sense that normal animation was de-activated, held at bay. Inanimacy, understood this way, can be understood as a possibility, or perceptual horizon, within animacy. Like animacy, inanimacy serves important survival functions for humans and animals. Flounders lie motionless when camouflaging themselves on the seabed in order to deceive prey and predators, just as rabbits and chipmunks freeze when startled and other animals play dead. Predators slow down or stop when hunting other animals so as to surprise their prey, and they depend on animacy signals in order to determine whether and when the animals they capture are alive or dead. All animate beings still themselves for sleep or rest. Humans suspend normal motor activity for a number of additional reasons, many having to do with acts of concentration: reading, watching a movie, listening to a lecture, holding yoga positions, meditating, staring off into space. Like animals, humans can be immobilized involuntarily. Their kinetic capabilities can shut down in coma and other modes of unconsciousness; their mobility can be constrained through illness and disability; and the agency of their animacy can be compromised externally through the coercive actions of others. Eventually, of course, all humans and animals will die. Theatre has demonstrated an intrinsic fascination with the nature of human animacy and the often ambiguous perceptual lines between animate motion and what is or seems to be its opposite. This fascination underlies the nineteenth-century appetite for tableaux vivants, or living pictures, in which performers replicated the settings and poses of famous works of art, and the continuing popularity of living statues as a form of street theatre. These genres engage two deep-rooted preoccupations that also lie at the heart of puppet theatre. One is the fantasy/fear—represented by Pygmalion’s statue, Pinocchio, and the Golem—that material representations of human beings can come to life, begin moving with a power of their own. Opposed to this is the related fear—represented by Lot’s wife and Medusa’s victims— that human life can be suddenly stricken into inanimacy. In the case of tableaux vivants and living statues, this twin fascination manifests itself in a specific form of spectatorial curiosity. Where are the signs of life in this radically de-animated body? Will it move, and, if not, what strains must it endure to hold its motionless pose? At what point will it come back to life, as surely it must? A living body stands in for a painted or sculpted representation of another living body. Despite our knowledge that the body we see is

62  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

alive—that this is a living picture or statue rather than the thing it imitates— its de-animating performance is uncanny in Jentsch’s sense, occasioning “doubt as to whether an apparently living being is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate.” Like Leontes and the other onstage spectators standing before the statue of Hermione in Act 5, Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, we wonder at this body’s inanimate animacy—or its animate inanimacy—admiring the art that appears so lifelike and the life that, as Leontes discovers, can render itself as art. Shakespeare’s statue scene highlights the perceptual uncertainty occasioned by its inanimate spectacle, which presents “the life as lively mock’d as ever / Still sleep mock’d death.”53 With these words, Paulina plays on the instability of animacy and animacy perception. “Lively” designates the accuracy, or lifelikeness, of the statue’s resemblance to the figure it represents, but the word carries its other connotation “living, animate,” as if lifelikeness can verge on life itself.54 In a figuratively rich juxtaposition, Paulina compares the art–life resemblance with what might appear to be its opposite, the death-likeness of sleep. If the statue imitates life in its liveliness, sleep imitates death in its perceived inanimacy. In the context of The Winter’s Tale’s final scene, though, these seemingly antithetical comparisons cross-over, mutually implicating each other. Because Hermione is dead to all on stage save Paulina, her statue—a memorial to what is lost—is imbued with the lifelessness of death. At the same time, because lifelessness has a perceptual kinship to death’s double, sleep, the possibility of the statue coming to life teasingly insinuates itself. The pivotal word “still”—which combines “motionless” with “refraining from movement” and “remaining in a state of being”—encapsulates this complex phenomenality. The paradox of animation frames the scene’s development. Leontes is initially confronted with the inert stoniness of Hermione’s statue, which contrasts with the living figure’s vitality: “O, thus she stood, / Even with such life of majesty (warm life, / As now it coldly stands), when first I woo’d her!”55 Yet this statuary coldness bears suggestions of life: a faint blush of color, the sensation of exhalation, the perception of movement, perhaps. “What was he that did make it? See, my lord,” he urges Polixenes, “Would you not deem it breathed, and that those veins / Did verily bear blood?” Is what he sees the pulse of life, or is it, rather, an illusion of life made vivid by the sculptor’s verisimilitude and

  MOVEMENT AND ANIMATION   

63

Leontes’ memory-driven imagination? Paulina must dissuade Leontes from kissing the statue by telling him that the ruddiness and moisture of her lips is the result of undried paint. The statue’s likeness to Hermione—the miraculous proximity of stone to the animacy it represents—renders those around it stone-­like; Perdita, Hermione’s longlost daughter, “[s]tand[s] like stone with thee.” As stillness radiates from the statue to those who contemplate it, so vitality returns to Hermione from the human community she is about to rejoin. It is movement, of course, that brings about this kinetic and affective bringing-back-to-life. “Be stone no more,” Paulina commands the statue when their eyes have had their fill, “Bequeath to death your numbness.” To Leontes, those accompanying him, and the spectators who have also been peering at Hermione’s body-rendered-statue, she quietly proclaims the return of animation: “You perceive she stirs. / Start not.”56 In a footnote to the statue scene in the 1963 Arden Shakespeare edition of The Winter’s Tale, J.  H. P.  Pafford makes the following claim: “The audience do not know that Hermione is alive. For them as well as for everyone else on the stage except Paulina the statue can be nothing but a statue.”57 As this chapter has suggested, such a statement misrepresents the perceptual complexity of the scene’s animacy disclosure/non-­disclosure. While the play provides no reason to think that Hermione’s earlier death announcement was feigned, it is difficult to imagine the Jacobean audience not recognizing the actor playing Hermione-as-statue and maintaining this background awareness while she stands motionless. Modern productions of the play sometimes take pains to make the standing figure appear more statuesque: when Viola Allen performed this scene in New York in 1904, her skin was whitened to match her Grecian gown and the plinth on which she stood, in keeping with the practice of living statue tableaux performers during that era.58 Other productions maintain the actor’s natural body, with formal heightening often provided by light. However, while most of the audience, at least, recognizes the immobile body as alive, it would be a mistake to claim that what they perceive is solely a living body. In her phenomenological treatise on empathy, Edith Stein stresses the perceptual connection between vitality and movement. “Rigid immobility,” she writes, “conflicts with the phenomenon of the sensitive, living body and the living organism in general. We cannot imagine a completely immobile  human being. That which is bound to one place completely motionless is ‘turned to stone.’”59 Holding herself motionless, the actor

64  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

playing Hermione becomes the stone she imitates, thereby justifying the perceptions of those onstage who see her as such. Could this figure, following Pafford, actually be a statue? Until the point where Hermione brings stone to life by stepping down, what the audience sees is neither a living woman nor a statue, but an uncanny threshold object that exists— not unlike the puppet-residents in D-Generation—both inside life and outside of it. Even when Hermione confirms her aliveness by speaking, her vitality is ghosted by its statuary non-life.60 While the statue scene’s staging of animacy is an extraordinary one— the kind of thing one finds in Ovid—the perceptual issues it engages arise in theatre whenever bodies assert their life in movement or retract this animating power. The play between animacy and inanimacy becomes an issue when characters die on stage. To understand the experiential components of this dramatic occurrence, we can turn to the statue scene’s counterpart in the closing scene of King Lear. There Lear carries in the dead body of Cordelia, who has been hanged on Edmund’s order. Overrun by grief, he knows she is gone: “I know when one is dead, and when one lives; / She’s dead as earth.”61 Still, he is unwilling to believe what he knows to be true. He peers desperately for signs of animation, seeking it, as Leontes did, in the motion and exhalations of breathing. When he sees, or imagines he sees, a feather move in the vicinity of her mouth, he jumps to a mistaken conclusion—“This feather stirs, she lives”—as if the air that moved the feather came from her motionless body.62 But Cordelia’s inanimacy is irrevocable, and Lear must acknowledge again that she will never return to life. While her body is not, like Hermione’s, statuesque, the lifelessness of this image is evoked through its projection onto others: “O, [you] are men of stones! / Had I your tongues and eyes, I’ld use them so / That heaven’s vault should crack.”63 The phenomenological irony of this scene is that the actor playing Cordelia is alive, and the movement of air in front of her mouth could indeed be a sign of her breathing. Lear’s feather-test, in other words, produces a false-positive when it comes to diagnosing life in Cordelia’s body but an accurate result if we apply it to the living actor. The reason we do not apply it in this way is that we bracket our awareness of the performer’s life when confronted with the tragic discovery that its character-life has ended. To bracket out one half of the animacy-inanimacy continuum in theatrical performance is not the same, however, as denying its existence. Most spectators, no doubt, have had the experience of watching the bodies of actors pretending to lie dead on stage to see if they move,

  MOVEMENT AND ANIMATION   

65

especially  if the acting is not very compelling and one is seated close enough to the stage to detect their chests rising and falling.64 The fact that they do not do this in most instances attests, not only to the tenacity of dramatic fiction but also to the perceptual power of de-animation. When actors stop moving, they momentarily set themselves apart from the kinetic dynamic generated and maintained by those around them. Directors and actors have long understood the perceptual effect of this and used it for dramatic advantage in scene blocking. As John Gielgud pointed out, “A player may [. . .] feel he will appear to better advantage if he stands still while the others move, even though, in studying the scene beforehand, it had seemed essential to the director that the others should be still and he should be the one to move.”65 Such actions, being temporary, only suspend the actor’s participation: and he or she can easily rejoin the movements of others. When actors render themselves immobile on stage for any length of time, by contrast, their presence acquires a more trenchant inanimacy. Inanimacy, in these cases, become the perceptual default, which explains why minor movements within this motionlessness are not often not perceived as relevant, or noticed at all. Phenomenologically, in other words, a dead character on stage—or human statue—inhabits a temporary non-life. Dramatists, directors, designers, and actors manipulate this perceptual realm opened by animacy and inanimacy in the theatre. One of the most intrepid explorers of this territory is Samuel Beckett, whose drama represents a remarkably intricate investigation of movement and movement perception. Elsewhere I have discussed Beckett’s late plays as a response to the modernist desire to formalize stage space and the performer’s body within it.66 As his own statue-play Catastrophe demonstrates, Beckett revisits theatrical formalism only to disclose the irrepressible sentience that formalism works to suppress. In my earlier words, “On the threshold of the body’s disappearance into nothingness or its reversion to pure matter, there are stirrings still.”67 As a conclusion to this chapter I will refine this claim by considering animacy in Beckett’s plays from a kinetic and kinesthetic perspective. The formalist drive in Beckett’s theatre—the intensifying effort to subordinate his actors within a precisely delineated mise-en-scène— entails, before all else, a disciplining of movement and a gravity-like pull toward immobility, whether this is the three actors confined to urns in Play, the performer’s body fixed in place in Not I, or the actor standing  motionless throughout A Piece of Monologue. Actors have described the  experience—and, in some cases, the paradoxical liberation—of

66  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

working under these constraints, and scholars have noted this feature of Beckett’s stagecraft. Comparatively little attention has been paid, though, to the crucial interplay between Beckettian kinetics and animacy perception. Beckett’s 1976 play Footfalls illustrates this interplay with particular complexity. Footfalls is a minimalist pas de deux between May—“dishevelled grey hair, worn grey wrap hiding feet, trailing”—and a Woman’s Voice originating “from dark upstage.”68 The play is divided into four sequences separated by darkness and the sound of a chime. As the lights come up in the first sequence, May slowly paces from left to right on an illuminated strip, holding her wrap to her chest with crossed arms and her body rigidly hunched. The light, Beckett specifies, is “dim, strongest at floor level, less on body, least on head.”69 She stops at the end of her pacing, faces front, and begins a verbal exchange with Voice, whom she addresses as “Mother.” While the two converse, she alternates between pacing—exactly seven steps each way with a slow wheel at each end—and standing motionless at either end, facing forward. Sequences two and three repeat this precise choreography, each time a little slower with the chime and light correspondingly fainter. In the second sequence the only one to speak is Voice, while in the third sequence May narrates a story that seems to refer to the relationship the audience has pieced together from the preceding sequences and the action we observe. When the light reemerges from darkness at the end of this sequence—“a little less still”—the only thing visible is the strip.70 After ten seconds, this, too, fades. With the exactitude typical of Beckett’s late plays, Footfalls establishes a formal counterpoint between self-movement and stillness. May paces between the two turning points, and her slow progress across the illuminated space is underscored by the sounds of her footsteps and the wrap that drags on the floor behind her. Her motionless posture at each end serves as a kind of bookend to the pacing that links them. “See how still she stands, how stark,” the Voice observes in the opening of the play’s second sequence.71 At the same time, though, Beckett’s play blurs the perceptual distinction between movement and non-movement. He accomplishes this, in large part, by slowing down the former. As noted, the pace of May’s steps diminishes in the second and third sequences. At several points while pacing, May pauses between steps, a suspension that establishes immobility in the midst of movement. The perceptual effects of slowness are especially pronounced when May turns to resume her pacing, when she wheels to change direction, and when she comes to a stop and

  MOVEMENT AND ANIMATION   

67

turns forward at one of the two end points. The transition between motion and stillness at these turning points is accomplished imperceptibly, and it can be hard at moments to detect whether the actor performing May moves at all. As vision scientists have established, movement cannot be perceived below a minimum speed; beneath this speed movement can only be inferred from change of position. Much of Footfalls’ kinetic dynamic takes place at, near, or beneath this perceptual threshold. In Walter Asmus’s 1988 television production of the play, which I rely on in analyzing this play, Billie Whitelaw bowed her head at several points while facing forward. Like her slow initiation of movement when turning to pace, this movement was carried out so slowly that Whitelaw’s change of position seemed stroboscopic at times—like a series of cinematic stills rather than a continuous, integral movement. The overall perceptual effect was of a human tableau flickering between movement and non-movement. The play of motion is also, in this case, the play of animation. Bodies animate themselves through movement and can move or not move in ways that affect the perception of animacy. Like the living statue or stage puppet, the performing body in Footfalls occupies an ambiguous position between agential self-movement and its absence. When the actor playing May stands still, her figure flickers in and out of animacy. In the second sequence, when May does not speak and the Voice talks about her in the third person, May recedes into a muteness that isolates her within the story that Voice recounts. In the third sequence, she reacquires a form of animacy by becoming a narrator herself, but the increased liveliness in her voice compared to the first sequence is countered by her increased faintness—her head often recedes into the darkness that envelops it—and her even more limited mobility. At one point during this sequence in the Asmus production, Whitelaw stood at the left side of the lighted strip for seven minutes (out of a thirty-minute production). Concentrating for that long on a figure making few, barely perceptible movements is quite demanding, and it was hard to maintain an awareness that the body standing there was alive at all. Even when Whitelaw’s May paced, her repeated movements felt mechanical, as if her pacing body was moving ­automatically rather than carrying out the character’s intention to move. This impression was reinforced by the puppet-like rigidity of the rest of May’s body and the fact that she described her motion not through the experience of moving but from the sound of her feet. As Voice quotes May in her story: “No, Mother, the motion alone is not enough, I must hear the feet, however faint they fall.”72

68  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

In a well-known anecdote, when Beckett directed Whitelaw for the 1976 Royal Court production of Footfalls, she asked him “Am I dead?” He responded, “Let’s just say you’re not really there.”73 Beckett’s playful/ serious pronouncement raises a perspective on Footfalls and Beckett’s drama as a whole that is at once ontological and deeply phenomenological. The “not really there” of Footfalls is an absence, or flaw, at the heart of being that afflicts all of Beckett’s characters, an absence memorably indicated by Carl Jung when he referred, in a lecture Beckett attended, to a female patient who “was never born.”74 Hence, our feeling, as the play goes on, that May is her own ghost, inhabited by the voice of another ghost until she vanishes from the play in the closing sequence. What the kinetic dynamics of Footfalls make clear is that “not really there” in Beckett’s theatre involves an intricate play of movement, stillness, visibility, and animacy perception and the fact that what we call “presence” on the stage is contingent, in large part, on these. As the actor playing May stands, and as she moves at the edges of stillness in the play’s penultimate sequence, her figure fades in and out of animacy, part there and part not-­ there, slowly disappearing before our eyes. Movement and its suspension are the vehicle for this phenomenological self-effacement.

Notes 1. Simon McBurney, foreword to Jacques Lecoq, The Moving Body, x. 2. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Primacy of Movement, xxv. 3. Jan Patočka, Le monde naturel, 46 (my translation). 4. Oxford English Dictionary. 5. Edmund Husserl, Ideas 2, 273. 6. Ibid., 271 (my insertion). 7. Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity, translated and cited in Jean-Luc Petit, “Constitution by Movement: Husserl in Light of Recent Neurobiological Findings,” 223. On the fundamentality of kinesthesia to self-constitution, Petit writes: “Before becoming, in the full sense of that word, an acting subject, the subject of its acts, the organism, is already ‘on the move,’ because only as already on the move is it capable of finding out about itself, discovering its own capacities and mastering them, and indeed of becoming for itself the pole of its own acts, if not a subject” (ibid., 222). See also Ludwig Landgrebe, “Phenomenology as Transcendental Theory,” 107–109. 8. Husserl, Ideas 2, 159–60. 9. Sheets-Johnstone, Primacy of Movement, 117 (emphasis in original).

  MOVEMENT AND ANIMATION   

69

10. Ibid., 131. 11. Sheets-Johnstone, “Kinesthetic Memory,” 87. 12. Drew Leder, The Absent Body, 45–49. 13. Barbara A.  Gowitzke and Morris Milner, Scientific Bases of Human Movement, 256. Sheets-Johnstone discusses and critiques Gowitzke and Milner’s movement taxonomy in “Movement: The Generative Source of Spatial Perception and Cognition,” 323–29. 14. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 97. 15. Rudolf Laban, The Mastery of Movement, 83–88. 16. Erwin Straus, The Primary World of Senses: A Vindication of Sensory Experience, 257. 17. Merleau-Ponty uses the term kinetic melody in Phenomenology of Perception, 135. In The Working Brain, Luria applies this term to the process of learning to write: “In the initial stages [. . .] writing depends on memorizing the graphic form of every letter. It takes place through a chain of isolated motor impulses, each of which is responsible for the performance of only one element of the graphic structure; with practice, this structure of the process is radically altered and writing is converted into a single ‘kinetic melody,’ no longer requiring the memorizing of the visual form of each isolated letter or individual motor impulses for making every stroke” (32). According to Luria, lesions of the premotor cortex result in “a definite disturbance of skilled movements, which are no longer performed smoothly, and each component of the skilled movement now requires its own isolated impulse” (179–80, emphasis in original). Sheets-Johnstone discusses the notion of kinetic melody in “Kinesthetic Memory,” 69–73. 18. James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 223. 19. “When the moving point of observation is understood as the general case, the stationary point of observation is more intelligible. It is no longer conceived as a single geometrical point in space but as a pause in locomotion, as a temporarily fixed position relative to the environment” (ibid., 75). 20. Noë, Action in Perception, 1. 21. Ibid., 130 (emphasis in original). 22. Gibson, Ecological Approach, 126. 23. Leder, Absent Body, 19. 24. Edward S. Casey, The World at a Glance, 202. 25. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 168–69. 26. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 144. Later in the chapter where this passage appears, Merleau-Ponty refers to the cane as “an appendage of the body, or an extension of the bodily synthesis” (154). 27. Rudolf Laban, Choreutics, 10. 28. Gibson, Ecological Approach, 116. 29. Straus, Primary World, 239.

70  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

30. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, 1. 31. Sheets-Johnstone, Primacy of Movement, 55. 32. T. G. R. Bower, “The Object in the World of the Infant,” 37. 33. Sheets-Johnstone, Primacy of Movement, 223 (emphasis in original). 34. Accounts of neurodivergence underscore the perceiving subject’s role in external movement perception. Individuals with cerebral akinetopsia (or “motion blindness”), which in severe cases is brought about by damage to the posterior brain, are unable to perceive fluid visual motion. Individuals with a milder, sometimes temporary, version of this condition report seeing movement stroboscopically instead of perceiving it as continuous. In gross akinetopsia, motion perception is more severely disrupted. One patient reported being unable to pour tea or coffee into a cup because “the fluid appeared to be frozen, like a glacier.” She was unable to cross the street because she could not perceive the movement of cars: “When I’m looking at the car first, it seems far away. But then, when I want to cross the road, suddenly the car is very near” (J. Zihl et al., “Selective Disturbance of Movement Vision after Bilateral Brain Damage,” 315). See also S. Zeki, “Cerebral Akinetopsia (Visual Motion Blindness): A Review.” 35. Neurologically, the brain processes biological motion differently than it processes non-biological motion. For a useful overview of the interdisciplinary research being conducted on biological motion perception, see Johnson and Shiffrar, eds., People Watching. 36. Marc Jeannerod, Motor Cognition: What Actions Tell the Self, 99. 37. Francesca Simion et  al., “A Predisposition for Biological Motion in the Newborn Baby.” 38. For a discussion of these and other animacy experiments, see John A. Pyles and Emily D. Grossman, “Neural Mechanisms for Biological Motion and Animacy,” esp. 308–312. Arieta Chouchourelou et  al., “What Does ‘Biological Motion’ Really Mean? Differentiating Visual Percepts of Human, Animal, and Nonbiological Motions,” addresses animacy perception. 39. William Wordsworth, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 68. 40. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, 141. 41. William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, 276 (hereafter referred to by title). 42. Kenneth Gross, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life, 66. 43. Ibid., 33–34. 44. Jiři Veltruský, “Puppetry and Acting,” 88. 45. Jan Mrázek, Phenomenology of a Puppet Theatre: Contemplations on the Art of Javanese Wayang Kulit, 30–31. 46. Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” 11  (emphasis  in original). 47. Ibid., 15. For a useful discussion of puppetry and the uncanny, see John Bell, “Playing with the Eternal Uncanny: The Persistent Life of Lifeless Objects.”

  MOVEMENT AND ANIMATION   

71

48. For additional information on TimeSlips, see Anne Basting, “Dementia and the Performance of Self.” 49. Additional information on D-Generation, which was directed by Robert Salomon, and a five-minute video that includes scenes from the production, can be found on the Sandglass Theatre website: http://sandglasstheater.org/d-generation/ (accessed 22 May 2017). 50. Gross, Puppet, 55. 51. Samuel Beckett, Dramatic Works, 13. 52. Eric Bass et al., “D-Generation,” 3. 53. Riverside Shakespeare, 1650. 54. Oxford English Dictionary. 55. Riverside Shakespeare, 1650. 56. Ibid., 1651. Kenneth Gross offers a powerful discussion of Shakespeare’s statue scene in The Dream of the Moving Statue, 99–109. 57. William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, 155, note 20. 58. A photograph of Allen as she appeared in the statue scene can be found on the Folger Shakespeare Library website in a section of the Winter’s Tale page entitled “Picturing The Winter’s Tale,” http://www.folger.edu/winters-tale (accessed 30 July 2017). 59. Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, 68. 60. This play of motion and inanimacy was an organizing dynamic of the 2016 Cheek by Jowl production of The Winter’s Tale. Throughout the play, but especially at the beginning and end, scenes of intense physical theatre were counterpointed by intervals of equally intense stillness where movement was frozen or suspended. The play was introduced by the figure of Time sitting motionlessly on stage while the audience took their seats, and during Leontes’ Act 1 soliloquies Hermione and Polixenes sat mannequinlike, de-animated, as Leontes manipulated their bodies to reflect his jealous imaginings. Characters were “statued,” in other words, well before the play’s concluding scene. In this denouement Natalie Radmall-Quirke sat immobilized as Hermione/Hermione’s statue and held this position so long before and after Pauline called on her to “be stone no more” that it began to feel as if she might not move at all. Rising, she walked around the gathered characters, approached Orlando James’s Leontes, and held her hand out for him. His moment, too, was held, to the point that both Hermione and Leontes entered a kind of suspended animacy. 61. Riverside Shakespeare, 1342. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., brackets in original. 64. Bottom’s death-scene as Pyramus in the tradesmen’s play at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a memorable example of an actor who cannot stay dead. Animacy trumps inanimacy during his failed attempt to non-perform. 65. John Gielgud, Stage Directions, 20–21.

72  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

66. Garner, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama, 52–86. This formalizing impulse can be seen in the stage designs of Edward Gordon Craig and Adolph Appia, Craig’s concept of the Übermarionette, Stanisław Witkiewicz’s Theatre of Pure Form, and the theatrical work of visual artists such as Wassily Kandinsky. 67. Garner, Bodied Spaces, 37. 68. Beckett, Dramatic Works, 426. 69. Ibid., 427. 70. Ibid., 432. 71. Ibid., 429. 72. Ibid., 429. 73. Bille Whitelaw, quoted in Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater, 60. 74. Brater, Beyond Minimalism, 64.

Bibliography Bass, Eric, Ines Zeller Bass, Kirk Murphy, Roberto Salomon, and Residents of Pine Heights Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, Brattleboro, Vermont. D-Generation (unpublished typescript dated 15 January 2013). Basting, Anne Davis. 2005. Dementia and the Performance of Self. In Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, ed. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander, 202–213. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Beckett, Samuel. 2006. Dramatic Works. Grove Centenary Edition, vol. 3. New York: Grove. Bell, John. 2014. Playing with the Eternal Uncanny: The Persistent Life of Lifeless Objects. In The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, ed. Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, and John Bell, 43–52. New York/ London: Routledge. Bower, T.G.R. 1971. The Object in the World of the Infant. Scientific American 225 (4): 30–38. Brater, Enoch. 1987. Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Casey, Edward S. 2007. The World at a Glance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chouchourelou, Arieta, Alissa Golden, and Maggie Shiffrar. 2013. What Does ‘Biological Motion’ Really Mean? Differentiating Visual Percepts of Human, Animal, and Nonbiological Motions. In People Watching: Social, Perceptual, and Neurophysiological Studies of Body Perception, ed. Kerri L.  Johnson and Maggie Shiffrar, 63–81. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 2003. The Uncanny. Trans. David McLintock. New  York: Penguin.

  MOVEMENT AND ANIMATION   

73

Garner, Stanton B., Jr. 1994. Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gibson, James J.  1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gielgud, John. 1963. Stage Directions. New York: Random House. Gowitzke, Barbara A., and Morris Milner. 1988. Scientific Bases of Human Movement. 3rd ed. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins. Gross, Kenneth. 1992. The Dream of the Moving Statue. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 2011. Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Book 2: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Jeannerod, Marc. 2006. Motor Cognition: What Actions Tell the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jentsch, Ernst. 1997. On the Psychology of the Uncanny. 1906. Trans. Roy Sellars. Angelaki 2 (1): 7–16. Laban, Rudolf. 1966. Choreutics. Annotated and ed. Lisa Ullmann. London: Macdonald and Evans. ———. 1971. The Mastery of Movement. Revised and enlarged by Lisa Ullmann, 3rd ed. Boston: Plays, Inc. Landgrebe, Ludwig. 1977. Phenomenology as Transcendental Theory of History. In Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals, ed. Frederick A.  Elliston and Peter McCormick. Trans. José Huertas-Jourda and Richard Feige, 101–113. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press. Lecoq, Jacques. 2002. The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre. Trans. David Bradby. Rev. ed. London: Methuen. Leder, Drew. 1990. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Luria, Aleksandr R. 1973. The Working Brain: An Introduction to Neuropsychology. Trans. Basil Haigh. New York: Basic Books. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. McBurney, Simon. 2002. Foreword. In The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre, by Jacques Lecoq. Trans. David Bradby, ix–x. Revised ed. London: Methuen. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1963. The Structure of Behavior. Trans. Alden L. Fisher. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A.  Landes. London: Routledge. Mrázek, Jan. 2005. Phenomenology of a Puppet Theatre: Contemplations on the Art of Javanese Wayang Kulit. Leiden: KITLV Press.

74  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Patočka, Jan. 1988. Le monde naturel et le movement de l’existence humaine. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Petit, Jean-Luc. 1999. Constitution by Movement: Husserl in Light of Recent Neurobiological Findings. In Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, ed. Jean Petitot, Francisco J. Varela, Bernard Pachoud, and Jean-Michel Roy, 220–244. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pyles, John A., and Emily D. Grossman. 2013. Neural Mechanisms for Biological Motion and Animacy. In People Watching: Social, Perceptual, and Neurophysiological Studies of Body Perception, ed. Kerri L. Johnson and Maggie Shiffrar, 304–317. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shakespeare, William. 1963. The Winter’s Tale, ed. J.  H. P.  Pafford. Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen. ———. 1997. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin, 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 2003. Kinesthetic Memory. Theoria et Historia Scientiarum 7 (1): 69–92. ———. 2010. Movement: The Generative Source of Spatial Perception and Cognition. In Spatial Cognition, Spatial Perception: Mapping the Self and Space, ed. Francine L.  Dolins and Robert W.  Mitchell, 323–340. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2011. The Primacy of Movement. Expanded second ed. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Simion, Francesca, Lucia Regolin, and Hermann Bulf. 2008. A Predisposition for Biological Motion in the Newborn Baby. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (2): 809–814. Stein, Edith. 1989. On the Problem of Empathy. 1917. 3rd. revised ed. Trans. Waltraut Stein. Vol. 3, The Collected Works of Edith Stein. Washington, DC: ICS. Straus, Erwin. 1963. The Primary World of Senses: A Vindication of Sensory Experience. Trans. Jacob Needleman. London: Free Press of Glencoe. Veltruský, Jiří. 1983. Puppetry and Acting. Semiotica 47 (1–4): 69–122. Wordsworth, William. 2014. Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose. Norton Critical Edition, ed. Nicholas Halmi. New York: Norton. Zeki, S. 1991. Cerebral Akinetopsia (Visual Motion Blindness): A Review. Brain 114 (2): 811–824. Zihl, J., D. von Cramon, and N. Mai. 1983. Selective Disturbance of Movement Vision After Bilateral Brain Damage. Brain 106 (2): 313–340.

Movement, Difference, and Ability

Moving Differently Before proceeding further in this book’s study of movement and its perception, I want to step back and address some important theoretical and methodological questions that bear upon this study. Whose experience do we describe when we make generalizations about movement and movement perception? Who is the I that moves and apprehends external movement in descriptions such as the ones I have offered, and what body authorizes these accounts? When we use terms such as flow or intentionality to characterize human movement, do we necessarily imply that all bodies move in the same way? These questions address a longstanding issue concerning phenomenological descriptions of experience. Are the structures of experience disclosed by phenomenology common to all subjects, and can these essentializing structures accommodate contingency and difference? In her canonical 1980 essay “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,” Iris Marion Young addresses these questions in reference to human movement. Young’s essay develops its argument through a critique of German phenomenologist and neurologist Erwin Straus’s 1952 essay “The Upright Posture,” which argues for the kinetic, psychological, and phenomenal importance of human uprightness. Citing the alignment of skull and vertebral column, the proportion and alignment of the legs, and the © The Author(s) 2018 S. B. Garner, Jr., Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre, Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91794-8_3

75

76  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

e­ xpansion of the body schema through the arms, Straus proposes that the human body was built for erectness and that this posture entails “a specific mode of being-in-the-world.”1 This upright mode of inhabiting space underlies the range of human action, including standing, walking, and throwing. In the essay’s closing quotation, the Enlightenment German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder states: “The upright gait of man is the only natural one to him, nay, it is the organization for every performance of his species and his distinguishing character.”2 Straus endorses this universalizing sentiment by concluding, “Human physique reveals human nature.”3 After discussing the use of weaponry in the biblical account of David defeating Goliath earlier in the essay, Straus notes “the remarkable difference in the manner of throwing of the two sexes” as demonstrated by photographs of girls and boys aged five and six executing this movement.4 Unlike their male counterparts, who engage their “total motorium” in the act of throwing, the girls do not stretch their arms sideward or twist their trunks; rather, they throw overhand, using a limited range of muscles. As a result of these deviations, the thrown ball lacks force, speed, and accuracy, and it begins its descent almost immediately. The “feminine attitude” to throwing, Straus claims, indicates a reluctance to project the body beyond its own center. Using the terms introduced in the previous chapter, we might say that the difference in movement performance that Straus observes reflects an inhibition of the intentional arc joining movement impulse and its environment. This difference in motile behavior, Straus concludes, is primarily a matter of expression—not a difference of strength or anatomical structure, “but of a general psychological attitude in relation to the world and to space.”5 Acknowledging the phenomenon that Straus identifies, Young critiques the essay’s account of female comportment for its unwillingness to engage the social causes of female inhibition in relation to task-related movement. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of women’s situation in patriarchal society and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of lived spatiality, Young offers a feminist account of feminine motility. Because women often believe themselves incapable of fulfilling tasks that require strength, Young argues, they tend to use only those body parts immediately connected to the task rather than mobilizing their bodies as a whole. Their movements lack fluidity, direction, and confidence in the relationship between aim and enactment; the space in which they move

  MOVEMENT, DIFFERENCE, AND ABILITY   

77

is a constricted one. At the root of these limitations is an ambivalence between transcendence and immanence, between the body as a vehicle for movement and the body as an object of attention and concern. “Our attention,” she writes “is often divided between the aim to be realized in motion and the body that must accomplish it, while at the same time saving it from harm.”6 This ambivalence and the inhibited intentionality it enforces derives not from some “mysterious ‘feminine essence’” but from socially imposed expectations and learned comportment.7 Girls are taught at an early age to inhibit their natural movements and to experience their bodies under a patriarchal gaze that objectifies them. “Women in sexist society are physically handicapped,” Young asserts. “Insofar as we learn to live out our existence in accordance with the definitions that patriarchal culture assigns us, we are physically inhibited, confined, positioned, and objectified.”8 I return to “Throwing Like a Girl” nearly forty years after it was written because it provides a model for challenging the blind spots that can shape phenomenological accounts of experience—in this case, the masculinist assumptions underlying Straus’s account of comportment and self-­movement— and the universalizing impulse behind such omissions.  The article’s history also demonstrates the value of critiquing one’s own phenomenological assumptions. In a 1998 essay revisiting her earlier article, Young questioned its acceptance of Merleau-Ponty’s model of body comportment, spatiality, and motility, “even though it would be appropriate to criticize a philosophy that locates subjectivity in the body for not asking whether sexed and gendered bodies express differing subjectivities.”9 Her essay, she suggests, accepted Merleau-Ponty’s existential humanism and its assumption that the experiential structures it identified were universal. She notes, for example, her article’s reliance on a Merleau-Pontean/Heideggerian instrumentalist account of motility and spatiality: “Its body as subject is a purposive actor, with specific objectives it moves out into the world to accomplish.”10 By privileging plan, intention, and control, she suggests, the instrumental-purposive model of action typifies male-coded comportment and activities (the examples she gives are sport, labor, and travel). What would a phenomenology of action look like, for instance, if it considered the corporeal modalities enabling what Jürgen Habermas called “communicative,” rather than instrumental, action? Referring to a scene in Tillie Olsen’s unfinished novel Yonnondio, in which a farm woman cans preserves while minding a crying

78  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

baby held between her arm and hip, she imagines a phenomenology that proceeded from an understanding of movement as “plural and engaged, to and fro, here and yonder, rather than unified and singly directed.”11 This mode of action, she suggests, is particularly characteristic of women. While I question Young’s equation of intentionality with a narrowly instrumentalist version of it—as I will argue in the chapter “Movement, Attention, and Intentionality”, the multiply directed movements illustrated in Olsen’s story are no less intentional than the act of throwing a ball—her articles illustrate the stakes in phenomenological description, such as the ones I employ in the present study. Because phenomenology seeks to illuminate the structures of givenness, it matters whose or what givenness underwrites its claims. The methodological contradiction that phenomenologists must negotiate derives from the contingency of individual experience and the shared structures that make intersubjectivity and social life possible. As Young’s later essay indicates, the issues raised by this contradiction are not easy ones. Young questions her original use of Merleau-Pontean phenomenology for its assumption “that there is a general level of theorizing where gender (or class or cultural) difference does not appear in a phenomenological ontology, and then more specific, less abstract accounts where they do.”12 This assumption was reflected in her earlier essay’s use of the phrase “gendered modalities” in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s experiential categories. A modality, after all, is a quality of something that transcends its particularity. “Throwing Like a Girl,” she acknowledges, “contains an implicit tension between its humanism and its effort to specify the modalities of that human universal.”13 The remainder of this chapter will pursue the question of commonality, divergence, and the imperative presented by things that do not fit or are left out. It does so in order to clarify how I approach the limitations and opportunities presented by phenomenological and scientific descriptions of movement and movement perception. The next section continues my discussion of blind spots and inclusiveness by considering the issue of normalization. The ensuing section offers a phenomenological framework for thinking about movement experience and what we know and cannot know in our kinesthetic engagement with others. It is followed by expanded application of Husserl’s notions of I can and I cannot. These sections explore theoretical and methodological assumptions that discussions of experience, subjectivity, and embodiment usually leave unexamined. The

  MOVEMENT, DIFFERENCE, AND ABILITY   

79

final section grounds this meta-discussion of divergence and diversity in a first-person account of attending two integrated-dance pieces by AXIS Dance Company.

Norming Movement Phenomenological disagreements having to do with divergence often boil down to an issue of scale: how has the field of experience been demarcated in individual analyses? Classical—and much contemporary—phenomenology categorizes its subject field as the human abstracted from its individual manifestations. The advantage of this strategy is that it enables the search for common variables, for experiential structures that inhere in all human beings—or most of them, depending on the phenomenologist’s willingness to admit exceptions. The disadvantage, obviously, is that it elides difference, the particular realizations of lived experience that mark human diversity. The obvious response to this essentializing strategy on the part of those who challenge it is to re-center the inquiry on individuals whose experience is not captured, or wholly captured, by such description. Often, this critique posits its own sub- or counter-category—a feminine modality of body comportment and motility in “Throwing Like a Girl,” for example—as a way of refocusing analysis. The description generated by such refocusing discloses modalities of experience undetected or passed over in the account “above” it. Inevitably, though, subcategories replicate features of the categories they set themselves against: they propose general accounts that apply to all of the individuals included in that subcategory and neglect more individualizing facets of the experience they describe. The descriptive power of “Throwing Like a Girl” does not obscure its own categoricalness. One can envision a response to Young based on further subcategorization (based on sexual orientation, age, ability, race, or class) then further subcategorization in response to these new accounts, each one forging new insights into lived experience. I point this out not to criticize the categorizing impulse; every account of experience can be critiqued according to who or what it leaves out. A phenomenology that cannot extend beyond the individual is just as untenable as a phenomenology that claims to subsume the myriad forms of particularity. The power of Young’s phenomenology—and Straus’s, for that matter—is a function of selectivity, of what

80  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

it leaves out. In this sense, categorization models human perception. It is impossible, phenomenology insists, to see everything at once. The body in which consciousness arises is enworlded, which means that it forms part of the world it perceives. One consequence of this situatedness is that perception is always perspectival: what I see depends on where I am. In his working notes for The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty extended the principle of incomplete vision to the structures of consciousness itself. Drawing an analogy to the physiological blind spot (punctum caecum)—the photoreceptor-absent point in the retina where the optic nerves passes into the eye—he asserts that perception is similarly structured in relation to what it cannot see. “[P]erception,” he writes, “is imperception.”14 Blind spots need not be considered flaws of vision; indeed, they are essential for the constitution thereof. They are also essential to the apprehension of alterity. Discussing this issue from an ethical standpoint, Jon Foley Sherman makes an important claim: “Eradicating blind spots undoes the possibility of perceiving others because it insists on a totalizing vision no one can possess.”15 Blind spots identify the invisible, that which escapes my vantage point. Foley Sherman goes on: “In this sense, blind spots do not hide the experiences of other people, and domination does not depend on them to do its work.” Blind spots, he writes, “secure experience as strange,” outside the visible’s illumination.16 This inability to see everything completely opens the space for ethical encounter. Phenomenological and other methodologies open themselves to criticism when they normalize their experiential categories without thinking through the implications of the hierarchy they establish or the lived experiences they exclude. Straus’s evocation of human nature is an example of this. When confronted with the divergent motile behavior of women and the psychological inhibitions he identifies as their source, he addresses them as gender-specific impairments rather than forms of experience with their own integrity and legitimacy. The problem of normalization is also at issue in the cognitive and neuroscientific research tradition I draw upon in my attempt to understand the phenomena I describe. Much of this research is historically grounded in a distinction between the normal and the pathological, a distinction marked since its formation in the nineteenth century by the equation of difference with abnormality, deficit, and disease. The pathological, in these cases, often involves neurodivergent ­conditions where typical sensorimotor, cognitive, and emotional

  MOVEMENT, DIFFERENCE, AND ABILITY   

81

functioning is impaired. This version of the normal/pathological model has influenced phenomenology, including the work of Merleau-Ponty. Throughout The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty refers to clinical descriptions of physical and cognitive difference—schizophrenia, aphasia, neurasthenics, number blindness, phantom limbs—as a way of illuminating his accounts of normal perception, body-experience, and motility. The best-­known example of this is his discussion of Johann Schneider, the subject of a 1918 neuropsychological study by Kurt Goldstein and Adhémar Gelb. Schneider, who sustained brain injuries as a result of being wounded by mine splinters during World War I, exhibited a number of impairments, including loss of movement vision, position sense, and body schema.17 Merleau-Ponty uses Schneider’s inability to engage in abstract or expressive movement—the fact that he is “‘bound’ to the actual” rather than being able to place himself in imaginary situations or execute movements without concrete applications—to clarify the normal subject’s ability to move through and interact with the world.18 In Schneider’s form of pathology, Merleau-Ponty writes, consciousness “mimics its customary operations, but without the power of obtaining their intuitive realization and without the power of hiding the strange deficiency that steals them from their full sense.”19 Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of Schneider and the other neurodivergent figures that people The Phenomenology of Perception are among his most revealing and suggestive. Like A. R. Luria’s neurological study of brain injury, The Man with a Shattered World, Merleau-Ponty’s extended account of Schneider’s experience demonstrates a remarkable ability to imagine different modalities of experience. In both cases, the analysis of divergence is grounded in the subject’s account of how perception and motion feel—its inner landscape, as it were. Although abnormality in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology exists on a continuum with normality— Schneider’s world is coherent for him on its own terms—the pathological framework that frames his discussion risks marginalizing the modalities it identifies. Besides the fact that, as Georges Canguilhem points out, “An anomaly is not an abnormality” and “Diversity does not signify sickness,” the term pathological reinforces a dichotomy between what is typical and the myriad forms of what is not.20 Pathologization also implies that those who speak from the vantage point of the “normal” have the authority to diagnose what is not normal, describe it using themselves as a model, and reinforce a category that has historically been applied for stigmatizing

82  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

purposes. In challenging the pathological model and the coercive normality it often sustains, my study advocates a more open and exploratory methodology, a recognition that normality is a matter of point of view, and a willingness to engage what eludes—and, to some extent, will always elude—the normalizing eye.21 Unreflective recourse to normality has historically characterized the study of movement and movement perception. It is striking, to give an example of this, how firmly phenomenological and cognitive descriptions of sensorimotor capacities assume visual ability: the ability to see the world through which one moves and to visually perceive the movements of others. Gibson’s ecological theory of perception, for instance, relies on visual orientation: the environmental affordances the perceiving subject encounters are seen or seeable. Similarly, the intentional model of movement that I illustrated in the previous chapter with examples such as walking, sailing, and shooting a basketball posits visual access to one’s body and the world through which one moves. How do these descriptions change when one does not presume vision? In Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness, John M.  Hull, a scholar of religious education who became blind at the age of 45, describes an experience of body, perception, and movement radically different from sighted experience. When he walks to work, he does so without the visual landscape that facilitates walking for those who can see by allowing them to project a course and visually monitor their progress. When Hull becomes aware of objects and obstacles ahead of or alongside him, he does so by using his cane and by sensing the presence of things through echolocation (the tactile perception of reflected sound waves). These faculties, along with the memory he develops of landmarks along the way, provide him with guideposts but not a visual trajectory to his steps. The blind person, he writes, “lacks an incentive to form a p ­urposeful action which would turn something grasped potentially into something realized actually.”22 The fact that Hull cannot watch his legs carry out his intention by moving in a purposeful direction—what he calls “the reassuring continuity of one’s own consciousness in the outlines of one’s own body”—further dissociates him from its movement in space.23 He knows his movements only through sensations: “When I try to visualize my route, what I do is to anticipate the sensations which my body will have at various times (i.e., places) along that route.”24 Though he secures a hold on his walking body and

  MOVEMENT, DIFFERENCE, AND ABILITY   

83

its environment using non-visual perceptual faculties, this hold is precarious. When a sighted person is lost, she can look at street sign and determine her location and direction. When a blind person is lost, by contrast, she loses not only direction but position, as well. “This is such a profound lostness,” Hull writes, “that most sighted people find it difficult to imagine.”25 Hull’s perception of the movements around him, including the movement of others, is equally transformed by the experience of blindness. Hull describes sitting in a park on a weekend day while his children played. As he sat there, he heard the footsteps of passers-by, the rustle of a newspaper from a nearby bench, the sounds of cars arriving at and leaving the parking lot, the sounds of geese and other birds from the lake in front of him, and the sounds of people playing soccer further off. Through these sounds, he experienced “an astonishingly varied and rich panorama of movement, music and information.”26 He notes, though, that the world of his perception in this moment consisted of discontinuous activity rather than sustained intentions. In moments of silence when nothing happened, that part of his perceptual world “died, disappeared.”27 On one hand, Hull’s perceptual environment was defined by movement, since the sounds of movement brought that environment to awareness. On the other hand, the movements he perceived were intermittent, untraceable. “The acoustic world,” he writes, “is one in which things pass in and out of existence.”28 When someone addresses him at a social gathering, that person arrives out of nowhere and disappears into nowhere when the conversation is over. The perceptual world that Hull describes is one where things announce their presence to him, call themselves into being for him; it is not a world that he can explore and interact with apart from this self-conjuring. While Hull uses the term normal to describe the experience of those who can see, his use of this term is free of the pathological framework that clinical descriptions often employ in designating impaired vision. Hull’s phenomenological meditation on blindness indicates a mode of body-­experience, motility, and movement perception that differs in important ways from that described by Merleau-Ponty and Gibson but is no less characterized by motor efficacy and perceptual richness. In contrast to the sight-based account of movement proposed by these writers, Hull offers a view of movement untethered to ocularcentric modes of motor intentionality. When

84  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

Hull walks through Birmingham or interacts with others, he does so intentionally: getting where he is going to, making a new acquaintance, surmounting the obstacles he encounters. Projecting himself into the world around him, he immerses himself in his environment and responds to it. But this interaction follows a different perceptual/motile logic, one that cuts in certain ways against the Merleau-Pontean grain. When Hull describes the acoustic environment he inhabits sitting on a park bench—or the way wind brings outdoor surroundings to life—the movement-experience he discloses operates outside vision in the receptivity of hearing and touch. And when he describes his body not as a human form but as “arrangements of sensitivities, a conscious space comparable to the patterns of the falling rain,” his account feels closer to the rhizomatic body of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari than that of The Phenomenology of Perception.29 Dialogue and methodological humility are called for when it comes to the question of normality and difference in phenomenological and other approaches to experience, perception, and behavior.30 Given the selectivity inherent in categorization and the structural inevitability of blind spots whenever one attempts to look at something globally, it is important to acknowledge and, when appropriate, engage with, what lies outside the field of vision (the sighted/blindness metaphor is intentional  here). As Foley Sherman notes, the work of revealing blind spots “is unending and exhausting, and no less necessary for it.”31 In researching movement and movement perception before and during the course of writing this book, I have made the interrogation of categories and the identification of blind spots one of my central methodological principles. In the case of published accounts by phenomenologists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists, I ask—as I have done here with Merleau-Ponty and Gibson—what experiences their enabling assumptions obscure. I have done this, as well, with my own assumptions and the models I have chosen to employ. As the rest of this book makes clear, I take as my reference point the intentionality of self-movement and a view of external movement perception that emphasizes integration and an attunement with animate motion. Both views assume an embodied subject embedded in its environment. I start from these models because versions of the dynamics they identify characterize every mode of motility and perception I have encountered or seen described. As Evan Thompson has persuasively argued, the enactive exchange between organism and environment, on which these models depend, characterizes all life-forms, including those at the monocellular

  MOVEMENT, DIFFERENCE, AND ABILITY   

85

level.32 I do not, however, offer their accounts as normative in the demarcating, often stigmatizing sense I critique above. While the experiential variables that underlie movement through the world are similar, individuals accomplish self-movement and movement perception in particular ways, and these are enacted in response to a range of internal and external variables. As my focus on the issue of disability throughout this study indicates, I am interested in experiential modalities that challenge what we view as normal and enrich the appreciation of divergent movement experience. In other words, I am interested in ways of moving and perceiving that haunt general claims, including my own. How would my account of walking on a crowded street in the chapter “Movement and Animation”, be different if I were a woman or someone with an unusual gait? As a necessary other side to this concern with divergence and variability, I am interested in what it means for embodied subjects to encounter difference across modalities. I take it as axiomatic that the experience of others can never be completely known. As Canguilhem reminds us, “An anomaly is a fact of individual variation which prevents two beings from being able to take the place of each other completely.”33 It is important to remind ourselves, though, that normality in the sense of commonality can enable as well as constrain. While the normal can be imposed on human variability as a social, institutional, and epistemological category, it can also be a flexible means of navigating this variability and a source of identification, development, and cohesion. In Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture, Carrie Noland writes: Rethinking the cultural field as differential rather than oppositional alone allows me to study a whole range of deviations from normative behavior— from slight variation to outright rejection—while simultaneously construing the normative as equally wide-ranging in its modes of acquisition. Normative behavior may be coercively imposed (as in Foucault’s account) or actively sought, imitated during infancy or gained incrementally throughout one’s entire life. Further, “normative” should be understood as normative within a particular context: a hip-swaying gait might be normative for a classed or gendered subject at a certain place and time, but balletic turn-out is normative for a self-selected group of skilled bodies that have acquired flexibility in the hip joints under voluntary duress.34

Rather than dismiss normativity as an impediment to diversity, then, one can productively engage the normal as a field of contact, engagement, and

86  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

shared experience, the point where difference announces itself but commonality is achievable. Understood in this flexible and strategic sense, normality is a necessary component of experience, disclosing itself differently depending on where and how one looks.

I can/I cannot An important characteristic of phenomenological, cognitive, and other descriptions of motility is their assumption of ability and efficacy. When I move through my environment, according to these accounts, I am able to realize my intentions through meaningful, successful actions. The confirmation of this ability comes from the fact that I am often not aware of myself in the act of achieving my projects. I may encounter external obstacles while carrying out my project, or I could have a splitting headache, at which point I become aware of my physical and mental effort through frustration or physical distraction. Ideally, though, the subject of these actions is able to carry out its projects in a condition of freedom and potency, and the presence of obstacles and interruptions represent situational compromises of an underlying ability. In this book’s introduction I referred to Merleau-Ponty’s statement that “Consciousness is originally not an ‘I think that,’ but rather an ‘I can.’”35 By locating consciousness in the body-subject’s pragmatic interaction with its environment, Merleau-­Ponty rejects the Cartesian mind for one that enacts itself through and in terms of its perceptual-motor capabilities. Intention is linked to ability in Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of movement; he writes that “my body is polarized by its tasks, insofar as it exists toward them, insofar as it coils up upon itself in order to reach its goal.”36 The fact of inability, however—the possibility that I cannot achieve the movements and goals I confront—is largely subsumed within this global I can. By normalizing ability in this way and leaving inability as an undesignated category, Merleau-Ponty aligns the latter with pathology. What Merleau-Ponty’s statement sidesteps, I suggest, is the dialectical ­relationship between ability and inability—the fact that neither is imaginable apart from the other in actual experience. For this reason, I ground my understanding of movement and movement perception, not in Merleau-Ponty’s I can, but in Husserl’s concepts of I can and I cannot in Book 2 of Ideas. Like Merleau-Ponty, Husserl equates I can with a spontaneous freedom in

  MOVEMENT, DIFFERENCE, AND ABILITY   

87

which the Ego accomplishes its goal within the sphere of “practical possibility” through the medium of the body.37 This freedom is not unbounded, of course. In terms of acquired skills, I can forget how to play the piano or fall out of practice. If I am laid up sick for a long time, I have to learn how to walk again; more permanently, I can have or develop a neurological disorder and lose the mastery of my limbs. Faced with the experience I cannot do it, Husserl writes, “I have become an other.”38 The experience of I cannot is therefore phenomenologically different from the experience of I can. Husserl considers the question of resistance. There are intentions that meet no resistance and those that encounter it (“a doing that has its ‘against which’”).39 The resistance I encounter may be overcome through a gradient of effort, or it may be insurmountable, in which case I cannot becomes the experiential base line.40 Up to this point in Husserl’s analysis, I cannot is largely an obstacle that one can overcome: one shakes one’s hand when it falls asleep, one redoubles ones efforts to overcome an apparent impasse. But with his consideration of insurmountability, Husserl suggests more fundamental connections between I can and I do not have the power: “The genuine apperception of resistance presupposes that we are not dealing here with something merely thingly, but with something of the sort that falls within the sphere of my ‘will,’ within the sphere of that which I perhaps already have come to know as something that is in my power” (271). While Husserl’s “resistance in the will” largely refers to the intending consciousness’s perception of the resistance it encounters, I propose two additional ways of thinking about this passage—and Husserl’s notion of I cannot—that open the concept of ability to a richer encounter with variability, cultural situatedness, disability, and difference. The first involves culturally internalized impediments to action. While Husserl’s examples of external resistance center on physical obstacles—trying to lift a heavy object, for instance—external limits on I can assume less material forms: the societal definitions that Young credited with physically handicapping women in a patriarchal society, for example. Internalized resistance of this kind reorients the subject’s bodily experience and its relationship to the world as a sphere of action. From this point of view, the “power” that Husserl speaks of is not only a matter of physical ability but also of pressures and coercions that shape what one can do and how one moves. I can and I cannot are inseparable from I may and I may not. As Sara Ahmed points out in Queer Phenomenology, “‘Doing things’ depends not so much on an intrinsic capacity or even on dispositions or habits, but on the way in which the

88  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

world is available as a space for action.”41 In her discussion of race, Ahmed cites Frantz Fanon’s description in Black Skin, White Masks of wanting to smoke while sitting at a table: And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty.42

Fanon imagines the movements he would have to make in order to reach the pack of cigarettes and find the matches. These movements are made, not with the spontaneous, unconscious freedom that a white person would display, but with a self-consciousness born of prohibition. Fanon attributes this alienation from his own movements to a “racial epidermal schema.”43 The internalized I cannot that Fanon describes in this situation manifests itself in other forms of disablement: off-limit places, prohibited intimacies, compulsory forms of labor, and a pervasive feeling of unsafety. Generalizing from Fanon’s account, Ahmed redefines the phenomenology of I can as a “phenomenology of whiteness.”44 I cannot, in this sense, is an inevitable experience of those who fail to meet its normative criteria. “When someone’s whiteness is in dispute they come under ‘stress,’ which in turn threatens bodily motility or what the body ‘can do.’”45 Ahmed suggests that the whiteness scale exists alongside other scales that intersect with and reinforce each other. The institutionally privileged white body, therefore, is also middle class and straight—and, needless to say, male. Queer Phenomenology provides a strong argument for the impact of ideological and institutional structures on body-experience, motility, and other forms of world-directed action. It supports the recognition that Husserl’s I can, like Merleau-Ponty’s after it, rests on social and i­ deological structures that constrain its field of operation. This constraint is both liberating and inhibiting. It is liberating for those who find themselves at the right end of the I can/I cannot hierarchy, inhibiting for those who do not. Husserl’s I can provides a touchstone for this dynamic by articulating a phenomenological model of non-alienated movement and ability; it offers the norm, one might say, of movement without the restrictions of socially defined categories. But while I agree with Ahmed that it does so, I see in Husserl’s I cannot and in his understanding of internalized resistance an

  MOVEMENT, DIFFERENCE, AND ABILITY   

89

opening to the outside through which shaping influences manifest themselves in consciousness and will. Fuller discussion of this opening might place Husserl’s individual-directed conception of habit in conversation with the sociological notion of habitus, which considers body comportment, motility, facial expressions, and other bodily practices from the perspective of society/culture, gender, class, and other forms of social positioning. Noland has made an important contribution to this line of inquiry by defining kinesthetic sensation as “a point of intersection between cultural, biological, and personal imperatives.”46 My second reading of Husserl’s I cannot extends the idea of dis-ability in a more radical direction.47 When Husserl characterizes resistance as falling “within the sphere of my ‘will,’ within the sphere of that which I perhaps have already come to know as something that is in my power,” his words suggest that I cannot is folded into I can and functions as a background to it. The issue of surmountability supports this way of thinking. In the case of resistance that is surmountable (a jar of peanut butter that requires a stronger twist to open, for example), I cannot is eventually replaced by a restored I can. In instances where resistance turns out to be insurmountable, though, specific I cannots install themselves as a permanent feature of experience. There are things I discover I cannot do by failing in the attempt, things I could do once but no longer can, things I know I cannot do before even trying, and things I am not allowed to do. Some of these I cannots manifest themselves as features of my environment (the wall that is too high to scale, the private beachfront property I am not allowed to enter); others manifest themselves as body limits and incapacities (the human musculoskeletal and cardiorespiratory systems, my individual ability to perform certain tasks). These two manifestations are, of course, different facets of the same phenomenon: the wall is too high to scale, in part, because my body cannot adapt itself to its surface and height, and my exclusion from beachfront access can be experienced as a motor inhibition while I stand there reading the notice that forbids my entrance. The disability brought to consciousness by these experiences need not be viewed as a compromise that contingency imposes on an originary I can. I cannot is always embedded in I can. We are born helpless into the world, and our earliest attempts to interact with our environment by moving within it are inseparable from this awareness. As we extend our ability to realize our intentions through environmentally situated action, our awareness of what we cannot do presents a constant background to our actions. I cannot is the space beyond my reach, the pull of gravity when I

90  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

jump, the fatigue in my eyes when I have been reading for a long time, what I see birds do that I am unable to. These motor forms of I cannot interact with a wider field of limiting factors such as habits of thought and comportment, body-image, psychological state, social proscriptions, and physical duress. I cannot, in short, is all that sets limits to my intentional life. From this perspective, is intentionality imaginable apart from the I cannot it challenges? Carried to its logical end, a non-challenged I can is the dream of omnipotence, the fantasy of a subject that observes no limits in a reality that yields to it at every turn.48 While this application of I cannot takes Husserl’s term in a direction that he himself did not pursue (and might not endorse), the opening for this reading is available in his brief introduction to this concept. Not only does Husserl theorize the concept of I can in relation to I cannot, he locates the latter in consciousness and the will to act. Playing out the implications of this inclusion, I suggest that ability and inability are dialectically inseparable from each other, that I cannot orients I can as the punctum caecum orients visibility. Often this orientation resides at the threshold of awareness, shaping an individual’s actions without necessarily calling attention to itself. I cannot is transcended in these instances as the body-­ subject reaches beyond itself in perception and self-movement. At other times, like the body’s dys-appearance that Drew Leder identifies in experiences such as pain and illness, I cannot obtrudes into consciousness with varying force and duration.49 In some individuals—the impaired, the elderly, the socially marked (such as Fanon)—inability becomes an experiential theme, undermining transcendental world-engagement with self-­ consciousness and tentativeness. But even for those fortunate enough to be able to neglect it, I cannot is intrinsically there as an aspect of experience. It resides in our skeletomuscular structure, which moves some ways and not others, in the limits of our senses, in the stresses and fatigue that our bodies are subject to. Shaun Gallagher’s distinction between body image and body schema provides a useful framework for understanding the I can/I cannot dialectic and its relationship to inner and outer enablements and constraints. In How the Body Shapes the Mind, Gallagher surveys the major uses of these terms since the late nineteenth century—including Merleau-­Ponty’s discussion of “body schema” (schéma corporel) in The Phenomenology of Perception—and proposes a conceptual distinction between them that reflects the complex structure of action and experience. Body image refers to the perceptions, attitudes, mental representations, and beliefs

  MOVEMENT, DIFFERENCE, AND ABILITY   

91

that has of one’s body. Body schema, on the other hand, refers to the sensorimotor capacities that function beneath the threshold of conscious awareness. “The body schema,” Gallagher writes, “involves certain motor capacities, abilities, and habits that both enable and constrain movement and the maintenance of posture.”50 The difference between these two systems, he explains, is the difference between perceiving one’s movements and being able to move or act. One perceives one’s body in a variety of sensory and mental registers, but one’s movements are governed by pre-conscious frameworks, dispositions, habits, and movement styles. Because my perception and attention can only attend to one part or aspect of the body at a time, the body image is necessarily abstract, partial, and distinct from its environment. The body schema, on the other hand, functions in an integrated, holistic way: posture adjustments, for instance, involve global adjustment across muscle systems.51 It is pragmatically and intentionally oriented toward its environment and can actually include parts of this environment within its body performance (the stilts of a circus performer, for example, or the blind person’s cane). While the body exists as an object of awareness in the body image, it tends to recede from consciousness during intentionally directed body-schematic performances. Only when this performance fails does the body intrude within one’s perceptual field. Gallagher’s clarification of the concepts body image and body schema is useful not only because it provides a conceptual reference point for understanding the relation of ability and inability, but also because it underscores the phenomenological inseparability of I can and I cannot. Because the body schema involves “motor capacities, abilities, and habits that both enable and constrain movement and the maintenance of posture” (my emphasis), it includes pre-conscious factors that inhibit as well as facilitate the subject’s kinetic intentionality. Motor capacities points to the skeletal, muscular, and neurological architectures that enable and constrain movement execution, while abilities as Gallagher uses the term suggests biomechanical invariants. Habits, on the other hand, are the results of learning, and they have historical, cultural, and interpersonal origins. How do externally observed postural and movement dynamics install themselves at the prenoetic ground of movement performance? A primary way, philosophers, scientists, and developmental psychologists have suggested, is through imitation. Children adopt the movement styles they encounter through a process of observation and largely unconscious reenactment. The concepts of body image and body schema provide an

92  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

additional perspective on this internalization of enablement and constraint. While the two systems differ in their operations and on what they present or do not present to awareness, after all, they are not entirely independent of each other. As Gallagher notes, body image sometimes influences the postural or motor performances of body schemas. Dancers and athletes train in order to make deliberate movements part of the body schematic performance; in the case of dancers and many athletes, this training is accomplished through visual analysis of one’s movements— standing in front of a mirror during dance rehearsals, analyzing films of one’s performance during elite athletic training.52 Conversely, body schematic performance can be brought to awareness in ways that modify body image, as when a newly acquired skill or disability changes my perceptions and beliefs about how my body moves. Crucially for our present discussion, longer-standing attitudes or beliefs about one’s body can operate at the body schematic level. Gallagher writes, “Certain established beliefs or dispositions concerning my body, even very basic ones concerning my human shape, may have an effect on my current body percept (short-term body image), and on the way that I move, and even on the way that I perceive the world.” In other words, he suggests, “there are reciprocal interactions between prenoetic body schemas and cognitive experiences, including normal and abnormal consciousness of the body.”53 Reciprocity, in this sense, is what allows the beliefs, attitudes, and expectations of culture to permeate and shape the body’s kinetic performance, whether that performance turns out to be the inhibited act of throwing a ball for the girls of Iris Marion Young’s generation or Fanon’s compromised movements as he imagines reaching for a cigarette under the white man’s gaze. As Fanon points out, we recall, “In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema.”54 Earlier I used the term biomechanical invariants to refer to the constraints presented by motor capacities and abilities, as if such constraints were a matter of skeletal, muscular, and neurological ­factors alone and only habits and overt movement performances were a matter of learning or cultural/interpersonal absorption. The reciprocal interactions between body image and body schema, however, challenges this easy distinction. If the I cans and I cannots that characterize my beliefs about how I move can originate externally, and if these beliefs can manifest themselves at the body schematic level within my actual movements, then ability and inability themselves are subject to cultural expectations, beliefs, and interventions. In this sense, I can and I cannot are a function not only

  MOVEMENT, DIFFERENCE, AND ABILITY   

93

of what my body can actually do and not do, but also of the ways skeletal, muscular, and neurological realities are framed by attitudes and institutional strictures. My body’s ability to conduct itself in certain ways and not in others reflects, in part, the social world it inhabits.

Spectatorship and Ability/Inability Understanding I cannot as an intrinsic feature of sensorimotor experience rather than a function of isolated intrusions into this experience has important implications for the way we think about movement and movement perception. Most obviously, it challenges ways of thinking that categorize ability and inability in sharp opposition to each other. A dialectically conceived I can/I cannot destabilizes the notions of normality and abnormality by demonstrating the mutual inherence of these two terms. It similarly undermines rigidly binary models of disability/able-bodiedness in ways that are consistent with an important argument in disability studies.55 While Disability and Able-bodiedness as social categories depend on their demarcation, to oppose disability and able-bodiedness as experiential categories without acknowledging the dialectical I can/I cannot that both negotiate is to impoverish both. It impoverishes able-bodiedness by denying the inability that frames and constitutes it. While some writers on disability have advanced the term temporarily able-bodied to express the precariousness of non-impairment, even this term may not do justice to the contingent nature of ability and the many ways that inability shadows it both obtrusively and unobtrusively. As those with disabilities know, a strict disability/able-bodiedness distinction also impoverishes disability by obscuring the robust I can that often persists in the presence of impairment.56 A concept of disability that fails to acknowledge its dialectical relation to ability denies being-in-the-world, agency, and efficacy to those designated by the term. The history and institutional forms of this denial are well known. In broader terms, the mutually constituting relationship between I can and I cannot has implications for how we perceive and vicariously enact the movements of others. If one’s ability to recognize and kinesthetically replicate these movements depends on one’s own movement experiences, as experimental studies have shown, then one’s ability parameters and sensorimotor history form a crucial base line of self–other kinesthetic interactions. As I watch a dancer performing, I am exhilarated by the seeming effortlessness of her moving body’s challenge to gravity and

94  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

s­keletomuscular constraint. In such moments, my kinesthetic imagination plays freely with I can, projecting me into a realm of movement possibility that frees me from my inflexible body’s limitations (its I cannot) by vicariously eclipsing them. At the same time, this feeling of liberation—of moving more freely that I ever could in reality—is shadowed by my awareness of the dancer’s exertion, even—and especially—when it appears effortless. With a lifetime of training, I could never do this. Because my body cannot move in these ways, I can also never completely know what it means to achieve and inhabit the kinetic melody she performs before me. I can imagine myself into her movements—participate vicariously as she moves through space—but my pleasure in her achievement is inseparable from my recognition of what I cannot do. Movement perception under this mode of attention involves an experiential oscillation between I can and I cannot, an oscillation that propels me outward into the movement I observe and backward into my own capacity/incapacity. The fact that I and the one whose movements I observe both negotiate the capacity/incapacity dialectic means that we share a field of experiential variability rather than inhabiting the same or opposite sides of a false dichotomy between ability and inability.57 As the perceptual dynamic outlined in the above example suggests, though, my experience of another’s movement is also individual, multiply conditioned, and necessarily limited in my ability to know the other’s experience-in-­ movement. As the phenomenon of blind spots demonstrates, I can and I cannot characterizes perception as well as action. While this fact underscores the humility that needs to be adopted when writing about the experience of others, such humility need not be paralyzing. What I can do and can know allows me to apprehend the other as a parallel moving, active subject in the world. What I cannot do and cannot know secures the alterity that makes genuine intersubjectivity possible. Confronted with this recognition, the fantasy of kinesthetic merging gives way to what Petra Kuppers calls “densities, encounters, and differences.”58 I close this chapter with a personal account of the ability/inability dialectic at work in spectatorial movement perception. Staying with the medium of dance, which has inspired so much of the discussion of kinesthetic empathy since the 1930s, I describe my own experience attending an evening of performances by the Oakland-based AXIS Dance Company. AXIS, which was founded in 1987, is one of the world’s leading physically integrated dance companies, creating innovative and powerful works for dancers with and without disabilities. AXIS formed the subject of Wanda

  MOVEMENT, DIFFERENCE, AND ABILITY   

95

Strukus’s important 2011 article on kinesthetic engagement “Mining the Gap: Physically Integrated Performance and Kinesthetic Empathy.” After attending several performances by AXIS, Strukus, who is non-disabled, analyzed her own responses during the performances she observed and those of audience members who participated in post-performance discussions. In both sets of responses she found a discrepancy between empirically observed responses and the automatic empathy responses that overreaching accounts of motor resonance suggest. As she watched the disabled AXIS performers, she found that her connection to their movements resulted, in part, from conscious efforts to monitor her feelings and increase her kinesthetic connection to these movements as opposed to automatically understanding them. She also found that certain aspects of the performance, such as the contact duets where disabled performers interacted with non-disabled ones, allowed her to partially bridge the gap between her responses to familiar movements and those that were unfamiliar. The responses of other spectators to the performances they had witnessed highlighted other gaps between the kinesthetic empathy that spectators experience and the actual experiences of those with disabilities. In Strukus’s words, “while it is more pleasant to imagine that the cognitive mechanisms of empathy allow us to truly connect with one another, instead of giving us a very convincing illusion of connecting with one another, knowing that we are always missing the mark is useful information for strengthening empathic bonds.”59 I will consider the issues of kinesthetic resonance and empathy that Strukus raises more fully in later chapters. What interests me here is the ability/inability gradient that she responded to while watching these performances. When I attended an AXIS performance in October 2015, I did so with the desire to understand the perceptual and phenomenal dynamics involved in movement difference, particularly those that engage embodiments and kinetic capacities with which I am unfamiliar. The evening I attended consisted of three dances, two of which I discuss here. Dix minutes plus tard, which was choreographed in 2013 by Sonya Delwaide, was a duet set to the second movement (Andante) of Schubert’s String Quartet no. 15. It was performed by able-bodied dancer Sophie Stanley and Julie Crothers, who is missing her left forearm. This piece was followed by an excerpt from Divide, a dance choreographed in 2014 by Marc Brew and performed when I saw it by able-bodied dancers Keon Saghari and Nick Bentley, wheelchair-bound dancer Dwayne Schuenemann, and Crothers.60 After an intermission and a new work entitled to go again (2015), the dancers participated in a question-and-answer session with the audience.

96  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

The AXIS evening was my first opportunity to attend physically integrated dance performance.61 Because there is a world of difference between seeing this form of dance live and seeing it on film or video, I was taken aback by its visceral impact on me. I was alternatingly engaged and jolted, drawn into the dancers’ movements in aesthetic appreciation but blocked in my ability to lose myself in these movements by the presence of bodies whose shapes and movement possibilities varied in such visible ways. Reflecting on this experience, I appreciate how effectively the AXIS performers troubled the body image, body schema, and ability/inability frameworks that structure everyday movement perception for me while opening the door to new aesthetic and empathic possibilities. In Dix minutes plus tard Stanley and Crothers moved with each other in an intimate pas de deux, the former with both arms intact and the latter with nothing below her left upper arm. Against the measured, emotionally intense cadences of Schubert’s strings, their bodies interacted quite intimately: Stanley and Crothers entwined arms, moved over each other’s backs and underneath each other. At times they moved apart from each other, mirroring and counterpointing each other’s movements; at other times their bodies interweaved, sharing each other’s weight and form. I found their performance achingly graceful, though my spectatorial encounter with this grace involved an awareness of Crothers’s missing forearm. How did she balance her body? How did she pull herself along on the floor, especially when she relied on the shortened left arm? The truncated arm participated with the other arms, but it did so under different constraints and possibilities. I was sometimes acutely aware of the missing hand: the two often held hands, which meant that there were points in the choreography where they did not have this movement option. Hands allow a tactile and intentional grasp on the world—did the end of Crothers’s upper arm probe the world in an equivalent way to the human hand? Without calling attention to itself in any deliberate way, in other words, the missing forearm stood out in its difference: when the dancers raised their arms, one was shorter than the other. This difference challenged deeply held body image expectations concerning symmetry and completeness and body schematic capacities having to do with the body’s reach into its environment or kinesphere (Laban’s word, we recall, for the space surrounding one’s body that can be reached by extending one’s limbs). Divergence was heightened by the presence of an able-bodied dancer who moved with a kinetic dynamic that was more familiar to me. However,

  MOVEMENT, DIFFERENCE, AND ABILITY   

97

while an important component of my response had to do with the ­dis-­ability represented by the missing forearm—with what a dancer cannot do without a lower arm and hand—Crothers’s dancing bore no hint of impairment. From the opening moments of Dix minutes plus tard, when the two dancers met at center stage and Stanley briefly rested her head on Crothers’s left shoulder and its trailing upper arm, the two moved with equal—and equally graceful—motor control and freedom. Guided by Delwaide’s choreography, they accommodated the contours, capacities, and incapacities of each other’s body in powerful and expressive ways. In moments during their performance, Crothers’s physical difference receded into the background of my awareness, subsumed by this larger harmony. But it never left this awareness. As much a part of her body as her other arm—and just as responsive to her kinetic intentions—Crothers’s left upper arm secured my attention and aesthetic appreciation by offering different performance possibilities within the can/cannot continuum. Precisely because their shared movements occupied kinetic/kinesthetic territory outside the ways I am accustomed to moving and the ways I am used to seeing bodies move in relation to each other, the two dancers offered something startling and beautiful. Having watched and re-watched a recording of Dix minutes plus tard, I can no longer imagine either dancer’s body, or the dance, differently. Divide presented a greater challenge to the motor perceptual frameworks I brought to its performance of able-bodiedness, disability, and movement. As befitting “an abstract work exploring the divide in human interaction in movement, space, and time,” its three principal dancers (Saghari, Bentley, and Schuenemann) moved together and apart, alternating between independently expressive movements and often intricate contact work.62 For most of the performance a fourth dancer (Crothers) lay off to the side, barely or partially lit, rising to join the others only in the dance’s closing minutes. The performance began with Bentley, Schuenemann, then Saghari conducting synchronized arm and upper-­ body movements with each other while facing right. The sequence played with symmetry and dissymmetry: two men and a woman, two standing dancers and one in a wheelchair, their movements coordinated. Eventually their movements diverged and the dancers began moving on their own. Schuenemann moved his wheelchair and body with the same fluidity that Saghari and Bentley displayed, and his movements rhythmically complemented theirs despite their different kinetic idiom. At those points when the dancers came together, as they frequently did, they accommodated

98  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

each other’s bodies with practiced and exact skeletomuscular adjustments. When the three moved with their arms linked, for instance, Schuenemann operated the wheels on his chair in tandem with their movements, and when circular movement was required Bentley pulled Schuenemann’s arm to spin him in a wide arc. Indeed, each seemed to seek out and explore the opportunities for interaction provided by the other two bodies. Bentley lifted Saghari then let her down so that she rested on Schuenemann’s back. Saghari climbed onto one of Schuenemann’s wheels and balanced herself on one leg while the latter supported her with one hand on her upper chest and the other braced against the floor. Watching this performance, I appreciated the agility of the performers, their ability to move their bodies with such precision, control, and seeming effortlessness. In Schuenemann’s case, I admired how skillfully he maneuvered his wheelchair body. He pulled this body backward so that he lay on his back, then maneuvered one of the wheels in order to right himself. He also performed a somersault, bringing the chair over his head then returning himself to an upright sitting position. The fact that he was in a wheelchair while the others had the use of their legs for locomotion foregrounded the ability-inability continuum and the dynamic of can-ness that characterize integrated dance performances such as this. But while I never lost sight of Schuenemann’s disability, the seamless integration of body and wheelchair during most of this piece left his motor projects and his body’s ability to execute these projects intact. This changed when, twenty minutes into the performance, Schuenemann unfastened his seat belt, lowered his body to the floor, and pushed his wheelchair off to the side. During the remainder of the dance he moved entirely on the strength of his upper body, pulling himself with his arms while his paralyzed lower body trailed behind. In order to draw his body together and raise it slightly from the floor, Schuenemann crossed his legs with his hands; in order to bring them under control when rolling over, he held them in his arms to keep them together. In a particularly gymnastic moment, he raised his body off the floor with his arms while his legs dangled behind. His movements here echoed those of the other dancers when they lay down and moved on the floor—particularly Bentley, who had also propelled himself with his arms in a choreographed sequence of crawling movements. But it differed in a critical kinetic and kinesthetic sense. Neither of the other dancers had to contend with the stark inertness of Schuenemann’s lower body: a zone where his body continued but no longer responded to motor directives or participated in its proprioceptive/

  MOVEMENT, DIFFERENCE, AND ABILITY   

99

kinesthetic life. The weight and materiality of Bentley’s lower body was also evident when he pulled himself along the floor with his arms, but his legs maintained a latent animacy: he could move them as he had elsewhere in the performance but chose not to or worked to minimize their contribution. Schuenemann’s legs, in contrast, appeared thing-like to me—incapable of movement, less animate than the wheelchair he had used up to this point, impediments to the freedom of self-movement. As I observed and vicariously tried to inhabit this sequence, I had a visceral, uncomfortable response (the notes that I jotted down during the intermission that followed include the words “terrifying” and “anxious”). I attribute my panic to two factors. The more obvious factor is that my body schema and body image were disrupted by the experience of watching someone who could not move his body in the way I could: an aspect of the I can out of which I execute my own movements and which I project when perceiving the movements of others was blocked by Schuenemann’s I cannot in a crisis of resonance. In this sense, my discomfort resulted from the encounter with something alien and unexperienced, as when I watch a contortionist twisting her body into angles and forms I am incapable of imitating. I can and I cannot can be seen from this perspective as capacities that differentiate my body and body-experience from those of others. As I reflected on my reaction to Schuenemann’s performance over the days that followed, however, it became apparent to me that a second factor had been at work. While I do not know what it is like to be paraplegic, I have had temporary experiences that resemble this condition. Having had parts of my body anaesthetized after injuries and conducting myself with these parts taken out of commission while they healed, I understand the experience of body areas intruding as objects in my awareness or dys-appearing, to recall Leder’s term. Age has also increased my sense of my body’s resistance to spontaneous movement impulses. Moreover, for a number of years I have had recurring dreams in which my legs are dramatically weakened or I am unable to move them at all. Usually these dreams feature situations where I need to be moving, either because I am in danger or have to get somewhere quickly. I have read that such dreams are common and have wondered if they result from the body’s sensorimotor de-activation during sleep. Regardless of where they come from, these dreams rehearse an experience of paralysis and weakness that I know my body is capable of in waking life, as well. From this perspective, my anxiety as I watched Schuenemann’s movements on the floor derived not only from an encounter with radical difference but from the ­recognition

100  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

of kinetic possibilities I am familiar with but consign to the margins of awareness because they are hard to acknowledge. What my responses to the two dances underscore is that the ability/ inability (I can/I cannot) dialectic provides an intrinsic backdrop to perceptual and kinesthetic encounters. While this dialectic maps the limits of my ability to project myself into the movements of others, it also provides the ground on which these movements are knowable in the first place. In the case of Schuenemann’s performance, ability and inability were inextricably tied together, as they were in my complicated, sometimes fraught, spectatorship. Instead of watching Schuenemann’s disability from an unfettered able-bodiedness, as some might theorize this act of spectatorship, my perceptual and kinesthetic encounter reflected a mutual negotiation of the I can/I cannot gradient and the recognition of their sometimes uncomfortable affinities. In philosopher Bruce Wilshire’s words, “Around and beneath and through the network of distinctions we raise—in the circumpressure of the world—flow mimetic fusions and affinities which we cannot adequately describe or predict.”63 Acknowledging such affinities troubles the disabled/able-bodied distinction and allows more nuanced accounts of its components. As Schuenemann left his wheelchair then danced on the floor without it, for instance, the paralysis of his lower body was countered by his massively developed arms, shoulders, and torso. Many of the acts he performed with his upper body were acts I could imagine myself performing: lifting, twisting, bending, and turning the wheels of the chair he sat on as a mode of locomotion. Even this half-body resonance, though, confronted me with my own ability parameters when Schuenemann displayed an agility and strength I am incapable of (lifting his body off the floor with his arms, for example). The bottom line, though, was how graceful, confident, and—a word I used earlier when describing Crothers’ performance—beautiful Schuenemann’s performance was. I could write in more detail about its physical aesthetics, which integrated seamlessly with those of his dance partners, but the real source of its beauty was its freedom and exuberance. In a powerful phenomenological account of learning to move after losing the majority of her left leg to amputation, film theorist Vivian Sobchack describes the liberating experience of moving on crutches. As she acquired facility using them, she enjoyed the freedom and expansiveness of her movements: “the span of one’s gait increases and there is a cadenced and graceful ‘swing through’ effect that not only covers ground but also propels the lived body forward in pleasingly groundless ways not allowed by

  MOVEMENT, DIFFERENCE, AND ABILITY   

101

mere walking.”64 She discovered the aesthetic pleasure of accomplishing even mundane domestic chores efficiently with her crutches—“carving out with the trajectory and cadence of my movement a certain orderliness and sequence to my actions.”65 In what, she points out, is a great irony, the sense she developed of her body’s grace, power, and potentiality developed not in spite, but because, of her disability. “Thus, although I certainly had to ‘overcome’ the reductive disadvantages and limitations of my disability, I also found my bodily experience newly expanded and amplified in a transcendent and empowered mode of ‘becoming.’”66 This paradoxical recognition lay at the heart of my aesthetic response to Schuenemann’s dance movements. Schuenemann embraced the constraints on what he could do and incorporated them in a performance of power and ability. I cannot, in this context of what he achieved, transformed itself into a liberated and liberating of I can. I may have been uncomfortable with my own I cannots while watching him move without the use of his lower body, but he, of course, was not. Like his fellow dancers, he moved from a position of ability, and his movements were marked by expressiveness and control. In the audience discussion that followed the evening’s performances, the AXIS dancers spoke about how the members of the company worked alongside each other. They spoke about learning what each dancer brings to the table, about working with abilities and limitations. As one dancer pointed out, when they encountered things that someone could not do they took this into account, worked around it. Is not all successful collaboration—even among the ostensibly able-bodied—like this? If I can and I cannot are inconceivable apart from each other, then difference is the basis for how we encounter and learn to move with each other. Motor intentionality arises out of a sense of ability (nobody sets out not to be able to do something), but the ability out of which it operates is circumscribed, shadowed, and defined by internally and externally imposed limits to what it can accomplish. Omnipotence—the divine ability to accomplish anything—is phenomenologically unimaginable, just as perception is ­unthinkable without the enablements and disenablements of one’s limited perspective. Whether we are performing with other actors or dancers onstage, watching from the audience, or accommodating our movements and the movements of those we encounter outside the theatre, the I can/I cannot dialectic conditions what we can do and what we cannot do, what we can know in others and what lies outside our empathic grasp. It also, as I have suggested, provides a framework for aesthetic and other forms of

102  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

accomplishment and for the body’s transcendence in world-directed action. I cannot, in this sense, is the background against which movement and movement perception are conceivable.

Notes 1. Erwin Straus, “The Upright Posture,” 139. 2. Johann Gottfried Herder, quoted in ibid., 164. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 157. 5. Ibid., 158. For an example of how Straus’s insights can be applied to a more identity-based phenomenological account, see Gayle Salamon’s excellent account of gender-transgressive walking, “Passing Period: Gender, Aggression, and the Phenomenology of Walking.” 6. Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,” 146. 7. Ibid., 142. 8. Ibid., 153. 9. Iris Marion Young, “‘Throwing Like a Girl’: Twenty Years Later,” 286. 10. Ibid., 288. Young also critiques her earlier essay’s dichotomous view of immanence and transcendence, its unitary conception of the acting subject, and its presentation of women’s body comportment exclusively in terms of oppression. 11. Ibid., 289. 12. Ibid., 287. 13. Ibid., 288. 14. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 247. 15. Jon Foley Sherman, Strange Proximity: Stage Presence, Failure, and the Ethics of Attention, 146. 16. Ibid. In an important article entitled “Differentiating Phenomenology and Dance,” Philipa Rothfield addresses the challenges and opportunities presented by kinesthetic difference: “Phenomenology represents a field, a domain, an axis of corporeality framed in relation to subjectivity. The differentiation of that field represents an epistemological complication, a reformulation, a multiplication. Not a rejection of its adequacy, just a sense of its being slightly out of reach, requiring a stretch, a shift of weight, a roll, perhaps a fall” (51). 17. J. J. Marotta and M. Behrmann, “Patient Schn: Has Goldstein and Gelb’s Case Withstood the Test of Time?” 633–34. 18. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 137. 19. Ibid., 139.

  MOVEMENT, DIFFERENCE, AND ABILITY   

103

20. Georges Canguilhem, quoted in Paul Rabinow, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason, 84. 21. Arguing for what she calls “normalization of the abnormal,” Gail Weiss advocates “deconstructing limited perceptual norms by expanding our available horizons of meaning to include the perspectives of those who have been excluded by them” (“The ‘Normal Abnormalities’ of Disability and Aging,” 212). 22. John M. Hull, Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness, 180. 23. Ibid., 64. 24. Ibid., 138. 25. Ibid., 145. 26. Ibid., 82. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 83. 29. Ibid., 133. As Miriam Helen Hill suggests in her phenomenological analysis of blindness, the vision that is privileged in most accounts of perceptual experience can actually obscure the multimodal body–world interrelatedness that blindness discloses. Raising the question of who is disabled in the sighted/non-sighted hierarchy, she writes: “The visually handicapped have advantages that the sighted do not have. [. . .] People must not let their eyes blind them to the world” (“Bound to the Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Sightlessness,” 109). 30. An impediment to this dialogue is the relative scarcity of mainstream phenomenological and cognitive research on divergent embodiments. Writing in 1998, Simi Linton lamented that “the kinesthetic, proprioceptive, sensory and cognitive experiences of people with an array of impairments” have received little attention (“Disability Studies/Not Disability Studies,” 530). Important phenomenological accounts of disability include S. Kay Toombs, “The Lived Experience of Disability”; Lisa Diedrich, “Breaking Down: A Phenomenology of Disability”; and Kristian Moltke Martiny, “How to Develop a Phenomenological Model of Disability.” 31. Foley Sherman, Strange Proximity, 146. 32. See Thompson, Mind in Life. 33. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 137. 34. Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment, 3. 35. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 139. 36. Ibid., 103. 37. Husserl, Ideas 2, 270. 38. Ibid., 366. 39. Ibid., 270. 40. Merleau-Ponty omitted the phenomenon of I cannot when he appropriated Husserl’s I can in the Phenomenology of Perception. Edith Stein, on the

104  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

other hand, appropriated both terms in her Husserl-influenced account of will in On the Problem of Empathy (see 107). Erica Harris argues for the applicability of I cannot in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of painting (“The ‘I cannot, but it can’”). 41. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 109. 42. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 110–11; quoted in ibid., 109. 43. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 112. 44. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 138. 45. Ibid. 46. Noland, Agency, 9. Nick Crossley compares the concepts of habit and habitus in Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Dewey, Marcel Mauss, and Pierre Bourdieu (“Habit and Habitus”). Addressing this issue through Husserl’s notion of “intersubjective normality,” Joona Taipale writes: “Intersubjectivity serves a normative function: it constitutes the ‘default’ or ‘standard’ manner in experiencing things, world, other people, a manner in which our perceptions, bodily movements, behavior, and action habitually tend” (“Twofold Normality: Husserl and the Normative Relevance of Primary Constitution,” 53). Sociologist Marcel Mauss, who was Husserl’s contemporary, emphasized the play of enablement and constraint in the “body techniques” that individuals assume: “Everything in us all is under command. [. . .] We have a set of permissible or impermissible, natural or unnatural attitudes” (Sociology and Psychology: Essays, 105). 47. I use “radical” here in the sense of “fundamental” or “relating to roots” rather than “original.” Others who have expanded on the notion of I cannot include Leder, Absent Body, 48–49, and Hanne Jacobs, “Husserl on Freedom and Reflection,” 17–18. 48. Jacobs writes: “Just as attending to everything at once within our visual field would not allow us to see much at all, one could wonder whether a creature that could practically effect any possible movement would be a bodily creature at all” (“Husserl on Freedom and Reflection,” 18). 49. Leder, Absent Body, 69–99.  Dys-appearance,  according to Leder, is the intrusion of bodily awareness during dysfunction, illness, and physical discomfort.  This “alien presencing” (82) contrasts with the body’s  normal tendency to disappear from awareness during its actions. 50. Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 24. 51. Ibid., 36. 52. Ibid., 35. 53. Ibid. 54. Building on Gallagher’s conceptual framework, Sarah E.  McCarroll has introduced a third term—“body map”—to designate the social, cultural, and historical pressures that influence the ways we carry ourselves and move. Originating from the outside, body maps function on and in tan-

  MOVEMENT, DIFFERENCE, AND ABILITY   

105

dem with body image and body schemas. McCarroll explains: “My contention is that body maps are the pattern by which a society imposes its values on our bodies; maps contain strictures of movement, carriage and gesture which are imprinted upon both body image and body schema, shaping our habitual movements. Body maps are the culturally imposed and heavily value-laden parameters for conscious behaviors that relate to constructing and maintaining a desired body image; these behaviors then impact schematic processes related to aspects of kinaesthesia, proprioception, aspects of movement and autonomic movements” (“The Historical Body Map: Cultural Pressures on Embodied Cognition,” 155). 55. Margrit Shildrick writes: “In rejecting the conservative agenda that disabled people are a distinct group who nevertheless are entitled to all the rights and benefits of their particular society, or at least to compensation where those cannot be accessed, many theorists now subscribe both to the notion of difference, and to the blurring of boundaries at the edges, in such a way that problematizes the whole categorical distinction” (Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality, 8). Lennard Davis offers a trenchant critique of disability as a category in Bending over Backwards, 8–32. 56. One of the remarkable features of John Hull’s account of blindness, for all he cannot do, is the fullness of his sensorimotor accomplishment in negotiating his sightless world. Some of these accomplishments result from an overcoming of inability—developing the ability to read his surroundings using echolocation, for example—but they also reflect a preexisting ability and sense of agency. 57. In an article outlining a phenomenological model of disability, Kristian Martiny writes that “It is a common structure for abled as well as disabled persons that our perspective on the world, our field of action, and our intentions are structured in accordance with our bodily abilities and disabilities—with the ‘I can’ (or ‘I cannot’) as it is defined for each individual” (“How to Develop,” 561). 58. Petra Kuppers, “Dancing Disabled: Phenomenology and Embodied Politics,” 272. 59. Wanda Strukus, “Mining the Gap: Physically Integrated Performance and Kinesthetic Empathy,” 103. 60. A recording of Dix minutes plus tard is available at https://vimeo. com/134027762. A recording of Divide that was previously viewable on the AXIS website is no longer available. 61. In this and other performance analyses throughout this book, I make extensive use of notes that I took during intermission and a more extended series of reflections three days after the performance. Susan Kozel offers useful observations on note-taking and phenomenological writing in “Process Phenomenologies” and Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology, 48–55.

106  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

62. AXIS Dance Company, “Repertory.” 63. Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity, 286. 64. Vivian Sobchack, “Choreography for One, Two, and Three Legs,” 59. 65. Ibid., 60. Sobchack compares this to the “aesthetics of ‘parsimony’ that is one of the criteria for elegant theory: the most being accomplished in the fewest of moves” (ibid.). 66. Ibid., 61.

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press. AXIS Dance Company. Repertory. AXIS Dance Company website. http://www. axisdance.org/repertory/. Accessed 1 Mar 2018. Canguilhem, Georges. 1991. The Normal and the Pathological. Trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett in collaboration with Robert S. Cohen. New York: Zone. Crossley, Nick. 2013. Habit and Habitus. Body and Society 19 (2–3): 136–161. Davis, Lennard. 2002. Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodermism, and Other Difficult Positions. New York: New York University Press. Diedrich, Lisa. 2001. Breaking Down: A Phenomenology of Disability. Literature and Medicine 20 (2): 209–230. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove. Foley Sherman, Jon. 2016. A Strange Proximity: Stage Presence, Failure, and the Ethics of Attention. New York/London: Routledge. Gallagher, Shaun. 2005. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harris, Erica. 2013. The ‘I cannot, but it can’ of Aesthetic Perception. In Moving Imagination: Explorations of Gesture and Inner Movement, ed. Helena De Preester, 295–310. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hill, Miriam Helen. 1985. Bound to the Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Sightlessness. In Dwelling, Place and Environment, ed. David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer, 99–111. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Hull, John M. 1990. Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness. New York: Pantheon. Husserl, Edmund. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Book 2: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Jacobs, Hanne. 2014. Husserl on Freedom and Reflection. In Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity and Values in Edmund Husserl, ed. Susi Ferrarello, 13–24. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Kozel, Susan. 2007. Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  MOVEMENT, DIFFERENCE, AND ABILITY   

107

———. 2015. Process Phenomenologies. In Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations, ed. Maaike Bleeker, Jon Foley Sherman, and Eirini Nedelkopoulou, 54–74. New York: Routledge. Kuppers, Petra. 2017. Dancing Disabled: Phenomenology and Embodied Politics. In Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, ed. Rebekah J.  Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and Randy Martin, 267–281. New York: Oxford University Press. Linton, Simi. 1998. Disability Studies/Not Disability Studies. Disability & Society 13 (4): 525–540. Marotta, J.J., and M. Behrmann. 2004. Patient Schn: Has Goldstein and Gelb’s Case Withstood the Test of Time? Neuropsychologia 42 (5): 633–638. Martiny, Kristian Moltke. 2015. How to Develop a Phenomenological Model of Disability. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 18 (4): 553–565. Mauss, Marcel. 1979. Sociology and Psychology: Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. McCarroll, Sarah E. 2016. The Historical Body Map: Cultural Pressures on Embodied Cognition. In Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies, ed. Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook, 241–258. London: Bloomsbury. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. 1964, ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A.  Landes. London: Routledge. Noland, Carrie. 2009. Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rabinow, Paul. 1996. Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rothfield, Philipa. 2005. Differentiating Phenomenology and Dance. Topoi 24 (1): 43–53. Salamon, Gayle. 2015. Passing Period: Gender, Aggression, and the Phenomenology of Walking. In Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations, ed. Maaike Bleeker, Jon Foley Sherman, and Eirini Nedelkopoulou, 186–203. New York: Routledge. Shildrick, Margrit. 2009. Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sobchack, Vivian. 2005. Choreography for One, Two, and Three Legs (A Phenomenological Meditation in Movements). Topoi 24 (1): 55–66. Stein, Edith. 1989. On the Problem of Empathy. 1917. 3rd. revised ed. Trans. Waltraut Stein. Vol. 3, The Collected Works of Edith Stein. Washington, DC: ICS. Straus, Erwin. 1966. The Upright Posture. Chapter in Phenomenological Psychology, 137–165. New York: Basic Books. Strukus, Wanda. 2011. Mining the Gap: Physically Integrated Performance and Kinesthetic Empathy. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 25 (2): 89–105.

108  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

Taipale, Joona. 2012. Twofold Normality: Husserl and the Normative Relevance of Primary Constitution. Husserl Studies 28 (1): 49–60. Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Toombs, S. Kay. 1995. The Lived Experience of Disability. Human Studies 18 (1): 9–23. Weiss, Gail. 2017. The ‘Normal Abnormalities’ of Disability and Aging. In Feminist Phenomenology Futures, ed. Helen A.  Fielding and Dorothea E. Olkowski, 203–217. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wilshire, Bruce. 1982. Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality. In Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory, 141–159. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1998. ‘Throwing Like a Girl’: Twenty Years Later. In Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Donn Welton, 286–290. Oxford: Blackwell.

Movement, Attention, and Intentionality

Moving in the Theatre Having completed the previous chapter’s theoretical and methodological self-examination, I begin this chapter where the chapter “Movement and Animation” left off: with immobility. One summer day in the mid-1980s, I found myself in the midst of students walking between classes at the University of Michigan. The layout of the Michigan Central Campus converges on an open plaza in front of the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library known as “the Diag” because of the sidewalks that intersect it diagonally from different directions. With benches on the side of its open area, this plaza is a popular place: students distribute flyers, set up information tables, hold events, and hang out enjoying the sun during the warmer months. It can also be one of the most congested parts of campus, as streams of people cross the plaza from multiple directions. In the intervals between classes, the Diag offers a clinic in pedestrian traffic flow and collision avoidance. At one point while crossing this plaza on the August day in question, I became aware of a woman standing motionlessly ahead of me. I no longer remember what she was wearing, but she held a light-colored parasol. Intrigued, I veered from my course and found a seat where I could look down on her from the library steps. Over the ten minutes or so that I spent observing her, she assumed a variety of silent poses. She held the parasol overhead or at an angle; sometimes she closed it only to open it again in a different position. Although I was not aware of this at the time, © The Author(s) 2018 S. B. Garner, Jr., Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre, Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91794-8_4

109

110  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

I later realized that her performance piece was a commemoration of the Nagasaki bombing, which was being remembered that day. The parasol, whether held overhead or blooming when she opened it, was an image of a nuclear mushroom cloud, and in her poses and movements she stood in for the victims of the bombing and those coming after them who mourn their loss. The gracefulness of her living-statue performance stood in contrast to the horror and devastation of August 9, 1945. What this solo performance artist effected was an irruption of theatre in the midst of everyday movement. As the other pedestrians and I navigated the multi-directional traffic, we encountered someone whose intentional stillness bracketed her off from the movement flows in which we were engaged. Her poses and slow, studied shifts of position asserted an inward awareness rather than the outwardly directed, practical intentionality of walkers making their way to somewhere else. In tacit recognition of this fact, pedestrians made a space—a magic circle, it seemed—around her. Some slowed down or stopped to watch her, as did I from my perch, but even those who did not and continued on their way became spectators from the moment they registered her difference. What did this difference consist of? For those who encountered her, something unusual was happening at the kinetic-perceptual level of social experience. While nothing in her bearing or spare movements was unusual in and of itself, what made them stand out was their isolation from the everyday. Lifted out of the practical movement repertoire and refusing the intercorporeal dynamic that surrounded her, her actions became their own end. What might otherwise have been performative in the sense of accomplishing an intention (walking to a restaurant to meet someone) became performative in the aesthetic sense of expressive self-disclosure. As this performance illustrated, theatre carves itself out of the movements of the world. In so doing, it modifies the movements it appropriates by framing their pragmatic functions within the dynamics of display. This framing can be illustrated with another performance example, this one employing the traditionally theatrical configuration of seated spectators and moving performers. In the prologue to his important phenomenological study Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor, Bruce Wilshire recounts his experience attending environmental artist Robert Whitman’s 1976 theatre piece Light Touch. Light Touch was mounted in a warehouse on Washington Street near the docks in New York’s Greenwich Village.1 As part of this work, the lights were extinguished and a sliding warehouse loading door was opened across from the

  MOVEMENT, ATTENTION, AND INTENTIONALITY   

111

seated spectators. Through the floor-to-ceiling opening—a makeshift proscenium, bounded by flowing curtains on both sides—the city, now theatricalized, became its own performance. Like the background sounds in a John Cage composition or the objects that were lifted from the everyday in Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, the city’s sensory texture—lights, sounds, movements, the passing of cars—emerged as a kind of found art, now stripped of the familiarity that often rendered it unnoticed. Pedestrians walked by oblivious to the spectators who observed them from the darkened room. When a truck eventually pulled up at the loading dock and its contents were unloaded—an apple, a cement block, and a kitchen sink— these objects stood in the spotlight as precipitates of the newly luminous urban field. As Whitman observed in the performance script of Light Touch, “The audience enters into the street, not in its physical sense but as an image of the real.”2 The unsteadiness of this perceptual boundary between the theatrical and the non-theatrical was made clear during the performance Wilshire attended when a police car pulled up in front of the open warehouse door and one of its occupants shone a flashlight on the spectators seated in the dark. Were the arrival and the movements of these policemen scripted? Wilshire suspects not.3 Because theatre renders the everyday performative, the dynamics of self-movement and movement perception that were detailed in the chapter “Movement and Animation” manifest themselves in the spectator–performer interaction in medium-­ inflected ways. This is not to say that performative movement and its perception differ in kind from the same processes outside the theatre. Rather, these activities and responses reveal phenomenological and cognitive intensifications of non-theatrical movement experience in its forms and variety. Like dance, sporting events, and other performance forms, theatre engages us with movements we might encounter outside the performative event while heightening these movements and our act of spectatorship as attentional objects. Understanding the movement dynamics particular to the performer–spectator interaction allows us to apply our developing understanding of movement and movement perception in m ­ edium-­specific terms. In the following section I discuss the role of attention in the performer’s and spectator’s experiences of movement within the theatrical environment. In subsequent sections I explore the centrality of intentionality to action and movement perception inside and outside the theatre. This centrality comes into play in theatre practices that choreograph the performer’s intentional arcs and those that challenge the intentional conception of performance and human experi-

112  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

ence. Attention and intentionality, I argue, play essential roles in the kinesthetic dimensions and empathic possibilities of theatrical spectatorship.

Attending to Movement Peter Brook famously asserted that “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”4 Gender assumption aside, Brook’s hypothetical stage raises important questions. According to Brook, empty space becomes theatre when it is traversed by the walking actor. People, however, observe others walk in front of them all the time without an act of theatre being engaged or recognized. The key to Brook’s theatre, it seems, lies in the “calling”: if I call this empty space a stage, then all that transpires on it becomes a theatrical event through the act of framing it as such. Framing something as theatre takes it out of everyday life, summons it forth as an object of theatrical attention. From this perspective, Brook’s walker moves theatrically because he is perceived as doing so, in the same way that the pedestrians passing by on the sidewalk outside Whitman’s darkened performance space are theatricalized by the proscenium-like frame of the warehouse door and the eyes of those who paid to watch them walk by at exactly that moment. Unlike the movement landscape of Whitman’s inadvertent and unaware pedestrian-performers, Brook’s movement-stage is doubly theatrical because it is intended as such by the actor who walks as a form of performative display. While a pedestrian’s walk is situational and goal-directed— arriving somewhere, window shopping, getting exercise—the actor’s walk is designed to be witnessed in addition to being goal-directed in a more utilitarian sense (reaching for a prop on the other side of the stage, hiding behind an arras, hauling a wagon across the ravaged countryside during the Thirty Years’ War). This double mode of theatrical action—doing in order to accomplish things and doing with an awareness of being seen—creates its own set of kinetic/kinesthetic issues. Martin Welton notes the strangeness of walking on stage, especially for first-year acting students who are asked to walk naturally (“Just walk”): “Suddenly self-conscious of a set of actions to which they customarily pay no attention, they find themselves both unnatural and struggling to do it at all.”5 As Constantin Stanislavski writes in An Actor Prepares, “In ordinary life you walk and sit and talk and look, but on the stage you lose all these faculties. You feel the closeness of

  MOVEMENT, ATTENTION, AND INTENTIONALITY   

113

the public and you say to yourself, ‘Why are they looking at me?’ And you have to be taught all over again how to do all these things in public.”6 Under the felt pressure of another’s look and its internalized equivalent, self-consciousness, the self-transcending trajectory through which intention realizes itself in environmentally directed movement is inhibited; what was natural becomes strained, artificial. Learning to move in the theatre involves re-retraining oneself to move in the mode of being-­looked-­at: “That is why it is necessary to correct ourselves and learn again how to walk, move about, sit, or lie down.”7 The fact that not everyone can draw attention to themselves in this unself-conscious manner indicates the skill that theatrical movement requires of the naturalistic actor. Tortsov, Stanislavski’s spokesperson in An Actor Prepares, demonstrates the art of sitting on stage. After his students unsuccessfully try to sit naturally in front of each other, Tortsov demonstrates this himself. His students are absorbed in his effortless performance. He smiles, they smile. He looks thoughtful, they wonder what he is thinking about. He looks at something, they wonder what caught his attention. Stanislavski’s student/narrator remarks on the paradox underlining this captivating self-display: “In ordinary life one would not be specially interested in his manner of taking a seat, or remaining in it. But for some reason, when he is on the stage, one watched him closely, and perhaps has actual pleasure in seeing him merely sit.”8 Inhibiting self-consciousness can be eliminated or minimized so that the actor can focus on the actions at hand. In Stanislavskian training this focus is accomplished by establishing points, then circles, of attention within the scenic field. By excluding the auditorium from her circle of attention, the actor creates a space where she can move and interact as if the audience was not there. But while Stanislavski claimed that the actor could “completely forget about the audience” under these attentional conditions, we might question whether this is ever the case.9 More suggestive of the actor’s attentional dynamics is British actor Ralph Richardson’s description of performing on stage: You’re really driving four horses, as it were, first going through, in great detail, the exact movements which have been decided upon. You’re also listening to the audience, as I say, keeping, if you can, very great control over them. You’re also slightly creating the part, in so far as you’re consciously refining the movements and, perhaps, inventing tiny other experiments with new ones. At the same time you are really living, in one part of

114  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

your mind, what is happening. Acting is to some extent a controlled dream. In one part of your consciousness it really and truly is happening. But, of course, to make it true to the audience, all the time, the actor must, at any rate some of the time, believe himself that it is really true. [. . .] Therefore three or four layers of consciousness are at work during the time an actor is giving a performance.10

As this description suggests, the actor’s attention while he or she performs is shifting and multi-directional. It moves actively between the lived reality of the role, the technical process of embodying the role, and the audience, which is an essential reference point of this process. How can all these exist at once without interfering with each other or the actor’s ability to execute the task at hand? The answer lies in attention itself. Attention involves more than a laser-like concentration that seizes awareness at the sacrifice of all else; rather, it is characterized by centers and peripheries. In P. Sven Arvidson’s phenomenological model, attention is a tri-dimensional phenomenon: Working from the center of the sphere of attention to its outer shell, there are three dimensions, each distinct but related to the others in ways that will be shown: thematic attention (attention in the dimension of theme or focus), the context of attention (consciousness in the dimension of thematic c­ ontext), and the margin of attention (consciousness in the dimension of margin as halo and horizon).11

Arvidson’s first two dimensions correspond to the point and circle of attention. Like the point of attention, the attentional theme is the focal object or center of awareness. This mode of attention is active, participatory. In Stanislavski’s case, intense observation arouses the desire to do something with the intentional object, and the act of doing something intensifies one’s observation of it in a mutually reinforcing circuit.12 Contextual attention includes all that is relevant to the attentional theme: the desk, chair, walls, books, notes, tea mug, and adjoining window that constitute my work environment as I concentrate on the computer screen, for example. This dimension is similar to Stanislavski’s circle of attention, an expanding field of awareness that eventually includes the boundaries of the actor’s playing space. For Stanislavski, such boundaries are a form of discipline: whereas the actor’s eyes may pass from one attentional point to another within the designated circle, “it must not go beyond the indicated limit of the circle of attention.”13 By dis-attending to what lies outside the circle of attention, Stanislavski’s actor brackets it from active consideration.

  MOVEMENT, ATTENTION, AND INTENTIONALITY   

115

Arvidson’s marginal attention refers to those elements of awareness that are not materially relevant to the theme and its context but are nonetheless present to consciousness as periphery or background. In Experience and Judgment, Husserl characterizes this background as “a field of pregivenness, of passive pregivenness, i.e., as a field that is always already there without any participation, without turning of explicit attention, without any awakening of interest.”14 Objects within marginal consciousness can become objects of thematic attention—sometimes disruptively, as when a knock on the door or a car backfiring outside my window jolts me out of my concentration. Marginal attention provides the horizon within, and from which, awareness identifies its focal object and what is relevant to it. In the attentional context of theatre as Stanislavski describes it in An Actor Prepares, marginal attention includes those areas of the theatre outside the circle of performance—including the spectators, whose eyes are directed toward the stage. However much Stanislavski’s naturalistic actor relinquishes conscious awareness of being watched, the audience remains a constant presence in marginal attention. For the Stanislavskian actor who succeeds in bracketing the audience from thematic and contextual attention (what Stanislavski means by “forgetting”), one cough can be all it takes for this presence to reassert itself within awareness. In non-illusionist performance contexts, of course, the audience is much more present to the actors than this: sitting on multiple sides of the stage (or on the stage itself), gathered around the performers in a public square, sharing the same light instead of being demarcated and obscured by darkness. But even in naturalistic staging practices that adopt the fiction of the spectator’s invisibility, the audience remains a point of orientation for the actor’s stage actions. As Gabriele Sofia points out, when an actor picks up a glass on stage, his or her action is directed to an onstage task (drinking the glass of water) and to the offstage task of engaging the audience’s attention on the action being performed. Instead of seeing this latter aim as a separate intention—a parallel attentional track that would interfere with the stage-­ directed action—Sofia introduces the term dilated intention to describe the broadening of performed action to include the audience.15 Performed action, in other words, is always goal-directed activity under the eye of another. As a way of reformulating Stanislavski’s admonition and extending it to non-naturalistic acting practices, we might say that relearning how to move naturally on stage—or learning how to move in any manner dictated by the theatrical conventions one is following—entails learning how to move as an object of spectatorial attention without the awareness of being

116  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

watched interfering with one’s own attentional/intentional project. Actors may incorporate this awareness into outward-directed performances that acknowledge the spectators (as in the Elizabethan and Jacobean public theatre, puppet theatre, traditional and contemporary forms of street theatre, and Brechtian theatre), or they may relegate this awareness to the background and perform as if the spectators were not there. Whatever performative stance they assume toward their spectators, actors operate with reference to an audience. What of the spectator who watches? In order to consider the spectator’s attentional relationship to the moving actor, let me return to my account in the chapter “Movement and Animation” of walking through Midtown New York on a weekend afternoon. For present purposes, it is a Saturday afternoon in early December 2015, and I am on my way to the Lyceum Theatre to see Belgian director Ivo van Hove’s production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. As noted earlier, I navigate the crowd by coordinating my movements with the movements around me: pedestrians, vehicles, construction workers on sidewalk and street. When I arrive at the theatre, I pick up my ticket at the box office window, find my seat, and flip through the playbill while glancing at other audience members taking their seats. When the performance is over, I stand up, put on my coat, slowly make my way out of the building, and head back to my hotel. These and similar movement practices—“transports by which the event itself is arrived at,” in Welton’s nice phrase—form an integral part of the play-going experience.16 As in all everyday actions, my movements in situations such as this are marked by environmental engagement and practical intentionality. They need to be: if I step absent-mindedly into the street, I risk being hit by a car. When the lights go down and the play begins, however, my relationship with the movements in front of and around me changes. The sensorimotor continuity between the actors’ presence on stage and mine in the audience undergoes a number of practical disengagements. As my awareness of those seated around me retreats into contextual and marginal attention, my need to adapt my movements to theirs subsides, as well (this will change if the theatre’s fire alarm goes off). My sensorimotor relation to the performers who are now the focus of my attention is similarly disengaged: their movements do not compel my body to move as those of the pedestrians outside the theatre do when I am one of them. Onstage fight scenes do not place my body in danger. For my part, I do not move in ways that involve me in events within the play’s circle of attention. Actors walk and gesture in engaged relation to each other while, in most

  MOVEMENT, ATTENTION, AND INTENTIONALITY   

117

theatres, I sit watching them in my seat. Sitting in an audience like this does not mean that I relinquish the kinetic realm entirely. While theatre, dance, and music reviewers commonly write that an audience “sat motionless” during particularly captivating performance moments, this phrase neglects the actual kinetic behavior of seated spectators: breathing, shifting in their seats, leaning forward to hear or see better, scratching, finding comfortable places to rest their elbows, engaging in respiratory and other biological processes. I am aware of these moments visually and tactilely as they take place around me, particularly if these interrupt my concentration on the actions taking place on stage. I am also kinesthetically in touch with my own breathing, position shifts, and other movements while I sit there, as I am with the overall stillness that my body maintains.17 But these movements are not practically engaged with those onstage, and my awareness of them usually rests in the background of my attention. The realist convention of audience members attending to plays in silence and relative immobility is also, of course, historically and culturally specific, the result of institutional and social conventions and the choices that theatre practitioners make in relation to these conventions. Audience mobility was differently enabled in the early modern English public theatre, for example, where many spectators stood and milled around, or in non-institutionalized theatrical environments where performances take place in non-theatre spaces and audiences are sometimes boisterous participants in the entertainment they have come to see. Contemporary interactive theatre practitioners challenge audience immobility by having their audiences take to their feet: bringing them on stage, having them move between performance spaces, encouraging them to explore the theatrical environments they encounter, leading them individually through city streets. By reconfiguring the kinetic possibilities of the audience–stage relationship, these examples reactivate movement dynamics that are bracketed in mainstream theatrical production. With seated spectators, actors transgress spectatorial boundaries by entering and exiting from the auditorium, moving though the audience, and addressing the spectators directly. The fact that spectators and actors share the same space ensures that disengagement is partial even in realist performance where the ­audience is not explicitly engaged. Actors can get close enough to the edge of the stage that sudden or violent movements make spectators sitting near them reflexively shrink back. This last phenomenon demonstrates the responsivity that spectators retain in the performances they attend to, even when their seated position

118  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

in most theatrical events disguises this attunement. But even when I move in relationship to a performer in interactive theatre, a dimension of our interaction remains disengaged from ordinary movement dynamics. As long as the performance lasts, her movements and my response are suspended in ambiguous relation to everyday encounters. This bifurcation of a shared, utilitarian kinetic field is intrinsic to theatrical performance. The barrier that separates the performer’s kinetic intentions and expectations from the audience’s is wrenched into focus when spectators take it upon themselves to act as if it is not there. Spectatorial disengagement from the actor’s kinetic performance ensures that the latter remains an object of interest apart from any relation it might have to the spectator’s motor projects and those of the extra-­ theatrical world. Another way of saying this is that the actor’s awareness of being attended to is matched by the spectator’s awareness of the actor’s performance as something consciously designed to be attended to. Disengagement from utilitarian involvement, in this sense, is accompanied by a heightened engagement in the to-be-seen-ness of the actor’s performance. The obviousness of this reciprocity belies the complexity of its attentional, sensorimotor, and phenomenological dynamic. Semiotic discussions of theatrical ostension tend to focus on the act of showing as something directed from the stage toward the audience. In Patrice Pavis’s words, “Whereas in the novel the act of showing occurs within the fiction, in theatre it bursts the bounds of the play and addresses the audience directly through the actor’s gestures and the ‘gestus of delivery’ of the mise-en-scène, breaking the framework of performance.”18 Although Pavis’s observation captures the performative dimension of the actor’s heightened visibility, what its investment in a communications model of theatrical address leaves underexplored is the spectator’s participation in the theatre’s logic of display. As Pavis observes elsewhere in the same discussion, “The stage is always something to look at, regardless of its form or function.”19 Phenomenologically, this watching constitutes the stage as something to be seen as a result of the spectator’s sensorimotor and attentional adjustments. The fact that individual spectators sit among others who are also constituting the stage and its inhabitants as objects of display reinforces this perceptual shift. Ostension in the theatre is an interattentional accomplishment. I borrow the term interattentionality from developmental psychologist and psychoanalytic theorist Daniel N. Stern, who identified the phenomenon of joint attention through shared attentional focus as a development achievement of infant intersubjectivity.20

  MOVEMENT, ATTENTION, AND INTENTIONALITY   

119

The experiential outlines of the actor’s intensified to-be-seen-ness are evident in the opening moments of van Hove’s A View from the Bridge. Before the performance begins, the central stage area consists of large, black box-like structure. On both sides of this structure are rows of seats for onstage spectators. I am seated in the second row of the orchestra, looking up at the stage and these spectators. When the house lights go down and the performance starts, the box lifts to reveal a bare, rectangular space surrounded on three sides by a flat railing. Mark Strong as Eddie Carbone and Richard Hansell as his fellow longshoreman Louis stand shirtless, wiping off their arms and upper bodies after a day’s work at the piers. Surrounded by steam, they tend to themselves silently in absorbed contemplation. My attention is similarly absorbed by their movements, all of which are familiar to me but none of which have manifested themselves before now with this kind of accentuation. I am aware of how the men move their arms and hands, how their bodies respond to touching and being touched, even (I imagine) how the washrag feels on their skin. I am aware, as well, of their intention in washing themselves, the often-­overlooked intimacy of tending to oneself like this, and the homosocial ease of the male ritual they engage in. This awareness is strongly kinesthetic, especially when my attention dwells on the specific actions that one or the other performs on himself. In these moments my awareness includes the sensation of going through these motions myself, and I sense within myself the tiredness of their actions and expressions. I do not lose myself in these resonances; instead, they form part of my overall attunement to the actors’ performances. On the margins of my visual field, I am aware of the onstage spectators, who also watch this sequence, and I can bring them more fully to awareness if I shift my eyes to look at them. But the focus of my attention remains the movements we observe. The presence of these spectators—and the ones who sit around me in the auditorium— does not distract me from my concentrated movement perception; on the contrary, our collective attention on the actors’ movements intensifies the to-be-seen-ness (and to-be-experienced-ness) of the kinetic performance unfolding before us.

Intentionality and Movement Perception David Rooney, one of the reviewers of A View from the Bridge, noted the attentional concentration of van Hove’s direction: “The great skill of van Hove’s production is how the director trains us, right from the opening

120  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

scene, to watch every gesture, every flicker of a look, every subtle movement of a cast whose performances are remarkable for the seemingly unstudied yet surgical nature of their physicality.”21 The audience’s focus on Eddie and Louis in the opening moments of A View from the Bridge is further enabled by van Hove’s modification of Miller’s directions. In Miller’s text Eddie enters the stage near the end of the lawyer/chorus Alfieri’s opening monologue and joins Louis and another longshoreman, who are pitching coins against a building wall. Unlike Miller’s described scene, which is split between two competing points of attention, van Hove’s opening highlights the two men participating in their wordless ritual, framed by the play of light and shadows on their bodies and the steam that rises around them.22 What if van Hove decided to stage the two men drying themselves against the noises and motions of the pier they came from? Let us imagine the two men and their interior space slightly off to the side with the remainder of the stage filled with activity. In this imaginative expansion of van Hove’s minimalist opening, the self-focused motions of Eddie and Louis would be displaced, possibly dwarfed, by the commotion surrounding them: longshoremen moving crates, orders being yelled back and forth. Such a scene would occasion a modified perceptual experience of the two men’s actions on the spectators’ parts. What was, in the actual production, a magnified focus on simple sensorimotor activity would become one point of attention among many, asserting itself among competing kinetic/kinesthetic claims. At moments, undoubtedly, the attention of individual spectators would be drawn away from the two men and toward something else. Indeed, if we expanded the environmental activity of our envisioned scene ad absurdum—adding forklifts, venders, and a symphony of steamship horns—we can imagine Eddie and Louis receding in the scene’s attentional field like Icarus in the corner of Brueghel’s painting. No matter what is going on around them, though, the two men wiping themselves off with washrags compel a certain mode of attention, as do the other characters we have added who move on stage. While it is true that humans respond visually and kinetically to all forms of perceptible movements, they are particularly attuned, as we saw in the chapter “Movement and Animation”, to biological movement, especially that of other humans. Perceptually speaking, all movements are not created equal. As a consequence, although I take in all of the stage’s movements and respond to them in affective, even visceral ways, my eyes are drawn to the actors who

  MOVEMENT, ATTENTION, AND INTENTIONALITY   

121

form part of this m ­ ovement field with particular attunement. Despite the elaborate staging effects used to simulate the storm, waves, and pitching vessel in some productions of The Tempest, the spectator’s visual and kinesthetic engagement is primarily with the men on board desperately working the steering wheel, flailing at ropes and sails, and trying to keep their balance as the boat is battered about. The dialogue that they utter throughout the “tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning” intensifies the spectator’s involvement in their ordeal, but kinesthetic engagement would remain intact even if this scene were played without words.23 The chapter “Movement and Animation” introduced the phenomenological and cognitive importance of intentionality to animated self-movement. The chapter “Movement, Difference, and Ability” reaffirmed this importance while acknowledging that intentionality manifests itself within corporeally and socially specific abilities and constraints. As these discussions stated or implied, movements are intentional if the person moving is the actional agent (in other words, the movements do not come about as the result solely of external forces), if they reflect a will or impulse to move, and if they carry out some purpose that the agent of the movement holds.24 While intentional movement may involve forethought and ­decision, such movement is not deliberative in the sense that it requires planning or other forms of cognitive anticipation. My movements may be accompanied by what we might think of as prior intentions in the sense that I intend to read a book when I pick it up or when I leave the house with things to do, but these anticipations are extrinsic to the intentionality of actual self-movement. Self-movement is intentional in the sense that it pursues a purpose, but this purpose is a kinesthetic enactment rather than a mental representation formed in advance. When I pull up a clump of weeds in the garden, my hand shapes itself to the shape and feel of the plants I am looking at, and my arm and body prepare themselves for the resistance I am likely to encounter. Similarly, when I run to catch a bus, my body enacts my intention of catching up with it in its kinetic/kinesthetic performance. In the second example, my decision to move may not be conscious at all: I see the bus start to pull away without me, and I start running. The dynamic understanding that intention is intrinsic to intentional self-movement recalls philosopher John R. Searle’s concept of intention in action. While prior intentions arise in advance of one’s actions, intention in action is an experiential feature of the action itself; as Searle writes, “The Intentional content of the intention in action and the experience of acting are identical.”25 When one carries out an intention, that intention plays a

122  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

causal role as the action unfolds; intention in action, therefore, is intrinsic to intentional action in a way that prior intention is not. Intentionality, in this sense, “reaches down to the bottom level of the voluntary actions.”26 While an experienced skier pursues the intention of making it down the mountain, every subsidiary movement along the way is a manifestation of this intentionality. “Each movement is governed by the Intentionality of the flow, even though there is not, and need not be, any explicit representation of the intentional movement.”27 Dorothée Legrand underscores this dynamic in her concept of “bodily intention”: “[T]he agent does act intentionally only when he or she follows the reason he or she consciously entertains; actions are structurally intentional, and the conception of intention as mental states must be completed by a conception of intention as bodily.”28 Recalling Merleau-Ponty’s notion of bodily orientation, intention, in this sense, is a sensorimotor capacity that operates even in the absence of cognitively formulated causality. The body, Legrand writes, “is not the instrument of intention but its organ.”29 Intentional movement may be goal oriented in an outward-directed way: reaching for a glass in order to pick it up, climbing stairs, helping someone up who has fallen. Or it may be enacted for its own sake, as in expressive or spontaneous movement activities: improvisational dancing, drumming one’s fingers absent-mindedly, walking for its own sake rather than hurrying to get somewhere.30 These examples suggest the role that affective and other physiological states play in activating intention: one drums one’s fingers out of impatience, excitement, anger, or boredom. Actions such as these are generated in response to internal as well as external environmental stimuli. In a phenomenological elaboration of Searle’s account of intention in action, Jerome Wakefield and Herbert Dreyfus mention the phenomenon of rolling over in bed to find a comfortable position. When doing this, one shifts one’s body in response to tensions distributed over the surface of the body until an acceptable equilibrium is reached. The process requires no forethought, no preexisting awareness of where one is going; one simply does it.31 The guiding intention—to get comfortable—remains in place, but the intentional arc that seeks to fulfill this intention plays itself out through a responsive sequence of adjustments and readjustments. Our propensity to recognize intentionality in the movements we observe—and the centrality of intentional-movement perception to kinesthetic response—can be illustrated by situations where intention does not exist. The street outside my office window, to choose an example, has trees

  MOVEMENT, ATTENTION, AND INTENTIONALITY   

123

on both sides. If I focus my attention on one of these trees, I perceive that it is alive. I know that this aliveness comprises a network of inner motions— drawing water from the soil to the leaves at the very top, growing until it reaches a certain height—but these motions are inaccessible to direct perception and I would not recognize them as intentional in the sense I have described even if I could see them. When a strong wind kicks up, the tree “comes alive” in my attentional field in the figurative sense that its trunk, branches, and leaves sway under the air currents; however, the tree is no more intentional that it was before, and I watch it sway with an awareness of the atmospheric dynamics that make it move. If, however, I shift my way of seeing it and allow it to come alive for me in an intentional sense, my perceptual engagement with it changes significantly. The trunk becomes a body core and the leaved branches become arm-like limbs extending out from it. When the wind blows forcefully, this tree-­being is a figure of endurance, attempting to assert its verticality while the moving air bends its trunk and limbs back and forth. At certain moments I sense a face in there, probably near the top of the trunk, though my feeling of it being enfaced hovers over the tree as a whole rather than settling on a part of it. Face or no face, the resistance to the wind’s force that I observe originates in the entire tree, which I experience under this way of seeing as a corporeally integrated subject. I know that this effort is a whole-body experience because I feel in my own body what it must be like to struggle against the wind, limbs stretching under its advance, all the while rooted to one spot. What is more, I physically invest these movements with affective content: exhilaration, fear, rage, defiance. Could it be signaling something to me or anyone else who happens to see it? This is a fanciful example, to be sure, but the experience it discloses demonstrates once again the perceptual predisposition that humans have for intentional biological movement as well as the kinesthetic involvement that occurs when the perceived movements fall within a repertoire of familiar sensorimotor experience. While the chapter “Kinesthetic Resonance” will look at some of the neuroscientific evidence for this predisposition, the phenomenological dynamic underlying animacy perception is richly in evidence in the absence of scientific explanation. Our attention is drawn to self-generating, intentional movement, and as the examples of pump jacks and puppets in the chapter “Movement and Animation” made clear, we can bring non-biological movements to intentional life without thinking about it. Understanding our perceptual and kinesthetic investment in intentional movement, particularly human manifestations of this, helps us understand

124  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

the phenomenal and cognitive primacy we give such movements in the theatre. Theatre confronts its spectators with competing claims on attention, and these claims can operate through divergent sensory channels. The theatre’s multiple modes of address engage the spectator in ways that compete with and even eclipse our attentional engagement with the actor’s intention-driven movements. To imply that our perceptual/kinesthetic attention remains locked on human movement over and against other environmental forms of movement is to misunderstand the nature and limits of attention (more on this point later). But intentional movement, as we have seen, has a particular salience for human movement perception, and we are experientially predisposed to notice and respond to theatrical forms of biological, or animated, movement that take this form. In the case of actors, this salience is reinforced by the perceptual importance we give to faces and vocal utterance. Faces, especially eyes, play a powerful role in animating the body and marking subjectivity. Because faces and eyes are directed outward, they also indicate attentional direction and provide cues for recognizing intentional targets (in the case of the basketball player shooting free-throws, for example). From the perspective of movement perception, attention and intention reinforce each other when eyes are involved: movement follows the gaze, precipitates visual intention into action. Voice likewise identifies intention. Facial expression, voice, and the rest of the body’s expressive apparatus also convey the sensory/affective dimension of intentional movement. As we have seen, this dimension plays a crucial role in movement execution, providing an impetus for intentional action and the feeling-atmosphere in which it is carried out. Edith Stein describes the dynamic by which affect discharges itself in action: “[A]s I live through the feeling, I feel it terminate in an expression or release expression out of itself. Feeling in its pure essence is not something complete in itself. As it were, it is loaded with an energy which must be unleashed.”32 The actors in A View from the Bridge perform emotions as forcefully as they do their actions, and they do so through the same gestures. When Eddie argues with his wife Beatrice in van Hove’s highly physicalized production, their movements and emotions run concurrently, each amplifying and expressing the other. Feelings and the heightened sensory fields of bodies under stress animate their movements, gestures, and vocal delivery in relation to each other. To say that emotion precedes action or action emotion in our perception of this exchange would be phenomenologically inaccurate. In their intentional thrusts and retreats, affect/movement is what we respond to.

  MOVEMENT, ATTENTION, AND INTENTIONALITY   

125

The opening sequence of van Hove’s production illustrates the nuances of affective action-generation. In its broader kinetic outlines, the sequence displays what seems to be straightforward, goal-directed activity. The two men share the intention of cleaning themselves, and they carry out this intention in smooth movements of their arms, hands, and torsos. Their actions do not encounter obstacles beyond the skeletomuscular limits of their reach and a perceptible fatigue that pressures their movements. As they wipe themselves, their motions have the conscious but automatic quality of familiar, long-practiced actions. The fact that each is the subject and object of his own movements gives their gestures a feeling of self-­ containment, of action that radiates outward but also inward. The intentionality they display as they tend to themselves in the company of each other demonstrates self-possession and a confidence in shared intimacy. At the same time, as the two men stand shirtless there is a sense of vulnerability about them: bodies need to be cleaned and otherwise attended to, and theirs are tired at the end of a long work day. Their eyes are often directed outward, as if lost in thought, and there are what seem to be unconscious movements: a quick glance down, an improvised shift of position. Self-possession here is counterpointed by an awareness of the body’s limits. The juncture of vulnerability and intentional control creates a fault line that all of the play’s men, particularly Eddie Carbone, negotiate as A View from the Bridge progresses. This fault line becomes glaringly apparent later in the play when Eddie lands a hard punch in an impromptu sparring session with Rodolpho, the Sicilian relative and border who has been wooing his niece, Catherine. In a show of power, Rodolpho’s brother Marco challenges Eddie to pick up a chair by holding one of its legs with one hand. In the Broadway production, Mark Strong’s Eddie gripped the leg, exerted himself to the limits of his ability, but was unable to lift the chair more than an inch or so above the floor in two tries. When his turn came, Michael Zegen’s Marco, who is smaller but more compact than Strong, lifted the chair in a slow, smooth motion and held it over his head in quiet triumph. His victory was a triumph of strength, of course, but it was also a vindication of intention: I set myself a task, and I accomplish it. Eddie’s defeat, by contrast, exposed I cannot as the unexpected constraint on his self-assured I can. Efficacious intentionality undergirds Eddie’s control over his world and his family. Once this intentionality is challenged, he will die trying to reassert it. The preceding example of intentional movement—Eddie Carbone’s do-or-die efforts to control his threatened world—represents a particularly direct form of motor intentionality. Its action is individual (carried

126  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

out by a single subject), linear (pursuing a clear objective to the point of success or failure), and instrumental (in van Hove’s production, appropriating the washcloth or chair to accomplish each objective). By restricting my examples to the male characters in a play concerned with a crisis of masculinity, I may be seen as providing support to Iris Marion Young’s claims that phenomenological approaches to movement privilege an instrumental-purposive model of action and that by privileging explicit objectives, intention, and control this model reflects male-associated modes of comportment and activity. True, the actions of Eddie and Marco exemplify the instrumental, goal-directed movement that Young describes and that scientific studies of neural motor resonance, which focus on manual gestures such as grasping and lifting, tend to concentrate on. But the instrumental-purposive model of action that Young targets—whose subject, we recall, “is a purposive actor, with specific objectives it moves out into the world to accomplish”—need not entail tightly held objectives, self-sufficient movement, and instrumental control over one’s environment. If we remove the restrictiveness from “purposive,” “specific objectives,” and “accomplish,” Young’s description of intentionality actually applies to modes of comportment and activity outside the model she challenges. In truth, while intentional movement can be singular, linear, and instrumental, it is also interactive, multi-directional, and improvisational. Young indicates what such movement would look like in the description I cited earlier of the farm woman canning tomatoes while holding a crying baby in Tillie Olsen’s short story. She characterizes such movement, we recall, as “plural and engaged, to and fro, here and yonder, rather than unified and singly directed.” Intention can be interrupted by competing tasks, situational demands, and others pursuing their own intentional arcs. Changing circumstances require adjustment; one’s actions are suspended, resumed, redirected, and abandoned. Engaged in its surroundings and the field of others, in short, intentionality is subject to contingency and improvisation. Some sensorimotor activities (play, sport, wandering) embrace contingency; others (military drills, performing in a string quartet, landing an airplane) seek to minimize and overcome it. But no intentional act is free of adjustment. Indeed, what may appear as a continuous intentional accomplishment—lifting a chair with one hand, for example—often ­consists of an improvised sequence of micro-intentions: adjusting one’s posture, rebalancing the chair, making a final push to raise it over one’s head. The unitary appearance of intentional movement is also challenged by the multi-directionality of engaged action. Olsen’s multi-tasking farm

  MOVEMENT, ATTENTION, AND INTENTIONALITY   

127

woman Anna, who cans preserves while tending to a crying baby on her hip and another who lies ill and asleep in the 107-degree heat, provides an example of parallel intentions being pursued concurrently. Young cites the following passage from Olsen’s description of this scene: Skim, stir, sprinkle; change the wet packs on Ben; pit, peel and cut; sponge. This time it does not soothe—Bess stiffens her body, flails her fists, begins to scream in misery. Just then the jelly begins to boil. There is nothing for it but to take Bess up, jounce her on a hip (there, there) and with her one free hand frantically skim and ladle. There, there. The batch is poured and capped and sealed, all one-handed, jiggling-hipped. There, there, it is done.33

Olsen’s description captures the sequence of alternating tasks that Anna faces as she moves to ensure that the proper canning steps are completed when they need to be and her children are attended to in whatever ways she can. Staccato single verbs (“pit, peel and cut; sponge”) underscore the intentional precision of each movement as she tends to the particular task at hand. One can imagine being distracted when trying to act under these circumstances, but this is not the case with Anna, whose attention is responsive to conflicting sensorimotor demands. While she focuses on one intentional task, the others remain in the field of awareness ready to be returned to at a moment’s notice or attended to simultaneously (Olsen’s use of parentheses suggests action taking place on the margins of attention). When required to accomplish two things at the same time, Anna mobilizes different parts of her body to meet these competing demands: one hand pours, caps, and seals; the other hand holds; her hip jiggles. Her skill lies in the ability to coordinate her movements in a fluid, synchronous performance that Olsen herself compared to dance.34 Bulgarian mime artist Alexander Iliev employs a related analogy when he refers to the performer’s ability to isolate and deploy individual body movements: “The idea of the human body as an orchestra is nothing new. Having mastery and facility with separate physical segments on their own or in combination is a basic principle for all representative stage activities.”35 One of his examples—the organist using his feet and two hands to perform different movements in a fugue—illustrates the multi-directionality and simultaneity available to intentional movement. As I will suggest in this chapter’s final section, the motor segmentation that often accompanies multi-­directionality can test the boundaries of intention-perception by challenging our perceptual bias toward unitary over non-unitary movement.

128  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

Finally, intentional movement can be interactive by being conducted in the presence of other moving intentional agents. These movements can have relatively little to do with each other—I read a book in the park while people stroll by—but they can also respond to each other, as when I walk on the city sidewalk and coordinate my movements with those of others making their way around me. In theatrical and other forms of performance, coordination is the norm: actors, dancers, musicians, and athletes move in relation to each other in addition to moving on their own. One way of describing this would be to say that actors move in intentional vectors that confront and accommodate each other. In the scene that follows the opening sequence in van Hove’s production, Catherine greets Eddie by running across the stage, jumping/climbing into his arms, and wrapping her legs around his waist. In what is clearly a longstanding ritual (less appropriate now that she’s grown, perhaps), Eddie anticipates her movements by bracing his body and opening his arms, then holding her while she clings to him. The sensorimotor and affective dynamic between the two is clearly more interactive than an “A meets B” model allows. Each recognizes the other’s sensorimotor intention by incorporating it into his or her own movements, co-inhabiting the movements they generate together. In such instances, the unitary notion of intentionality—where intentional activity is a function of the autonomous subject—can be replaced by the more expansive term interintentionality, the shared recognition and enactment of actions.36 This mutual inherence of your actions in mine when we encounter each other, and vice versa, is felt even when— or especially when—neither of us knows what the other will do. In terms of movement perception, interintentionality ensures that the sensorimotor actions we watch on stage are not necessarily bound to the agents that initiate them. When intentionality is plural rather than singular, its enactment acquires a collective dynamic. Watching an orchestral performance, one can focus on individual musicians and appreciate the skill with which they play their instruments, or one can focus on the orchestra as a whole, which moves with a shared intentionality born of training and rehearsal—coordinating movements and handling thematic material with a synchrony that makes its members feel like a single body. The same is true with dance performance, where dancers move individually but also as part of a collective intentional arc. When dancers move in contact and choreographed relation with each other, intentional boundaries are hard to disentangle. In such moments, moving for transforms itself into moving with, and the kinetic I opens to a kinetic we. Theatre, of

  MOVEMENT, ATTENTION, AND INTENTIONALITY   

129

course, is rich with such moments. At the end of van Hove’s A View from the Bridge, the actors huddle over Mark Strong’s body as blood rains down on them in an apocalyptic tableau. When they move, they do so as one, the lines between them undefined, meaningless. A production that has focused so intensely on individual confrontations resolves itself in communal movement.

Post-Intentionality Intentionality expressed through movement is a cornerstone of the dramatic theatrical tradition; indeed, what we usually call “dramatic action” rests on this embodied dynamic. Kinetic intentionality is crucial, as well, to other theatrical and performance forms, including mime, pantomime, acrobatics, dance, musical performance, and athletics. The potential intricacy of its dynamic in the game of anticipation between actor and spectator is beautifully captured in a description by Italian actress Roberta Carreri: [I]f during a scene I have to lower myself to pick up a notebook from the floor, I will not look immediately at the object. I will first look to my right and then to my left before I kneel. My aim is to avoid anticipating the action, while at the same time justifying what I do by giving it a logical reason: I look around me to make sure that I am not being seen by anyone, or maybe to ask myself why no one has picked up the notebook yet, perhaps even to check if there are other objects on the floor that need picking up. I look at the notebook only in the last instant, and then I kneel. At this point I can choose to use the in-tension of picking it up as if it were a feather, lifting it up with two fingers. The important thing for me is not to do an action mechanically by following the shortest route as we do in daily life, but rather to evoke—by means of phrasing—images that change my in-tension and awaken, in the minds of spectators, associations that offer various levels of interpretation.37

Carreri employs the term in-tension, as rendered in this translation, because the Italian word for “intention”—intenzione—includes, as Gabriele Sofia notes, the sense of internal muscular tension.38 While Carreri applies the word to the actor’s movement execution, the idea of in-tension applies as well to the spectator’s engagement with the actor’s intentional dynamic. Instead of signaling her intention to pick up the notebook and carrying it out in a straightforward, expected manner, she creates a cognitive tension for her spectators by entwining other intentional possibilities, delaying execution,

130  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

and picking it up with a delicacy that varies from what the spectator probably anticipated. What the above description reminds us of is that great actors do not just do things; they individualize their actions, break them down into micro-actions, playing with and against the spectator’s expectations in what Carreri calls “the dance of intentions.”39 The importance of intentional movement to theatrical action and spectatorial movement perception is also attested to by the resistance to it in certain anti-realist or “post-intentional” theatrical currents over the last 120 years. Edward Gordon Craig’s call for an Über-marionette that would replace the human actor, for example, was born from his distrust of the human actor’s intentional agency. Actors may formulate rational intentions consistent with the demands of theatrical work, but the physio-­affective nature of their human bodies interferes with carrying them out. The actor, Craig writes, is at the mercy of emotion: “he moves as one in a frantic dream or as one distraught, swaying here and there; his head, his arms, his feet, if not utterly beyond control, are so weak to stand against the torrent of his passions, that they are ready to play him false at any moment.”40 Emotion, for Craig, operates outside the agential structure of purposeful action; along with the other “weakness and tremors of the flesh,” it is a realm of accident and contingency.41 As a remedy for this condition, Craig proposes replacing self-movement with a more rational agency-from-without: the artist/director’s controlling intentionality. In the Über-marionette, the impulse to move and its execution are dictated by another, and the sensorimotor body becomes an instrumental one, yielding to the artist/ director’s control in the same way that a painter’s brush yields to its hand. Craig speaks of a “mechanical perfection” where the actor’s body is “absolutely the slave of his mind,” but in the High Modernist transformation he imagines authorship and authority reside in the artist’s creating intentionality.42 Marionettes do not move themselves, and automatons are set into motion by someone else. F. T. Marinetti’s writings on Futurism and Futurist performance assault human intentionality with different aims. On one hand, intentional action was the channel through which Futurist humanity would impose its masculinist, Nietzschean will to power and assert the power and speed of a newly mechanized modernity. In his 1915 essay “Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine,” Marinetti heralded the evolution of a non-­ human species that would meld the human with the mechanical. The representative of this new species identifies with his motorcar “so as to facilitate and perfect an unending exchange of intuitions, rhythms,

  MOVEMENT, ATTENTION, AND INTENTIONALITY   

131

instincts, and metallic discipline.”43 Freed from the distractions and inefficiency that result from softness, the body becomes the instrument of a hyper-intentionality. But while this intentionality represents the perfection of action execution, it also signals the end of human biological motion understood in terms of the body-subject’s sensorimotor exchange with its environment. What animates the Futurist body is impersonal and profoundly inhuman: metallic discipline, “physiological electricity.”44 The depersonalized energies suggested by the latter phrase also support the idea of a body no longer manipulable through intentional control. This parallel challenge to sensorimotor intentionality—short-circuiting ­intentionality rather than intensifying it beyond normal human capability—is evident in Marinetti’s idea of “body-madness” (fisicofollia). Marinetti praises the variety theatre for eschewing psychology for bodymadness, and he proposes extending this more radically in Futurist performances through strategies of agitation. Examples he suggests include spreading strong glue on some of the seats so that spectators cannot move and making them itch and sneeze by spreading itching powder and sneezing powder on their seats.45 In both instances intentional movement is subverted by forcing reflexive and other reactive forms of movement—in the case of spectators stuck to their seats, one imagines, their increasingly agitated efforts to extricate themselves from their unexpected predicament. Agitation and erratic movement were also evident in the audience disturbances that Marinetti and his fellow artist/provocateurs elicited during their Futurist serate. Contemporary theatre practitioners have similarly worked to undermine or decenter intentional movement in order to open up new ways of representing and perceiving sensorimotor behavior. This is not the place for an exhaustive account of these experiments, which have been discussed under rubrics such as postmodern theatre, postdramatic theatre, performance art, immersive theatre, cyborg theatre, virtual theatre, and intermedial performance. Instead, I will focus on three performance artists whose work explores the boundaries and thresholds of intentional movement: Cyprus-born Australian artist Stelarc, director Robert Wilson, and dancer/choreographer Cathy Weis. In challenging the paradigm of intentional self-movement, these artists have been profoundly influenced by the impact of technology on the representation and perception of human motion. From its origins in the motion-photography experiments of Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, which captured human and animal motion in a series of rapidly shot stills, cinema

132  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

s­howcased the representational ability to break down movement into freeze-frame images, speed it up or slow it down, and fracture it through close-ups, cross-cuts, and montage techniques. Cinematic and other technologies have similarly been used to displace, fragment, and multiply the body in artistic and other forms of representation.46 Live performers are doubled by filmed or digital representations of themselves and visually integrated with technologically generated movement fields. Certain performance artists employ technology to subvert the autonomy of movement intentionality. In Fractal Flesh (1995–98), for example, Stelarc wired his body to a computer via motion-stimulation circuitry attached to his limbs that enabled participants in Paris, Helsinki, and Amsterdam to jolt parts of his body into movement (one leg remained under Stelarc’s control so that he could stand, and his right arm was enclosed in a robotic arm that could be activated voluntarily).47 Human intentionality and agency were displaced by electronically transmitted, remote stimulation; in Stelarc’s own words, the body presented by Fractal Flesh was one “whose proprioception responds not to its internal nervous system but to the external stimulation of globally connected computer networks.”48 Disrupting self-movement in this way also disrupts its perception: jolted into movement, Stelarc’s body moved in untraceable, seemingly random ways. With multiply and remotely generated movements combining with Stelarc’s self-generated movements, the variously activated intentionalities on display undermined kinesthetic identification. Wilson and Weis subvert the perception of intentional movement within more familiar performative parameters. Wilson, whose Einstein on the Beach (1976) serves as my point of reference, subjects everyday movement to phenomenological permutations.49 In one of his signature techniques, movement is slowed down to the point where it becomes barely perceptible or even imperceptible as movement. This deceleration denaturalizes human movement by placing it beneath the threshold at which its continuities are registered and its intentional trajectories recognized and sustained. As I noted in the discussion of Footfalls in the chapter “Movement and Animation”, researchers on movement perception have demonstrated that beneath a certain ­threshold—roughly the speed of a minute hand on a clock—humans cannot perceive movement as movement. This conclusion parallels the kinesthetic finding that slowing down one’s own movement changes the sense of ­fluidly moving into an awareness of positions, proprioceptive snapshots rather than kinesthetic flow.50 As Wilson has pointed out, the movement enacted and perceived at this sub-threshold level opens

  MOVEMENT, ATTENTION, AND INTENTIONALITY   

133

­ ifferentexperiential possibilities: “If one has to move slower than one d would normally move, and one thinks about moving slower, it is boring. In the slowness there are all different kinds of energies and speeds. And that happens through the experience of time.”51 Intentional, goal-driven movement obscures a kinesthetically and perceptually richer motility, in other words, an experiential dynamism that discloses itself in a phenomenologically expansive temporal present. Hans-Thies Lehmann describes the formal and perceptual effects of slow motion in the works of Wilson and other contemporary theatre artists: “When physical movement is slowed down to such an extent that the time of its development itself seems to be enlarged as through a magnifying glass, the body itself is inevitably exposed in its concreteness. It is being zoomed in on as through the lens of an observer and is simultaneously ‘cut out’ of the time–space continuum as an art object.”52 Other aspects of Wilson’s movement direction work to frustrate intentional movement perception and replace it with a more formal perspective on kinetic activity. In the 1984 production of Einstein on the Beach at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, performers often moved in disjointed rather than fluid sequences, undermining the flow in which intentional movement typically manifests itself. Arm gestures followed each other without sensorimotor coherence, and they interacted with head gestures in similarly discontinuous fashion. Individual movements within these gestures were often broken down into component movements that were held before being followed by the next sub-gesture: a hand lifted, fingers extended, the forearm lifted, with the mechanical quality that musicians or athletes employ when breaking down a skill in order to perfect it. To quote Lehmann again, “the motor apparatus is alienated: every action (walking, standing, getting up and sitting down) remains recognizable but is changed, as never seen. The act of striding along is decomposed, becoming the lifting of a foot, advancing of a leg, sliding shift of weight, careful coming down of the sole. The scenic ‘action’ (walking) takes on the beauty of a purposeless pure gesture.”53 Performers’ bodies were kept rigidly still while individual body parts moved, which further dis-integrated the experience of embodied movement. In their often stiff mobility, the performers frequently resembled mannequins. When they turned, they often did so by turning their entire torsos without pivoting at the neck, waist, or hips. The fact that their eyes pointed forward without responding to or engaging their environment gave their movements a self-contained rather than world-directed appearance. This impression was reinforced by the

134  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

affectless manner the performers assumed. In the production’s formal dance sequences, performers moved with greater fluidity, but because these movements were repeated with identical execution they lost their expressive quality and appeared automatic—like the stereotypy, or repetitive behavior, that can afflict captive animals. These movements, like the more stationary ones, shared a diagrammatic quality that subordinated the performers to Wilson and collaborator Philip Glass’s broader visual/ kinetic/sonic tableau. Dancer, choreographer, and videographer Cathy Weis explores the coherence and organicity of intentional movement by incorporating video and other technologically mediated forms of representation into her performances. Weis’s interest in what Susan Kozel calls “the extraordinary alchemy between bodies and technologies” deepened after she was diagnosed in 1989 with multiple sclerosis, and several of her productions address the experience of bodily dissociation using technological means.54 In Dummy, one of the pieces in Monitor Lizards (1999), Weis shared the stage with a video monitor featuring her face. The monitor was initially passed among the spectators with Weis’s video head (she herself was speaking offstage) making comments about the audience handling her and a male dancer attempting to dance in front of them. When the monitor itself eventually made its way to the emptied stage, the face explained: “I used to have a body. Once, I was a dancer. I could run and jump and kick my legs high like the best of them.”55 Weis herself entered the stage and ­interacted with a pre-recorded version of her video face, which was now attached to a two-foot long puppet body. She talked with her double, held it in her lap like a ventriloquist’s dummy, even danced with it. In these encounters the movements of the live dancer’s body were juxtaposed with the denaturalized hybrid-body that she manipulated from outside, a body that reflected “[t]he oblique fracturing of the body parts, the disconnectedness to your body” that has become a cornerstone of Weis’s choreography.56 Humanized at one remove by Weis’s monitor head but unable to integrate the remote agency represented by this image with its inanimate object-body, this puppet-double dislocated the spectator’s perception of motor intentionality. Fragmenting the body and reconfiguring it technologically, Weis’ choreographic work challenges organic notions of intentional movement using other techniques, as well. In A String of Lies (1995) Weis employed what she calls “Half & Half” technology to bisect and recombine the images of two people standing in front of separate cameras; these images

  MOVEMENT, ATTENTION, AND INTENTIONALITY   

135

were projected onto a screen as a hybrid body, each half of which reflected a different intentional whole despite the dancers’ efforts to coordinate them. Recombinant technology takes additional forms in Weis’s work. In With a Shadow of Turning, the third piece in Weis’s 2002 work Electric Haiku, dancer Ksenia Vidyaykina entered the stage while her image was projected on a large screen covering the back of the stage. The image filmed by a differently located camera was added to the first image and the two moved in superimposition. Watching the two projected figures filmed from opposite perspectives, Vidyaykina manipulated them with her movements: bringing them close enough that their limbs and torsos overlapped as if conjoined. Eventually, she sat down with her knees up and her arms supporting her at an angle. As she moved forward the figures merged to become a tarantula-like hybrid with faces on both sides of its head, raising its arm-leg limbs to the accompaniment of hollow clicking sounds.57 Technology has also allowed Weis to isolate the moving body’s parts. In Painting and Stripping, the penultimate piece in Electric Haiku, Vidyaykina entered a stage that was dark except for an indistinct, ­multi-­colored image projected onto a side curtain. Wearing a flowing white gown, Vidyaykina moved in and out of the light, exploring it with different parts of her body. When these body parts were illuminated and colored in different areas of the projected light, they acquired momentary identity apart from the dancer’s body as a whole. At one point, her moving hands were the only things that were illuminated—cut free, it felt, from the body they belonged to. At another point, Vidyaykina faced forward as the projected image played over the upper part of her body; while she stood motionless, the flickering image brought motion to the highlighted parts her body, bringing them into and out of colored illumination with the kinetic jaggedness of an Eisenstein montage. What we register in performances such as the ones discussed in this section are a discontinuity, unclear agency, and non-unitariness that disrupt intention-oriented movement perception. At the same time, the complex dynamic of spectating demonstrates how insistently intentional movement continues to operate in performances that set out to undermine it. Though their movements are often denaturalized in terms of expressive, goal-­ directed intentionality, the performers in Einstein on the Beach nonetheless retain motor agency, and their gestures are understood in relation to that agency, uncommon though the qualities and sequences of these movements may be. In fact, Wilson and Glass’s opera is awash in intentional movement, usually executed at the micro-gestural level but sometimes

136  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

expressing itself in sweeping arcs. Our ability to follow this intentionality is challenged by the discontinuous sequencing of gestures and movements and by the fact that they are repeated, which bleeds them of any sense of originality or individual agency. Over the four and a half hours of Einstein on the Beach, perceptual concentration is hard to sustain, and the intentional mastery enacted by each performer easily gives way to their formal participation in the opera’s aesthetic field. This issue, however, is as much an attentional as an intentional one, and the spectator can reengage her focus on the performers’ self-movement any time she chooses. Even when she does not, agency remains a perceptual backdrop of their sensorimotor performance: though their movements are disjointed, formally constructed, and decelerated, it is humans who navigate this space, not machines. Even when they are stationary, intentionality is latent in the fact that they could move, and do eventually if I watch them long enough. Intentional movement expectation provides a perceptual backdrop for Cathy Weis’s performances, as well. Most obviously but worth underscoring nonetheless, live performers take the stage as part of the intermedial field that Weis establishes: Weis accompanied her puppet double in Dummy, Vidyaykina performed onstage in front of her filmed onscreen images in With a Shadow of Turning, and other Weis performers have similarly anchored her performances in the human body. Because her performers move within familiar intentional parameters, they counterpoint the technologically manipulated movement-bodies produced elsewhere on stage. Moreover, while these other fragmented, distorted, and technologically recombined bodies disrupt the perception of intentional movement in some ways, they engage it in other, equally interesting ways. The hybrid Vidyaykina-image dancers projected onto the screen in With a Shadow of Turning, for example, maintained their separate movement agency while they danced in relation to each other, even in the early moments when parts of their bodies were superimposed on each other. As I watched their movements on a video recording of Electric Haiku, my attention inhabited one, then the other, in uneven alteration. The fact that they combined projected images of the same dancer who moved in front of them seemed to enable this attentional switching, though it was impossible for me to inhabit both moving bodies at the same time. When Vidyaykina brought her two images close enough that they merged into a single multi-limbed creature, their separate agency vanished, and what I perceived was unreadable in terms of intentional human movement. This is not to say that it lacked intention of any kind; in fact, the figure seemed quite self-possessed

  MOVEMENT, ATTENTION, AND INTENTIONALITY   

137

as it raised and lowered its arm-leg limbs, shifting its body and sounding the floor on which it moved. The movement-body that signaled this intentionality was not, however, one that my body could recognize or imagine itself into. What was particularly unsettling as I watched this hydridized figure was the fact that its limbs were familiar. I found myself focusing on isolated movement executions—raising a leg, shifting a shoulder, the kind of thing that usually forms part of an intentional project rather than an object of attention in its own right—with flashes of recognition and perceptual engagement. Operating on the boundary of intentionality, these kinesthetic solicitations teased me with their refusal to cohere. Intentionality may have broken apart as a centering principle, but its movement elements persisted in what replaced it, untrackable at times but nonetheless felt. We can use the term post-intentional to describe the movement representations staged by Wilson, Weis, and Stelarc but only if these performances are understood to be deeply engaged with the perceptual dispositions they challenge. Stelarc’s Fractal Flesh, mentioned earlier, is a case in point. While the left part of Stelarc’s body during this event was wired to respond to remote activation, the right side (including the prosthetic arm) responded to the artist’s automatic and voluntarily movements. This created a splitbody performance in which external stimuli confronted, overwhelmed, and accommodated Stelarc’s own motor intentionality. In other words, while Fractal Flesh and the artist’s other remote-­activation performances from the late 1990s produced “a body whose authenticity is grounded not in its individuality, but rather in the MULTIPLICITY of remote agents that it hosts,” Stelarc’s already-cited claim that this body responds “not to its internal nervous system but to the external stimulation of globally connected computer networks” oversimplifies the kinesthetic experience he engineered for himself and his spectators.58 As Brian Massumi notes, Stelarc’s performance in Fractal Flesh “combines expressive and prosthetic elements in a new relay apparatus.”59 In the video segments that document Fractal Flesh and similar works such as Ping Body and Extended Arm, Stelarc’s efforts are evident in the way he holds his body, maintaining his posture and holding his head steady, accommodating the often jarring movements that his body initiates and is subject to. Watching this performance requires the spectator to navigate the conflict between remotely activated and intentional movement. Because one cannot always tell where external stimulation ends and internally generated movement begins, Stelarc’s body occasions conflicting forms of perceptual engagement. At times when I watched online excerpts from this performance, Stelarc’s

138  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

entire body seemed activated from without, like a figure animated by electricity. In other moments, it felt like Stelarc’s motor agency played a role in movements I was pretty sure were externally produced, as if he were engaged in some strangely expressive dance. While the undecidability of these responses means that intentionality in a performance such as this cannot be recognized in terms of individual, outward-engaged agency, it does not mean that motor intentionality is taken out of play. In Stelarc’s technobody art, intentionality and individual agency are revealed at the juncture of other kinetic forces; if these forces mock intentional action’s claim to autonomy in a technologically saturated biosphere, they also disclose its persistence in momentary, decentered recognitions. This interface is profoundly unsettling in a work like Fractal Flesh, but it allows kinesthetic and empathic access points for those who share his performances as observers.60 In summary, while intentionality manifests itself quite directly in the end-related actions that actors and characters pursue as a matter of course in theatrical performance, it manifests itself, as well, at the boundaries and thresholds where the unitary agent’s cognitive and sensorimotor authority is called into question. Drama may indeed be an imitation of action, as Aristotle asserted, but the phenomenological and cognitive energies of theatrical performance are often generated in the not-quite spaces where intentionality is decentered, multiplied, and challenged. When we consider the kinesthetic dimension of movement perception and its function in empathic and other forms of resonance, we should avoid oversimplified notions of movement intentionality. Our experience of theatrical action does not consist of vectors confronting each other in unbroken lines. At the same time, we should remain suspicious of theoretical models of intermedial, postdramatic, or differently designated performance practices that fail to take motor intentionality into account or deny it through concepts like the Über-marionette or the posthuman. Manifestos are not the same as the performances they envision, and the embodied performer has always resisted theoretical attempts to imagine its agency away. As long as the performer and the subjects that attend to her remain alive, embodied, and sentient, intentionality is an inescapable point of perceptual reference.

Notes 1. Bruce Wilshire, Role-Playing and Identity, ix–xiv. 2. Robert Whitman, “Light Touch” 80. 3. Wilshire, Role-Playing and Identity, xi. There is no mention of policemen in Whitman’s script.

  MOVEMENT, ATTENTION, AND INTENTIONALITY   

139

4. Peter Brook, The Empty Space, 9. 5. Martin Welton, Feeling Theatre, 121. 6. Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, 84. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 37. 9. Constantin Stanislavski, A Life in Letters, 288. 10. Ralph Richardson, Interview, 71–72; cited in Evelyn B.  Tribble, “Distributed Cognition, Mindful Bodies and the Arts of Acting,” 138–39. 11. P. Sven Arvidson, The Sphere of Attention: Context and Margin, 1 (emphasis in original). 12. See Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, 83. 13. Ibid., 89. 14. Translated and quoted in Simo Pulkkinen, “Husserl on the Factical and Historical Grounds of the Transcendental Subject,” 112  (emphasis in original). 15. Gabriele Sofia, “Achieved Spontaneity and the Spectator’s Performative Experience,” 73. 16. Welton, Feeling Theatre, 105. 17. In a parenthesis to his discussion of kinesthesis in The Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl adds I hold still to the experiential modality I move (161). This observation suggests that the act of refraining from movement can be seen as existing within a kinesthetic field. Husserl also mentions “I refrain from moving my body” in Thing and Space (335). Choreographer-performer Victoria Gray writes: “In its apparent absence, movement becomes more present and we acknowledge that binary oppositions between stillness and movement do not and cannot sensibly exist; stillness is within movement and movement is within stillness” (“Re-Thinking Stillness,” 201). Gray cites performance theorist SanSan Kwan’s observation on the phenomenological complexities of not moving: “When the body is at rest our powers of introspective proprioception experience a world of microscopic tremors, vibrations and pulsations happening within the body” (ibid., 206; Kwan, “Hong Kong In-corporated: Falun Gong and the Choreography of Stillness,” 17–18). 18. Patrice Pavis, Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis, 244. 19. Ibid. 20. Daniel L. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, 129–30. 21. David Rooney, review of A View from the Bridge. 22. In this production Alfieri begins his monologue when the scene is over and Eddie and Joey have left the stage. 23. Riverside Shakespeare, 1661 (stage direction). 24. My use of the term intention in the present context differs from the phenomenological use of “intention” to describe perception’s inherence in its objects (i.e., all perception is perception of something). This strictly

140  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

phenomenological meaning, which originates in Husserl’s writing is, of course, deeply related to the motile and perceptual experiences I discuss, as Merleau-Ponty’s notion of motor intentionality [intentionnalité motrice] indicates (Phenomenology of Perception, 112–14). See David Morris, “Body,” 114–18. 25. John Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, 91. 26. Searle, “Response: The Background of Intentionality and Action,” 293. 27. Ibid. 28. Dorothée Legrand, “Bodily Intention and the Unreasonable Intentional Agent,” 161. 29. Ibid., 166. 30. By including expressive movement under the broader rubric of intention, I am going against the practice of many neuroscientists, who restrict the latter term to externally goal-directed movement. While experiments on the brain’s mirror system suggest difference between the neural processing of goal-directed and non-goal-directed movement, the experience of movement and movement perception do not reflect this clear-cut distinction. 31. Jerome Wakefield and Hubert Dreyfus, “Intentionality and the Phenome­ nology of Action,” 263. 32. Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, 51. French phenomenologist Renaud Barbaras underscores the inseparability of affect, perception, and movement: “Beings capable of moving are the very ones that are capable of feeling; feeling and movement are the two aspects of a same mode of living, because movement assumes the desire for a goal, which itself requires the capacity for perceiving it” (Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception, 87). 33. Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio, 185–86; cited in Young, “‘Throwing Like a Girl’: Twenty Years Later,” 289. 34. Olsen, Quoted in Mara Faulkner, Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen, 47. 35. Alexander Iliev, Towards a Theory of Mime, 188. 36. Expanding Daniel N. Stern’s use of this term in The Interpersonal World of the Infant, Ingar Brinck defines interintentionality in the context of infant development: “Interintentionality is the sharing of information with another agent about the intention and beliefs of the self and others, first by ostensive, bodily based means, such as gaze, gesture, and vocalization, later in development by symbolic means, for instance, verbally” (“The Role of Intersubjectivity and Intentional Communication,” 132, italics in original). 37. Roberta Carreri, On Training and Performance, 68; cited, in different translation, in Sofia, “Achieved Spontaneity,” 76.

  MOVEMENT, ATTENTION, AND INTENTIONALITY   

141

38. Sofia, “Achieved Spontaneity,” 76. 39. Carreri, 68. 40. Edward Gordon Craig, On the Art of the Theatre, 56. 41. Ibid., 81. 42. Ibid., 67 (emphasis in original). 43. F. T. Marinetti, “Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine,” 86. 44. Ibid. 45. F. T. Marinetti, “The Variety Theatre,” 190. 46. Nicolás Salazar Sutil provides a valuable discussion of technology and movement representation in Motion and Representation: The Language of Human Movement. 47. A segment of this performance can be viewed at Stelarc, “Circulating Flesh.” Fractal Flesh was one of a number of Stelarc performances that experimented with remote skeletomuscular activation and prosthetic technologies; others include Split Body: Voltage in/Voltage Out (1995), Ping Body (1995), Movatar/Avatar (1997) and Extended Arm (2000). Brian Massumi provides an account of these and other performances in his analysis of Stelarc’s work (Parables for the Virtual, 116–26). 48. Stelarc, “Earlier Statements.” 49. My observations refer to the 1984 production of Einstein on the Beach at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. A documentary about this production entitled Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera includes extended sequences of the opera. 50. Uwe Proske and Simon C. Gandevia, “The Kinaesthetic Senses,” 4141. 51. Robert Wilson, in Jan Linders, “Time Has No Concept: An Interview with Robert Wilson,” 87. 52. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 164. 53. Ibid (emphasis in original). 54. Susan Kozel, Closer, xvii. 55. Cathy Weis, quoted in Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre, 68. I am indebted to Parker-Starbuck’s fine discussion of Weis’s work in Cyborg Theatre and several essays/reviews that preceded it (see “The Body Electric: Cathy Weis at Dance Theatre Workshop” and “Shifting Strengths: The Cyborg Theatre of Cathy Weis”). Of Dummy she observes, “The piece forms a narrative of bodily disappearance and cyborgean rebirth” (Cyborg Theatre, 68). 56. Cathy Weis, Quoted in Dulcie Leimbach, “On Line, Choreographer Pushes Back Boundaries.” 57. A segment of Vidyaykina’s performance can be viewed on Weis’s website “Cathy Weis Projects,” http://www.cathyweis.org/works/works/electric-haiku/. Video recordings of most of the other performances discussed here are available in the Moving Image Archive of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

142  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

58. Stelarc, “Earlier Statements.” 59. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 120. 60. Challenging Stelarc’s pronouncement that the human body is “obsolete” in the late capitalist era, Amelia Jones describes her empathic response to his work Extended Arm, which continues his exploration of prosthetic and remote-activation technologies: “I imagined (even empathically experienced) my own body trapped, controlled, directed by this technological apparatus. Far from experiencing Stelarc’s (or my own) body as ‘obsolete’ or otherwise irrelevant or transcended, I felt more aware of my own bodily attachment to his artistic practice—more and not less cathected to his technologized form” (“Stelarc’s Technological ‘Transcendence’/Stelarc’s Wet Body,” 87).

Bibliography Arvidson, P. Sven. 2006. The Sphere of Attention: Context and Margin. Dordrecht: Springer. Barbaras, Renaud. 2006. Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Paul B. Milan. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Brinck, Ingar. 2008. The Role of Intersubjectivity and Intentional Communication. In The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity, ed. Jordan Zlatev, Timothy P. Racine, Chris Sinha, and Esa Itkonen, 115–140. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Brook, Peter. 1968. The Empty Space. New York: Atheneum. Carreri, Roberta. 2014. On Training and Performance: Traces of an Odin Teatret Actress. Trans and ed. Frank Camilleri. London/New York: Routledge. Craig, Edward Gordon. 1956. On the Art of the Theatre. 1911. New York: Theatre Arts Books. Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera. Directed by Mark Obenhaus. 1985. DVD. Santa Monica: Direct Cinema, 2007. Faulkner, Mara. 1993. Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Gray, Victoria. 2012. Re-Thinking Stillness: Empathic Experiences of Stillness in Performance and Sculpture. In Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, ed. Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason, 199–217. Bristol: Intellect. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Iliev, Alexander. 2014. Towards a Theory of Mime. Trans. Milena Dabova. Ed. Michael M. Chemers. London: Routledge. Jones, Amelia. 2005. Stelarc’s Technological ‘Transcendence’/Stelarc’s Wet Body: The Insistent Return of the Flesh. In Stelarc: The Monograph, ed. Marquard Smith, 87–123. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  MOVEMENT, ATTENTION, AND INTENTIONALITY   

143

Kozel, Susan. 2007. Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kwan, SanSan. 2003. Hong Kong In-corporated: Falun Gong and the Choreography of Stillness. Performance Research 8 (4): 11–20. Legrand, Dorothée. 2010. Bodily Intention and the Unreasonable Intentional Agent. In Naturalizing Intention in Action, ed. Franck Grammont, Dorothée Legrand, and Pierre Live, 161–180. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. Karen Jürs-Munby. London: Routledge. Leimbach, Dulcie. 1999. On Line, Choreographer Pushes Back Boundaries. New York Times, July 1. Linders, Jan. 1997. Time Has No Concept: An Interview with Robert Wilson. Theatreschrift 12: 79–95. Marinetti, F. T. 2006a. Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine. 1915. In Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus. Trans. Doug Thompson, 85–88. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 2006b. The Variety Theatre. 1913. In Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus. Trans. Doug Thompson, 185–92. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge. Morris, David. 2008. Body. In Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts, ed. Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds, 111–120. Stocksfield: Acumen. Olsen, Tillie. 1974. Yonnondio: From the Thirties. New  York: Delacorte Press/ Seymour Lawrence. Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer. 2003. The Body Electric: Cathy Weis at Dance Theatre Workshop. PAJ 25 (2): 93–98. ———. 2005. Shifting Strengths: The Cyborg Theatre of Cathy Weis. In Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, ed. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander, 95–108. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2011. Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pavis, Patrice. 1998. Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis. Trans. Christine Shantz. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Proske, Uwe, and Simon C. Gandevia. 2009. The Kinaesthetic Senses. Journal of Physiology 587 (17): 4139–4146. Pulkkinen, Simo. 2014. Husserl on the Factical and Historical Grounds of the Transcendental Subject. In Phenomenology and the Transcendental, ed. Sara Heinämaa, Mirja Hartimo, and Timo Miettinen, 106–128. New York: Routledge. Richardson, Ralph. 1967. Interview with Derek Hart. In Great Acting, ed. Hal Burton, 62–72. New York: Hill and Wang.

144  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

Rooney, David. 2015. Review of A View from the Bridge, directed by Ivo van Hove, Lyceum Theatre, New York. Hollywood Reporter, November 12. Searle, John. 1983. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1991. Response: The Background of Intentionality and Action. In John Searle and His Critics, ed. Ernest Lepore and Robert Van Gulick, 289–299. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin, 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Sofia, Gabriele. 2013. Achieved Spontaneity and the Spectator’s Performative Experience—The Motor Dimension of the Actor-Spectator Relationship. In Moving Imagination: Explorations of Gesture and Inner Movement, ed. Helena De Preester. Trans. Gennaro Lauro, 69–85. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Stanislavski, Constantin. 1989. An Actor Prepares. Trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. New York: Routledge. ———. 2014. A Life in Letters. Selected, trans. and ed. Laurence Senelick. London: Routledge. Stein, Edith. 1989. On the Problem of Empathy. 1917. 3rd. revised ed. Trans. Waltraut Stein, vol. 3, The Collected Works of Edith Stein. Washington, DC: ICS. Stelarc. 2011. Circulating Flesh—Stelarc at Virtual Futures. Virtual Futures 2.0 Conference. University of Warwick, June 18–19. http://www2.warwick.ac. uk/newsandevents/podcasts/university-news/115-virtual-futures-2/. Accessed 26 Aug 2017. ———. Earlier Statements: Fractal Flesh. Stelarc website. http://stelarc. org/?catID=20317. Accessed 28 Aug 2017. Stern, Daniel N. 1985. The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New  York: Basic Books. Sutil, Nicolás Salazar. 2015. Motion and Representation: The Language of Human Movement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tribble, Evelyn B. 2016. Distributed Cognition, Mindful Bodies and the Arts of Acting. In Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies, ed. Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook, 132–140. London: Bloomsbury Methuen. Wakefield, Jerome, and Hubert Dreyfus. 1991. Intentionality and the Phenomenology of Action. In John Searle and His Critics, ed. Ernest Lepore and Robert Van Gulick, 259–270. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Welton, Martin. 2012. Feeling Theatre. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Whitman, Robert. 1977. Light Touch. October 4: 80–93. Wilshire, Bruce. 1982. Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Young, Iris Marion. 1998. ‘Throwing Like a Girl’: Twenty Years Later. In Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Donn Welton, 286–290. Oxford: Blackwell.

Kinesthetic Resonance

Kinesthetic Sympathy Chapters “Movement and Animation,” “Movement, Difference, and Ability,” and “Movement, Attention, and Intentionality” have identified a number of features of movement and movement perception that pertain to theatrical spectatorship: the perceptual disposition toward animate movement, the central role of attention to the execution and perception of performance movement, and the prominence of motor intentionality in our apprehension of animate movement. In exploring the phenomenological grounds of movement and movement perception, I have proposed that human motility entails a dialectical negotiation between ability and disability, between what my body can do and what it cannot. This dialectic can lie outside our awareness given our propensity to act upon the world within the sphere of what we can accomplish. I cannot intrudes as a realization when we confront our limits, whether imposed from without or through our bodies. For many people, I cannot is an immediate rather than background feature of experience. When I pay attention to myself moving and perceiving external movements, I am reminded of movement’s dynamic kinesthetic landscape. Because my body’s movement experience is usually transcended when I carry out goal-directed actions, I am often unaware of this inner sensation. But when I broaden my attention to include myself while acting— or exert myself to the point that my body’s effort becomes an object of attention in its own right—this inner side of movement makes itself © The Author(s) 2018 S. B. Garner, Jr., Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre, Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91794-8_5

145

146  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

apparent. The term kinesthesia was coined in 1880 by British neurologist Henry Charlton Bastian to describe sensations resulting from or associated with movement.1 According to Bastian, kinesthetic sensations—or what he and his contemporaries also referred to as “muscular sense”— originate in the muscles, tendons, fasciae, joints, and skin. In addition, he speculates, they include a quasi-awareness of “unfelt or but little felt impressions which guide the volitional activity of the brain [. . .] and which serve to bring it into relation with the different degrees of contraction of all muscles that may be called into action.”2 The concept of kinesthesia has sometimes been equated with proprioception, which refers to the direct sensation one has of bodily posture, limb extension, and the relative position of body parts. Proprioceptive signals combine with vestibular signals (originating in the inner ear) that register balance in order to coordinate one’s awareness of position and movement. Because alcohol impairs these signals, policemen measure proprioceptive awareness when they ask subjects to close their eyes and touch their noses during field sobriety tests (the vestibular system is also checked during these tests when subjects are asked to walk in a straight line). Because of its explicit grounding in movement, though, I favor the term kinesthesia in my discussion of theatrical embodiment and perception over proprioception, which gravitates toward the body at rest. As the lived inside of kinetic action, kinesthesia represents the dynamism of embodied self-experience. The importance of kinesthesia to movement and perception is also a central feature of the phenomenological tradition from Husserl to Sheets-­ Johnstone. Whereas objectively observable movement, for Husserl, is a property of the physical body (Körper), kinesthesia belongs to the lived body (Leib).3 These movement aspects are intimately related. Kinesthetic sensations, Husserl writes, “are different from the movements of the living body which exhibit themselves merely as those of a physical body, yet they are somehow one with them, belonging to one’s own living body with its two-sided character (internal kinestheses, external physical-real movements).”4 My body moves in space, but my experience of acting within and upon my environment—or what Husserl calls “holding sway” (walten)— derives from the kinesthetic sensations animating these movements. Kinesthesis, so defined, is essential to one’s perceptual constitution of the external world: the movements of my body and the kinetic sensations they provide of eye, head, and hand movements allow me to perceive space and the objects within it. The awareness of my eyes and head moving, for example, allow me to know that the world around me does not move

  KINESTHETIC RESONANCE   

147

when I turn my head from left to right even though it appears to do so. Because I move is foundational to Husserl’s I can and I do, kinesthesia is intrinsic to my intentional hold on the world. This kinesthetic hold forms the basis for other-recognition: “Only through my originally experienced holding-sway, which is the sole original experience of living-­bodiliness as such, can I understand another physical body as a living body in which another ‘I’ is embodied and holds sway.”5 The related claim that kinesthetic awareness allows one to vicariously inhabit the experience of another was introduced and developed in late nineteenth-century aesthetics. The word empathy was introduced as a term for this activity in 1909 by the British psychologist Edward Titchener as a translation for the German word Einfühlung. The German original, which means “in-feeling” or “feeling into,” had been coined several decades earlier by philosopher Robert Vischer in his 1873 treatise On the Optical Sense of Form. When confronting a work of art, Vischer claimed, we employ the faculty of imagination, or “inward sensation,” to project ourselves into the art-object and inhabit its structures as if they were our own. “When I observe a stationary object,” Vischer wrote, “I can without difficulty place myself within its inner structure, at its center of gravity. I can think my way into it, mediate its size with my own, stretch and expand, bend and confine myself to it.”6 Facing such objects, we can also perceive emotions and attitudes that manifest themselves in expressive movement— “a secret, scarcely suppressed twitching of the limbs, a timorous yearning, a gesturing, and a stammering.” Through a joining of sensation and imagination, Vischer suggests, we inwardly experience the static object as if it could move freely. The projecting angle of a cliff, for instance, seems to lunge forward in impatience, curiosity, or anger.7 This empathic view of aesthetic experience was taken up by Vischer’s contemporary Theodor Lipps, who used the concept of inner imitation (Nachahmung) to describe this process of virtual identification. Whereas Vischer emphasized the role of emotion in determining our perception of movement in the stationary perceptual object, Lipps located Einfühlung in movement perception and the kinesthetic repertoire it draws upon. When I see someone perform a movement, Lipps claims, I feel a striving in myself that follows the observed movement. The more engrossed I become in this movement, the less aware I am of my own movements; the kinesthetic activity I feel, in other words, is subsumed by what I perceive. “I feel active in the movement or in the moving figure,” Lipps writes, “and through projecting myself into it I feel myself striving and ­performing

148  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

this same movement.”8 In Lipps’s well-known example, when I watch an acrobat on a high-wire above the seats in a circus, I enter into his movements as if they were my own. So strong is this identification that I experience  no separation between myself and the acrobat above me: “I feel myself in him and in his position.”9 In aesthetic imitation of this kind, I am carried away from the experience of my own body as something separate from the body I observe: “[T]he feelings of my bodily states must disappear from consciousness to the degree in which I am engrossed in the contemplation of the aesthetic object—to which the states of my body simply cannot belong.”10 Paradoxically, while Nachahmung entails a physiologically grounded muscle mimicry, the kinesthetic dynamic of that mimicry is projected onto the moving figure or non-moving work of art that occasioned this response. When I contemplate an open architectural form, for instance, I may feel an inner expansion that involves muscle tensions in my chest, but the bodily origin of this sensation does not exist for my consciousness as long as my attention is directed to the spacious hall. The kinesthetically responsive body, in other words, transcends itself in the act of looking. The movement component of this muscular identification and its implication for the performing arts were developed in the 1930s by John Martin, the New York Times’s first dance critic and a champion of early twentieth-century modern dance. What characterized the practitioners of modern dance, Martin claimed, was their recognition that movement is the essence of dance. By foregrounding movement over music, pictorial design, static poses, and programmatic movement sequences, dancers such as Martha Graham reclaimed the kinetic expressivity of primitive dance that had been lost in classic and romantic dance. As an art of movement, Martin insisted, dance was grounded in kinesthesia, the neuromuscular sixth sense that allows internal awareness of our body’s position and movement. Because this kinesthetic sense is also activated when we watch movement, it provides the basis for what Martin termed “inner mimicry” or “kinesthetic sympathy.” In his words, When we see a human body moving, we see movement which is potentially producible by any human body and therefore by our own; through kinesthetic sympathy we actually reproduce it vicariously in our present muscular experience and awaken such associational connotations as might have been ours if the original movement had been of our own making. The irreducible minimum of equipment demanded of a spectator, therefore, is a kinesthetic sense in working condition.11

  KINESTHETIC RESONANCE   

149

Grounded in the body’s sensorimotor responsiveness to its environment, kinesthetic sympathy allows the spectator to inhabit the dancer’s movement in a kind of virtual merging: “We shall cease to be mere spectators and become participants in the movement that is presented to us, and though to all outward appearances we shall be sitting quietly in our chairs, we shall nevertheless be dancing synthetically with all our musculature.”12 Human movement, according to Martin, has an emotional as well as a physical component; indeed, the expressivity of dance reflects an emotional experience that can only express itself in this manner. “Emotion,” for Martin, is an expansive concept, including personal experience and affectively driven motor intentionality in addition to affect. Martin employs the Greek term metakinesis to designate the connection between physical movement and this “psychical” intention.13 Because muscular movements embody the psychic states that animate them, the spectator’s act of reexperiencing these movements provides access to the performer’s intentions and emotions.14 “It is the dancer’s whole function,” Martin writes, “to lead us into imitating his actions with our faculty for inner mimicry in order that we may experience his feelings.”15 Like other movement forms, dance represents a direct mode of physical and psychical communication, and this becomes apparent when we attend properly to our responses while witnessing the dancer’s movements. Martin’s stipulation “when we attend properly” is important. While inner mimicry is a natural function of our kinesthetic/perceptual musculature, its operation has been occluded by the modern denial of kinesthetic sensibility. This denial is evident in the resistance that traditional audiences experienced toward modern dance, which emulates the authentic motor expressivity of primitive dancers instead of classical ballet. So that the new dance may find receptive spectators, Martin calls for audiences to “awaken the dead muscle sense.”16 Because Martin’s writings on kinesthetic sympathy became a touchstone for subsequent debates on the role of motor resonance and empathy in the performer–spectator relationship, it is important to consider the premises on which his understanding of this relationship rest. Martin’s writings have been challenged by recent dance theorists for the universalizing tendency evident in his discussions of the dancing and perceiving body. In Susan Leigh Foster’s words, Martin’s view of empathy “absorbed vast differences into it, transforming culturally specific patterns and practices into pan-human dramatic action.”17 Martin does, it should be noted,

150  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

acknowledge differences in human movement: “Geography, climate, race, religion, social environment, physique, dress, cultural tradition, historical background, and the very passage of time itself, all affect the ways men move and, more particularly, the ways they translate movement into dance.”18 He also cites Rudolf Laban’s classification of people into movement styles as evidence that it is impossible for everyone to be taught to do the same type of movement.19 Moreover, he acknowledges the differences that racial and cultural difference impose. “Oriental” dance, for instance, is centered on the hands and upper body with the fingers, toes, head, and neck moving in distinctive ways, while African dance centers on the pelvic region. The difference that Martin acknowledges, though, rests on a universal movement impulse. The ritual dance of primitive people, French court ballet, and the Lindy Hop—a Harlem-based dance popular during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s—can be traced back to a common root: “They are all outgrowths of what might be called basic dance, which is the same in all parts of the world, in all times and cultures.”20 What assures this commonality are the kinetic translation of inner experience into movement and the kinesthetic receptivity that allows another to reembody this meta-kinetic movement across cultural boundaries. The central issue here is one of accessibility. How are the experiences of another person accessible, and what are the barriers to this accessibility? Foster, suggesting that Martin’s notion of kinesthetic access is racially coded, compares his discussions of African-American choreographer Pearl Primus’s dance pieces and Martha Graham’s Primitive Mysteries (1931) as evidence that the kinesthetically receptive body he posits is white: “The white, and for Martin racially unmarked, body of Graham could feel free to absorb and draw from the rhythms specific to racially marked peoples, whereas the black body struggled under dual responsibilities to art and to race.”21 When it comes to issues of ability and inability, Martin’s kinesthetic faculty is also unmarked in the sense that bodies do not impose their differences or sensorimotor histories on kinesthetic receptivity. This is not to say that physical and motor differences do not make themselves felt at all. When spectators applauded Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova’s ability to hold the arabesque posture for an extended period of time, for instance, they “knew in terms of their own physical limitations just how far beyond them it was to sustain any such attitude, and enjoyed this vicarious experience of motor freedom.”22 The reason why one can appreciate and vicariously inhabit experiences that are beyond what one is currently able to do is that they exist as possibilities; as Martin explains in the passage quoted

  KINESTHETIC RESONANCE   

151

earlier, “When we see a human body moving, we see movement which is potentially producible by any human body and therefore by our own; through kinesthetic sympathy we actually reproduce it vicariously in our present muscular experience and awaken such associational connotations as might have been ours if the original movement had been of our own making.” Kinesthetic responsivity, according to Martin, transcends the individual body’s capacities and incapacities. Whereas Martin’s notion of kinesthetic accessibility offers an explanation for the fact that people do respond to movements outside their own movement repertoire—to claim that this is not so would require taking the position that people can only respond to what they are capable of or experienced at doing themselves—it hinges on the problematic assumption that kinesthetic sympathy is a panhuman phenomenon capable of erasing the differences embodied in movement abilities, repertoires, and practices. The universalist tendency of Martin’s kinesthetic model reflects a modernist preoccupation with the essences underlying difference. As Mark Franko observes in Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics, “Modernist accounts of modern dance history [. . .] perform the telos of aesthetic modernism itself: a continuous reduction to essentials culminating in irreducible ‘qualities.’”23 Movement, according to this view, is a universal language not because its means of expression are the same from person to person, but because all humans have immediate, non-verbal access to the mover’s kinesthetic experience. While you and I may differ in physique, training, and cultural background, in the encounter of self-­ movement and kinesthetic apprehension we become the same. One of the things that underwrites this access is a universally operative I can. As part of his assumption that people can unequivocally access the inner movement life of others across the boundaries of difference, Martin makes crucial assumptions concerning the “any human body” that is involved in the kinesthetic encounter. Beyond the question of cultural specificity, Martin’s performing and perceiving bodies are normative ones, able to execute and experience the full register of human movements. Those who watch the dancer’s body and vicariously reenact its movements have an unimpeded ability to do so; the “irreducible minimum of equipment” required of the dance spectator, we recall, “is a kinesthetic sense in working condition.” As Martin states in Introduction to the Dance, “There is no disposition here to claim that the average spectator approaches the dance with anything but a perfectly functioning neuromuscular system and an equally healthy general physical organism.”24 Despite this claim,

152  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

though, Martin’s account of kinesthetic sympathy is shadowed by bodies unable to attain the normative sensorimotor and perceptual freedom necessary for expressive movement and its vicarious reenactment. In the rare instances when disability is explicitly mentioned in Martin’s text, it is conceived as a deficit or threat. Speaking of the spectator’s kinesthetic sense, for example, Martin writes: “It is this and this alone which the average man must bring with him to a dance performance; without it he is like a deaf man at a symphony, a blind man in an art gallery.”25 Disability represents anything that impedes the body’s ability to serve as receptive instrument during the act of artistic participation. Like a properly maintained violin, normative bodies are necessary if the dancer’s movements are to reverberate in the spectator’s experience. While the actual disabled body is largely  absent from Martin’s writings—as it was, for the most part, in the modern dance whose accomplishments and evolution they chronicle—abnormality makes itself felt in movements that radically challenge what the typical body can do. The complications that non-normative embodiment presents to Martin’s notion of kinesthetic sympathy are evident, for example, in his discussion of contortionists: “Even in the case of the acrobat and the contortionist we are made to feel, through muscular sympathy, the strain, the difficulty of the tricks performed, and hence to have a corresponding sense of courage, skill, superiority, or sometimes of revulsion for abnormality.”26 This final response suggests that inner mimicry as Martin theorizes it is a matter of resistance as well as transparency. What he later refers to as “distaste for the abnormal” raises questions about the nature and dynamics of kinesthetic identification.27 Does the revulsion or distaste that Martin imagines some spectators feeling at the sight of the contorted body reflect a failure of muscular mimicry: this movement I observe is unrecognizable and therefore alien to me? Or does it signal a desire to disown aberrant movements that I recognize within myself but find uncomfortable or cannot execute successfully? In both cases, movement perception generates a dissonance between my actual or imagined kinetic/kinesthetic repertoire and an aberrant set of movement possibilities. In the former instance, we have a failure of other-recognition; in the latter a failure of self-recognition as I reject movement affinities that I find difficult to acknowledge. Martin supports this second explanation when he wonders why the contortionist’s “twistings and dislocations” arouse “feelings of revulsion or sometimes of actual nausea.”28 The reason, Martin argues, is that we reexperience these feats in our own musculature. The fact that our neuromuscular resonance with

  KINESTHETIC RESONANCE   

153

the contortionist may cause revulsion or nausea while Pavlova’s arabesque gives us the feeling of vicarious freedom may reflect the fact that Pavlova’s dancing body appears to transcend itself in an I can temporarily unbounded by gravity and skeletomuscular limitation. The design of this position and the goal of training for it, after all, are to make the elevation seem effortless, like the acrobat’s seeming ability to soar. The contortionist, by contrast, maneuvers his or her body by bending and extending it in ways that visibly (and painfully) lie beyond the capability of “normal” bodies; in this act of deforming the body in relation to normal skeletomuscular parameters there is no illusion at work. If “[a]ll physical exertion finds an echo in the watcher’s motor mechanism” and we constantly experience ourselves in the movement of others, then to watch a contortionist is to imagine oneself into impossible positions and to vicariously feel the discomfort and necessary failure of such an attempt.29 Kinesthetic resonance in a situation such as this confronts I can with I cannot, what lies in my ability as an embodied, intentional being with what bounds it. In the phenomenological logic that characterized my earlier account of observing the AXIS Dance Company, motor performances of this kind mock my fantasy of transcending my body’s limitations in kinetically expansive ways.30

“Mirroring” Movement The notion of inner mimicry that Martin championed has been the object of separate investigation by scientists interested in the connections between movement and movement perception. This interest was intensified by the discovery of “mirror neurons” in the pre-motor cortex of macaque monkey brains in the early 1990s and the accumulating evidence since then of an equivalent neural network in human and certain other animal brains. Because it pertains to the phenomenon of kinesthetic spectatorship that this book explores, I will highlight some aspects of this research. Mirror neurons, which were first identified by neuroscientists at the University of Parma, discharge when an individual executes a specific motor action and when that individual observes another individual executing the same or similar action. These neurons, researchers concluded, relate observed action to the observer’s motor repertoire, activating neurons that are also responsible for performing that action. One of the crucial distinguishing features of mirror neurons is that they respond to goal-directed action but not to movements that lack an apparent goal. They are geared, in other words, toward motor intentionality. Neuroscientists have identified two

154  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

main categories of mirror neurons. Strictly convergent mirror neurons discharge when a monkey is performing a specific goal-directed action and also when it observes another monkey or a human performing the same action, while broadly convergent mirror neurons discharge not only for the same action but also for non-identical actions that accomplish the same goal—in monkey experiments, for example, grasping something with one’s hand or with one’s mouth or using different grips.31 Another category of mirror neurons termed canonical neurons respond when the monkey sees an object associated with a specific action (grasping, for instance) even if that action is not being carried out. Mirror neurons have been identified that respond to sound rather than observed action. The same neurons activate when a monkey hears the sound of a peanut being cracked as when it cracks the nut itself, even if the sound comes from outside the monkey’s field of vision.32 A 2009 study on humans demonstrated that congenitally blind participants exhibited mirror activation in the same areas of the brain while hearing actions being performed that were activated in sighted subjects when they viewed these actions.33 In a finding with important implications for theatre and the other imaginative arts, human studies have also established that mirror neurons activate when one imagines an action by thinking or reading about it or when one hears an action being recounted (in storytelling, for instance). The initial identification of monkey mirror neurons and subsequent research on their properties were accomplished using microwires implanted in the brain. Because such procedures have mostly proved unfeasible with human subjects, the identification of mirror neurons in human subjects has relied on non-invasive braining imaging technology such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and on combining this information with what scientists have discovered in single-cell research on monkey brains.34 In 2010 neuroscientists at UCLA identified individual human mirror neurons using wires inserted in the brains of willing epileptic patients whose brains were being examined for surgical reasons. An additional discovery was that these neurons also exist in areas of the brain not classically associated with mirror neurons.35 Because of this fact, the network of such neurons is often referred to as the “mirror-neuron system” (MNS) or “mirror system.” While the presence of monkey-related mirror neurons in humans remains a matter of controversy, the weight of over twenty years’ research into this system strongly supports the existence of human mirroring operations.36

  KINESTHETIC RESONANCE   

155

According to neuroscientific experiments, mirroring activity is lessened when one perceives an action being performed compared to when one enacts that action oneself—and lessened still more when one encounters representations of the same action in other forms (a narrative, for instance). Individual neurons fire differentially in response to different aspects of the observed actions, and a certain category of mirror neurons have opposite firing rates for action execution and observation, increasing their activity in the former situation and decreasing their activity in the latter. These variations help distinguish my own actions from those I observe, and they work in conjunction with inhibitory mechanisms in the brain to ensure that we do not automatically carry out the actions we observe (attempting bodyflips while watching a gymnastics meet, for instance).37 But empathic mirroring can also be mitigated or disowned on a more individual basis at pre-conscious and conscious levels. As neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese observes, for myriad reasons we feel the need to protect ourselves from our motor and emotional identifications with others; the action we observe could actually hurt us or the internalization of certain actions might put our own identity boundaries at risk. One of the reasons that theatre offers such powerful mimetic experiences, Gallese speculates, is that it offers a safe environment where our inhibitory mechanisms are not automatically called into play. “[W]e are free to let our simulations go,” he writers, “without having to bother to be prepared to counteract what is happening on stage.”38 Mirror neurons have been associated with imitative behavior, mind-­ reading, language acquisition, autism, and empathy. Scientists and philosophers have debated the claims made on their behalf and their role in action understanding. Many of these debates concern the relationship between mirror neuron-facilitated motor apprehension and other cognitive operations. Vladimir Kosonogov, for example, raises questions about the belief that human mirror neurons are coded for goals because they are activated if the observed action is goal directed and do not activate if this condition is not met. How, he asks, do these neurons “know” that the observed action is goal directed or a pantomime of such an action? The only way that an observer can recognize an action as goal directed is if other brain structures recognize that the observed movements are part of a complete action and that they have a goal. This recognition is usually accomplished by attributing reasons and consequences to the movement based on the observer’s knowledge and experience. We know that a bee flying toward a flower pursues the goal of collecting nectar and pollen because we have been told many times that

156  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

this is what bees do.39 Carrying this logic into the observation of human movement, we anticipate the javelin thrower’s intention to hurl the javelin when he pulls back his right arm and shoulder because we have seen this action performed before, may have performed some version of it ourselves, or simply know that this is what javelin throwers do. Arguments such as this over the relationship between mirror neurons and other cognitive operations generally come down to a debate between bottom-up and top-down models of how we understand the actions and intentions of others. Proponents of the former, including early advocates of mirror-neuron theory, tend to see mirror-­neuron activity as driven by visual and/or audio stimuli, while ­proponents of the latter emphasize the ways in which this activity is modulated by contextual, attentional, and higher-order cognitive contributions and by the subject’s preexisting experience of the world. Recent research on the human mirror system has led to a more nuanced understanding of neural mirroring and its functional relationship to other cognitive mechanisms.40 Neuroscientists, for instance, have identified mirroring activities in areas of the brain responsible for emotion and physical sensation. Some of the mirroring responses identified in such studies have explicit motor components. When I see others laughing, for instance, I see their bodies and faces move in recognizable ways and hear the sounds they make. But emotions and sensations are more than motor epiphenomena; they recruit areas of the brain other than or in addition to those associated with action planning and execution. Feeling disgust and observing someone whose face registers disgust, for example, activate neurons in the anterior insula, an area of the brain that transforms unpleasant olfactory and gustatory sensations into visceromotor reactions (such as nausea).41 As Christian Keysers and Valerie Gazzola summarize this research, vicarious activity of the kind associated with mirror neurons exists in many brain areas, including the motor, somatosensory, and emotional cortices.42 Elsewhere, Keysers has suggested that mirroring is a general principle of brain function.43 Despite their disagreements over the different mechanisms involved, in short, scientists have amassed a formidable amount of evidence that movement perception and movement enactment are deeply implicated in each other. But while the discovery of a mirror system in the human brain seems to provide confirmation of the theory of kinesthetic resonance, it is important to guard against the assumption that neural activity is the same thing as consciousness of one’s movement and movement perception. The

  KINESTHETIC RESONANCE   

157

mirror system may, as its proponents claim, allow someone to understand the actions of another “from the inside” and provide that person “a first-­ person grasp” of the other’s motor intentionality, but the neural activity that carries this out takes place on what Shawn Gallagher calls a prenoetic level inaccessible to reflective consciousness and outside the field of ­phenomenal experience.44 Activity at this level correlates, but does not coincide, with conscious awareness of activity. In a well-known experiment conducted by Benjamin Libet in the early 1980s, subjects were asked to record the moment at which they became aware of simple hand movements while their brains were measured for signals indicating the neural preparation to move; what the study showed was that the latter anticipated the former by several hundred milliseconds. “Put another way,” Libet writes, “the brain ‘decides’ to initiate or, at least, to prepare to initiate the act before there is any reportable subjective awareness that such a decision has taken place.”45 Mirror neuron activity, in other words, is not synchronous with kinesthetic experience or any of the other modes of movement awareness that comprise sensorimotor/perceptual experience. Correlations between the two must inevitable return to the hard problem of how consciousness arises from neural events in the first place. Beside the fact that neuroimaging and phenomenal awareness yield different kinds of “first-person” data, there are other reasons to be cautious when using neurological models to understand experiences as complex and engaged as movement perception. Like all scientific experiments, research on the mirror system involves the measurement of carefully limited variables in highly controlled situations. As a result of this, aspects of lived experiences are examined in isolation from each other so that they can be understood in their own terms, free of the compromising influence of other variables. The accumulating results of these and other studies are then explained in terms of models that connect brain areas with cognitive functions. This empirical procedure differs from a dynamic, integrative approach that understands movement as a dynamic interaction of perception, emotion, intention, and sensorimotor capacities. Another aspect of neuroscience’s experimental protocols is that its studies are conducted in kinetically artificial environments. The individuals studied in these experiments are often seated, restricted in how they can move by the requirements of the experiment, and further immobilized by the necessities of measuring equipment (an fMRI scan, for instance, may require the subject’s head to be secured in a brace). Correspondingly, the movements they observe are isolated from everyday environments and are typically

158  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

presented in a non-interactive format (on video screens situated at a particular distance from the subject’s eyes, for example). A majority of the movements studied since the earliest experiments on mirror neurons involve simple gestures and actions: grasping, holding, imitating hand movements. As a consequence, we know a lot about what happens to monkeys and humans on a neural level when they observe someone pick up a small object, but these experiments tell us little about how these neurons operate when the movements an individual executes and observes are enworlded, as they are outside the laboratory. Our world is one of multiple signals and kinetic invitations; its movements implicate us, and ours it. Action and perception are embedded in each other. From this point of view, the discovery of neural mirroring mechanisms is not the key to self– other movement understanding, as many of their early champions declared, but rather one support, among others, for a broader cognitive/experiential account. My own interest in mirroring mechanisms is guided by the belief that the neurological discoveries connected with them and the often competing models for explaining how they work offer a lens for thinking about the dynamic relation between movement perception and enactment. The discovery of neurons that facilitate this connection dovetails with non-­MNS neurological, psychological, and other empirical studies, many of which preceded their discovery. In 1975, to give one example, scientists at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, found that observing localized motor activity in someone else (arm and lip movements, in their experiment) triggered activity in the observer’s muscles that corresponded to that activity.46 The goal-directed nature of motor mirror neuron activity also evokes the phenomenological, enactive, and philosophical models of intentional action that this book outlines and develops. Self-movement unfolds in intentional arcs, these models suggest, as do the movements we are most attuned to in others. To the extent that neural mirroring mechanisms recognize and respond to such movement—alone or in conjunction with other cognitive processes—they provide a neural corollary to the awareness of our own and others’ movement. In the area of external movement perception, what we know about them provides addition evidence for thinking about that lock or sense of engagement we experience when we focus on another’s intentional actions and the vicarious engagement we feel in our muscles. We may not be able to feel our neurons firing, but we can experience our affective and sensorimotor resonance in response to the movements of others when we bring this kinesthetic dynamic to awareness.

  KINESTHETIC RESONANCE   

159

Recognizing the neural corollaries to movement experience does not require that one endorse the priority given to mirror neurons in neuroscience-­driven accounts of movement experience. Maxine Sheets-­ Johnstone, whose phenomenological approach to movement contributed to this book’s earlier discussion of animation and self-movement, offers a compelling argument against doing so. In her response to the argument of Gallese and art historian David Freeberg that mirror neuron-facilitated simulations underlie the aesthetic contemplation of painting and sculpture, Sheets-Johnstone asserts that such claims misunderstand the relationship between neural activity and kinetic/kinesthetic experience.47 Citing research on neuronal development, she notes that the brain is a dynamic self-organizing system in which synaptic connections between nerves cells are constantly changing: neurons are pruned if they make unproductive connections, and new synaptic connections are always being formed.48 Because pruning and connectivity respond to our experience, “it would seem incontrovertible that the mirroring capacity of certain neurons derives basically from kinesthetic experience of one’s own moving body, that is, from one’s movement experiences. In effect, mirroring is basically the mirroring of another’s moving body on the basis of the actual and possible movements of one’s own moving body.”49 Fetal brains develop neurons and synaptic connections as the fetus enacts a range of complex movements, and neural proliferation and adaptation continue throughout life in the context of familiar and new kinesthetic experiences. As we learn to move in different ways, the repertoire of kinetic/kinesthetic abilities we acquire and practice build up new synaptic connections. Sheets-Johnstone also suggests that the learning capacities and possibilities that influence synaptic development can be “differently honed” by way of culture.50 The argument that mirror neuron activity is conditioned by sensorimotor learning is in keeping with recent neurological research, which has provided a more complex understanding of how these cells work and the vicarious enactments they bring into play. An increasing number of these researchers have challenged the assumption that mirror neurons provide universal access to the movement experiences of others. Neural mirroring mechanisms, their research demonstrates, are culturally conditioned, and adaptive. As Caroline Catmur and her colleagues have shown, the mirror properties of the mirror-neuron system “are neither wholly innate nor fixed once acquired”; rather, this system “is both a product and a process of social interaction” and the sensorimotor learning this frequently entails.51 Beginning with the infant’s earliest experience mirroring the

160  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

movements, expressions, and sounds of its mother, humans incorporate the movement practices of the communities they come in contact with. In sensorimotor and kinesthetic terms, we are neurally wired to incorporate and rehearse the sociocultural environments we inhabit. As one corollary of this, there is a strong correlation between the strength of cognitive mirroring and such factors as background, experience, and expertise: someone who is trained as a violinist experiences stronger kinesthetic resonance when observing the small-motor movements of a professional violinist than one who does not. In a 2007 neuroscientific study of audiomotor recognition, researchers found that training non-musicians over five days to play a novel piano piece resulted in “hearing-doing” mirror neurons being activated when they heard a segment of the piece replayed whereas there was no equivalent activation when they heard two control pieces they had not played.52 Other studies have confirmed the connection between expertise, cultural familiarity, and mirror-neuron activation. In 2005 a research team led by Beatriz Calvo-Merino studied the role of training on the observance of dance performance. The neuroscientists showed videos of classical ballet and Brazilian capoeira to two groups of dancers trained in one or the other dance form. When their brains were measured while watching videos of these dances, the areas of the brain associated with mirror activity responded much more strongly when they watched their own dance style than when they watched the other one. Echoing Sheets-Johnstone, the researchers concluded that the mirror system “integrates observed actions of others with an individual’s personal motor repertoire.”53 Expertise, in this instance, is embedded in cultural movement conventions; while Calvo-Merino and her colleagues do not address this fact explicitly, their experimental use of a historically European and historically Latin American dance form raises the question of how kinesthetic receptivity arises within the kinetic/kinesthetic communities we belong to. This question has been taken up more directly by the work of dance scholars who have demonstrated the importance of subjective, cultural, and historical factors in kinesthetic empathy. In an important qualitative study of audience response that used data generated by interviews and focus groups, dance researchers Matthew Reason and Dee Reynolds found that the kinesthetic and emotional responses of spectators asked to watch classical ballet and the South Indian bharatanatyam differed in kind and intensity based, in part, on their cultural familiarity with these forms. The responses of these spectators were highly individual, marked by experience, motivations for

  KINESTHETIC RESONANCE   

161

attending dance performance, and what Reason and Reynolds call “pleasure strategies” in addition to cultural competence.54 Susan Leigh Foster’s observation about history addresses the situatedness and individuality of kinesthetic response: “The dancer’s performance draws upon and engages with prevailing senses of the body and of subjectivity in a given historical moment. Likewise, the viewer’s rapport is shaped by common and prevailing senses of the body and of subjectivity in a given social moment as well as by the unique circumstances of watching a particular dance.”55 When mirror neurons were popularized in the early 2000s, they were hailed as universal keys to the actions, intentions, and experience of others. In a passage quoted in the introduction to this book, Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia quote Peter Brook as stating that “with the discovery of mirror neurons, neuroscience had finally started to understand what has long been common knowledge in the theatre: the actor’s efforts would be in vain if he were not able to surmount all cultural and linguistic barriers and share his bodily sounds and movements with the spectators, who thus actively contribute to the event and become one with the players on stage.”56 Remove the mirror neuron part, and this statement could have been written by Martin as a description of kinesthetic sympathy. Current understand of neural mirroring mechanisms and the experiential dynamics that we refer to under the label kinesthetic empathy challenges this transcultural, universalizing assumption. Neuroscience, dance theory, and phenomenology converge on this point. Far from offering identical and universal access to others, our ability to respond to their movements by vicariously enacting them is situational, embedded, and conditioned by everything we bring to the perceptual encounter in terms of sensorimotor experience, identity (understood as my situatedness in specific, externally imparted movement practices), cultural familiarity, and cognitive disposition. I recognize your movements and kinesthetically enact them by calling upon a  multi-determined  movement repertoire that  navigates what I am familiar with and what I am unfamiliar with. Only on the basis of these possibilities and limits is genuine movement understanding conceivable.57

Resonance in the Theatre To assert that humans respond to the movements, gestures, and expressions of others in part by recognizing their sensorimotor dynamic, anticipating their outcomes, and vicariously inhabiting them is no longer the

162  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

groundbreaking claim it might once had been. This resonance capacity is confirmed by scientific studies (even as they disagree about the neural mechanisms involved), by aesthetic theory, and by phenomenological attention to experience. It is supported, too, by the practical insight of dancers, actors, and others involved in the movement-based performing arts. Less clearly understood are the variability, intensities, and limitations of motor resonance in real-world movement situations. Many accounts of kinesthetic empathy and neural mirroring seem to presuppose that motor resonance is automatic and continuous. It does not take much reflection on actual movement-perception environments, such as theatre, to conclude that this presupposition needs to be qualified. While motor resonance may form a basic part of one’s sensorimotor and perceptual attunement to others, it manifests itself selectively and variably. As we have seen, it prioritizes intentional over non-intentional action.58 This presents no challenges when the movement observed is a hand reaching for a coffee mug in an fMRI experiment: reach for the mug, pick it up by the handle, return it to the table, withdraw one’s hand. Laboratory actions are clearly delineated and presented without distractions. What happens when the movement subject picks up the coffee mug in an absent-minded way while talking animatedly with others? When a robot instead of a human being picks up the mug with programmed, mechanized motions? Our discussion of Wilson, Weis, and Stelarc in the chapter “Movement, Attention, and Intentionality”—and our discussion of D-Generation in the chapter “Movement and Animation”—showed that the line between intentionality and non-intentionality can be fluid, hard to determine. Though resonance responds to intentional arcs, it can activate and de-activate during such performances, emerge and recede, in irregular, often conflicting, ways. If we imagine that the person picking up the mug does so during a dinner party onstage while others perform similar or different actions simultaneously, what determines which kinetic solicitations a spectator singles out and vicariously inhabits? To phrase the question in these terms is to identify attention as an important determinant of kinesthetic response. We considered the role of attention in movement and movement perception from the actor’s and spectator’s points of view in the chapter “Movement, Difference, and Ability,” and I have implicitly evoked attention throughout my account of these phenomena outside the theatre. Mobile and adaptive forms of attention govern my movements as I negotiate a crowded sidewalk, attention focuses on the end point when I engage in an intentional act, and attention obtrudes in my awareness of muscular strain when I attempt to lift an object that is too heavy for me. It is useful here to recall

  KINESTHETIC RESONANCE   

163

Arvidson’s phenomenological c­ ategories or “dimensions” of attention. At its outermost reaches is the attentional margin, that halo, horizon, or background that includes everything present in my awareness. At its core is thematic attention, the lens that identifies focal objects. Between these two poles is contextual attention, which draws from the attentional margin those objects that pertain to the focal object. A 2008 study by Australian scientists indicated the active role that attention takes in delineating the field available to action observation. “In everyday life,” its authors write, “we are frequently confronted with situations in which several gestures or actions are observed simultaneously (i.e., during group social interaction). One might therefore anticipate the existence of a mechanism that prevents unnecessary processing of actions that are not immediately relevant.”59 The question facing a theory of kinesthetic spectatorship in the theatre—like all theories of audience response that foreground cognitive and phenomenological engagement—is how perceptual objects are brought forward as focal points within the spectator’s attentional field. What, in other words, directs the eye, the other sensory mechanisms, and the attentional dynamics they enable? Since focusing attention on one object or group of objects in the perceptual field involves disattending to others (by delegating them to the attentional margin), understanding this process can tell us a great deal about our kinesthetic orientations and reorientations during a theatrical performance. Attentional dynamics can be difficult to describe, and they are understandably resistant to generalization across individuals and attentional situations. Attention can be individual and idiosyncratic, the result of training, habits, environmental factors, and physiological states (one pays attention very differently when one is tired or hungry than when one is alert and comfortable in one’s body). Where one is seated in the theatre— close to the stage, at the back of the mezzanine, in the center of the audience, off to the side—influences attentional engagement with the actions onstage, as can the behavior of other audience members during the performance. Moreover, attention is multiply motivated. It is called forward and directed by objects and events in my perceptual field, and it is directed by the attentional predispositions I bring to what I encounter. It is, in short, active and reactive at the same time, interactive as well as dynamic. As George Home-Cook observes in his recent book Theatre and Aural Attention, “In the theatre, as in everyday life, objects of attention are neither ‘presented’ objectively to an inactive participant nor are they mere abstractions of the mind but are phenomenologically constructed, formed

164  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

and articulated through a dynamic process of embodied, intersensory attending in the world.”60 To the extent that sensorimotor and emotional resonance are involved in this attentional process, they share this embodied, intersensory dynamic. While it may seem obvious to assume that resonance follows attention in my perceptual encounters—I attend to another and, as a consequence, vicariously enact her movements and emotions—it may also be the case, as Christian Keysers has suggested, that resonance and attention engage in a two-way interaction in which attention can be guided by affective and motor resonance in addition to enabling it.61 In this reverse relationship, I attend to the movements of someone attempting to navigate his way down a crowded sidewalk while precariously balancing a stack of boxes because that figure is identified for me by an initial resonance response. In such instances resonance functions as its own mode of attentional selection. The example of someone walking down the sidewalk with boxes comes from a 2005 episode of the PBS program Nova on the topic of mirror neurons that staged this scenario while filming the reactions of other pedestrians observing a man struggling with his precarious load.62 As Robert Krulwich, the program’s host, made his way haltingly down the sidewalk, adjusting his movements to keep the stack of boxes from falling while he was clearly limited in his ability to see ahead of him, those near him and as far away as across the busy street stared at him, some leaning in tandem with his movements as if navigating his obstacles themselves. Elsewhere in the program, spectators at a sports bar watched a sporting event on an offscreen television. Engrossed in the physical action, they moved their bodies in response to particularly intense moments or stood completely still, their eyes reflecting their vicarious involvement. Such involvement is familiar to sports fans, who frequently help with their own bodies when a soccer player takes a penalty kick or a tennis player attempts a difficult shot in a crucial tennis volley. These examples illustrate the fact that spectatorial attention and the resonance enactments that accompany it are conditioned in their intensity by the stakes that one perceives in the action being performed. In view of the New York pedestrians’ concerned engagement with the precarious balancing act that was staged for them, for instance, we can note the connection between resonance, attentiveness, and physical risk. It is not by chance that aerial acrobats have featured so prominently in accounts of kinesthetic empathy. For reasons that are no doubt evolutionary, humans are cognitively oriented not only to notice risk within their environment

  KINESTHETIC RESONANCE   

165

but also to vicariously assume the action-capabilities of those they perceive to be at risk. Joseph Roach provides a different performance example of this phenomenon in his discussion of the Austin-based Rude Mechanicals’ production The Method Gun (2010), which played in New Haven as part of the 2010–11 season of the World Performance Project’s No Boundaries series. In the production’s final sequence, the actors performed while eluding an array of swinging work lights that crisscrossed the stage. “The rhythm of the pendulums,” Roach writes, “approximates a beating heart, accelerating with fear, as the actors find their way through a kinetic maze that changes its openings and obstacles in microseconds.”63 Not surprisingly, as Roach notes, the production’s New Haven spectators leaned from side to side as the performers negotiated this dangerous environment. While this attentional/kinesthetic response to physical risk may be as close to universal as sensorimotor attunement gets, the situations it applies to do not exhaust the stakes that an action can have for one who observes it. The soccer game that takes over the bodies of those who care about it, for example, leaves those who do not literally and figuratively unmoved. The kind and intensity of one’s kinesthetic investments differ from person to person, and they are conditioned by the factors that I discussed in my earlier discussion of resonance mechanisms—personal experience, expertise, cultural and social factors, and whatever else makes the objects, individuals, and actions in my environment compelling and urgent to me. Psychoanalytic theorists, evolutionary biologists, and cultural anthropologists might offer different explanations of what these stakes are and what they derive from. Given the variability of theatrical attention and the individual factors that constitute an audience’s encounters with performance, it is important to avoid accounts of kinesthetic resonance that seek to generalize its operations. Kinesthetic attunement does not behave like a radio signal that one locks into and follows with unbroken attention. Nor is there a blueprint for how spectators should or actually do respond to the actions they view on stage. The resonance responses to an actor’s performance that I describe in a particular performance I observed might very well have been different at other performances of the same work, and I cannot infer that those sitting around me have identical experiences. This is not to say that spectator responses are entirely different from each other: as performers understand, audiences can engage (or fail to engage) with a play or dance piece in common, even synchronized, ways. Emotion can be contagious, and kinesthetic resonance can be as well, given that the bodies we are

166  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

k­ inesthetically attuned to when we sit in our seats include those surrounding us. But the feeling of common response can be mistaken, as well, given the myriad individual and situational variables at play. To dwell on just one of these briefly, not everyone has the same perceptual access to sensorimotor stimuli. The powerful kinesthetic response to van Hove’s A View from the Bridge that I described in the chapter “Movement, Attention, and Intentionality,” for instance, owed much to the fact that the last-minute ticket I purchased was in the second row of the Lyceum Theatre auditorium. People I know who viewed a later performance from the front mezzanine reported feeling less emotionally and physically engaged in their distant seats. This is not surprising given that they had diminished access to the actors’ faces and the nuances of their movements. In a recent study of the dancer–spectator relationship, Corinne Jola and Matthew Reason looked at the effect of proximity on kinesthetic empathy and other aspects of spectator response. One of the benefits of proximity, they found was the greater access it gave to the performer’s face. A participant in their experiment described this effect: “You can see more of her facial expressions, her emotions, there were some smiles and some, you know, basically the dancer’s emotions, so you were able to connect more and feel more of her movements.”64 For my part, while proximity to the actors’ expressive bodies in van Hove’s production enabled me to feel their gestures and actions more intimately, my position below the raised stage meant that I could not see their feet for most of the production. How would my kinesthetic experience have differed if I had sat in one of the rows of seats flanking the stage on either side, where I could see their entire bodies from a few feet away? Theatrical seating is characterized by gradients of distance, angle, and visibility, all of which modulate or constrain resonance opportunities. At the same time, while attentional and kinesthetic activity is subject to personal and environmental variables, it is not arbitrary. These processes are conditioned by the perceptual dispositions highlighted throughout this study: toward animate over non-animate movement, intentional over nonintentional movement, and unitary over non-unitary movement. They are also responsive to performance strategies for activating and directing the spectator’s kinesthetic attention within a field of competing stimuli. Stage design, blocking, lighting, and costume can foreground actors so that their movements become attentional attractors, and actors call attention to themselves and others through gestures, words, and actions. This engagement can be concentrated on specific movements and intimate sensorimotor actions, or it can occur more expansively across multiple movement

  KINESTHETIC RESONANCE   

167

interactions. An example of the former and its potential kinesthetic complexities is the “glass of water” scene in Act 1 of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, when Lenny and Ruth encounter each other late at night after Ruth’s husband Teddy has gone to bed and Ruth has returned from her walk in his family’s North London neighborhood. Ruth and Lenny have never met, and they navigate their unfamiliar proximity to each other using predatory and defensive strategies. Lenny moves at and around Ruth with words, recounting two rambling stories that end with violence toward the women he claims to have encountered. Ruth is silent for much of this exchange, deflecting his efforts to draw her into the power dynamic he aggressively seeks to establish. Their gestural contest extends to the manipulation of objects. Early in their exchange Lenny brings Ruth a glass of water from the sideboard; since she has not requested this, his action asserts preemptory dominance. Ruth sips from the glass and puts it on the side table next to her. Later in their exchange, Lenny moves the ashtray that sits near the glass and proposes relieving her of the glass even though she is not done with it. When Ruth refuses to give him the glass, he says he will take it himself, at which point Ruth delivers the unexpected line, “If you take this glass . . . I’ll take you.”65 As Lenny sputters a response, Ruth picks up the glass, lifts it toward him, and offers him a sip. Her words get even more uncomfortable for him when she offers to let him sit on her lap then invites him to lie on the floor while she pours the water down his throat. Having turned the tables on her former aggressor, she drinks the rest of the water, puts down the glass, and goes upstairs. Discussions of the power struggle that drive Pinter’s drama have often highlighted the importance of language as an arena for interpersonal negotiation. I will add to this discussion in the chapter “Language, Speech, and Movement.” What I want to call attention to here is the role of physical movement, movement perception, and kinesthetic resonance in defining these negotiations. The glass—and, to a lesser extent, the ashtray—are foregrounded as objects of attention and manipulation. The questions of who picks up the glass and why, who drinks from it and who does not, increase in stakes as the scene progresses. In Peter Hall’s 1973 film version of The Homecoming, which included cast members from the original 1965 stage production, Ian Holm’s Lenny pours two glasses of water almost nonchalantly, but the fact that Vivien Merchant’s Ruth has just declined his offer for something to drink calls attention to his action and the attempt to dominate that underlies it.66 When he offers/threatens to take the glass back, the issue of who handles it is more strongly accentuated. Lenny stands next to and

168  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

almost above Ruth in a position that occasions kinesthetic uncertainty. Will he ignore her “No” and take the glass anyway? Will he back off? At the point when Ruth seizes the initiative by picking up the glass herself, the kinetic/ intentional dynamic shifts, and she takes charge of the movement interaction. She holds the glass out to him with an intimidating confidence then stands, holding the glass in front of him and tilting it toward his mouth. So invasive and unexpected is this gesture that Lenny shrinks back from her (the fact that Merchant is taller than Holm adds to the intimidation of this kinetic peripeteia). From the spectator’s point of view, the resonance dynamic of Pinter’s scene may seem fairly straightforward. Given that no action has been more frequently studied than grasping in neuroscientific experiments on primate and human mirror mechanisms, we know how forcefully such actions solicit sensorimotor resonance. Clearly, then, the actual grasping and manipulation of the glass is one through-line of the spectator’s kinesthetic engagement with this scene. The contours of this engagement, though, are kinesthetically nuanced, as evidenced in the way that Merchant handles the glass in the scene’s final sequence. As Lenny responds to her line “Why don’t I just take you?” with a brief but aggressive counter-speech, she reaches for the glass with her right hand, grasps it with her thumb and four fingers, and holds it while he finishes what he is saying. Is she deciding what to do with the glass during this pause? Waiting to carry out an action she has already formulated? As he finishes, she shifts the glass to her left hand and lifts it in his direction while holding it with her fingers from below, as if presenting an artefact for observation. It is an unusual gesture, not the way one typically holds a glass, since it cannot be easily tilted or placed back down from this position. When Ruth stands up, she switches the glass back to her right hand and grips it tightly while she leans toward him and tilts it in his direction. Whereas her movements up to this point have focused on the hands and lower arms, she now moves the glass with her entire arm, shoulders, neck, and head, while her left arm is held tightly in support of this gesture. With her face moving to within eighteen inches or so of his face, the exchange is charged with erotic intimacy and threat. Based on the way she holds her body and moves, she could be offering a drink to a lover, offering milk to a child, or preparing to water a hanging fern. When her offer/threat has achieved its effect (Lenny is forced to respond, “What are you doing, making me some kind of proposal?”), she laughs, releases the tension in her body, and drinks the rest of the water in a relaxed but authoritative posture.

  KINESTHETIC RESONANCE   

169

The kinesthetic exchange between Lenny and Ruth, in other words, is characterized by sub-intentions, micro-adjustments, and shifting movement possibilities. At any moment in this sequence, the characters can choose to move, not move, or move differently than they do. Each of these choices and possibilities carries potential resonance for a spectator engaged in their kinesthetic interaction. Given the gap that Pinter establishes between intention, language, and physical gesture in his plays and his practice of disguising the force of characters’ emotional life behind outwardly restrained forms of behavior, the glass of water scene is charged with latent and unpredictable movement. Watching this scene, I experience some of these possibilities—Lenny suddenly reaching to grab the glass, for instance, in a flash of imagined, vicarious movement. I also experience the physical constraint of not moving, the urge to move that presses against silence and immobility but contains itself. Sometimes I see the impulse to move, or imagine that I do, in the actors’ eyes (particularly Holm’s). As the scene progresses toward its concluding confrontation, the glass itself becomes a target of kinesthetic impulses realized and unrealized. I will revisit the kinesthetic complexities of this scene from The Homecoming in the chapter “Language, Speech, and Movement,” where I consider the role of language in movement experience. I conclude the present discussion with a  different observation on the dynamics involved in watching an onstage interaction such as this. The fact that there are two characters involved in the exchange means that there are, at any moment, two objects of kinesthetic attention. At the start of this section I raised the question of how one focuses one’s attention and the kinesthetic responses attendant upon it when faced with competing attentional solicitations. As I will argue later, speech is one of the resources by which actors draw attention to themselves; language subjectifies the body that speaks and calls attention to its perceptual and intentional holds on its environment. Actual movement, of course, also calls kinesthetic attention to itself: I watch someone reach for and grasp a glass, and I vicariously enact this gesture, drawing on my own motor experience. Resonance displays its clear predisposition in such cases toward intentional, or active movement. In situations where more than one actor moves, however, my attention can be drawn to either at any point. It can also alternate between actors as I attempt to grasp the movement interaction as a whole. Re-viewing the scene, I can focus on Holm’s Lenny during the sequence when Ruth takes hold of the glass and goes on the offensive. Doing so animates movement initiatives that lie in the back-

170  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

ground, so to speak, of Merchant’s more intentionally dominant actions. That Holm’s movements and expressions are largely reactive at this point in the exchange does not mean that they lack resonance for me as a spectator. In what is probably a gender-specific identification with Lenny at this moment, I recoil inside when Ruth pushes the glass uncomfortably close to his face, feel my neck and shoulders pull back as I do when I watch a character in a movie recoil from an animal or enemy that suddenly jumps into the frame. The truth is, though, while I can isolate Ruth’s gesture and Lenny’s reaction by consciously directing my attention, the two are not entirely distinguishable in a phenomenological sense. We saw in our discussion of biological movement in the chapter “Movement and Animation” that movements are responsive to the environmental presence of objects and other moving agents: I walk on a crowded sidewalk in tandem with pedestrians who approach me on different trajectories and from different directions. And as we saw in the chapter “Movement, Attention, and Intentionality,” intentional movements often formulate themselves in response to, and in coordination with, the intentional movements of others. In this sense, they are inherently intersubjective. It would be phenomenologically inaccurate to claim, then, that Ruth acts and Lenny responds in experientially discrete movements. When Ruth leans in toward Lenny and extends the glass toward him, his recoil is an extension of her intentional action. From the other end of the intentional relationship, Ruth’s gesture and the physical proximity of her body while she carries is determined, in part, by Lenny’s reaction. In this sense, he inhabits her movement intention as she does his. The mutual inherence of movement subjectivities in their physical encounter has important implications for a spectator’s kinesthetic identifications. One can foreground Ruth or Lenny in attentional terms—even change one’s focus when one views the scene more than once—but their kinesthetic interaction is interactive, which means that each is an inseparable part of their kinesthetic exchange. Under laboratory conditions, mirroring neurons may respond to discrete actions, but in theatrical situation (as in life) resonance responds to whole movements with their interintentional, environmentally situated operations. When I watch Ruth’s “proposal” to Lenny without artificially trying to single out one or the other, what I respond to in kinesthetic and emotional terms is a shared action of approach–retreat. This action may be marked by individual initiatives, but its kinesthetic dynamic includes them both.

  KINESTHETIC RESONANCE   

171

Multi-Directional Resonance As the scene between Lenny and Ruth in Pinter’s The Homecoming indicates, the resonance dynamics engaged by theatrical performance are multi-dimensional. Kinesthetic responses can be tightly focused in sequences such as this, or they can be less focused, as with scenes in The Homecoming that include the entire cast. In such scenes, the spectator’s kinesthetic attention is multiply directed, focusing on one, then another, performer, scanning the stage in a dynamic that is both active and reactive. This dynamic is evident in those performances that decenter the stage and strategically subvert action intentionality—such as those discussed in the closing section of the chapter “Movement, Attention, and Intentionality”—but it is evident as well in traditional theatrical performances where actors present competing points of attention, manipulate and resist anticipation, and speak (and dance and sing) as well as move. Having explored the kinesthetic invitations of a two-handed scene, I would like to discuss a more expansive, kinetically intricate theatrical endeavor: North Hollywood-based integrated theatre company Deaf West’s production of the rock-musical A Spring Awakening, which opened at the Los Angeles’ Inner-City Arts in September 2014, transferred to the Beverly Hills Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills in May 2015, and moved to New York’s Brooks Atkinson Theatre that fall.67 The production, which featured hearing, hard-of-hearing, and deaf actors and musicians, was performed using American Sign Language (ASL), vocal English, and choreographed dance movements. All of the actors signed their lines, while those who could hear also spoke and sang their parts. Deaf actors were doubled by hearing actors who spoke and sang their lines for them, including the actors playing Wendla and Moritz, whose “doubles” also performed as musicians in the onstage band (as four of the other doubles did). One of the actors, Ali Stroker, performed in a wheelchair. With over two dozen performers onstage, Spring Awakening presented an often kaleidoscopic movement field. Like other musicals, it alternated solo performances and intimate interactions with ensemble performances in which actors moved in tandem with and against each other. While not simple by any means, these coordinated sequences are more straightforward to describe from the perspective of kinesthetic resonance. When the performers danced and moved in parallel, their synchronized bodies generated a unified kinesthetic participation. In these sequences, individuality

172  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

was subsumed within a collective kinetic performance: the intentionality that guided their movements was trans-subjective rather than subjective, as if the impulse to move and the arc of its execution arose between and outside them. The resonance occasioned by these movements was intensified, of course, by the music, which surrounded and imbued the performers and reinforced their movements with its own dynamics. Music is often described as an auditory phenomenon, but it is a kinesthetic one, as well, engaging the body with its vibrations, volumetric expansions and contractions, and its cadences that rise and fall, quicken and slow. Phenomenologist Don Ihde offers an insightful description of music’s kinesthetic solicitations: To listen is to be dramatically engaged in a bodily listening that “participates” in the movement of the music. It is from this possibility that the “demonic” qualities of music arise. In concentrated listening its enchantment plays on the full range of self-presence and calls on one to dance. Dance, however, must be understood not merely in a literal fashion, for dance in this context is the enticement to bodily listening. Thus the full range of the dance to which music issues a call is one that spans the continuum from actual dancing [. . .] to the “internal” dance of rhythms and movements felt bodily while quietly listening to baroque music.68

In Spring Awakening, music had an integrating effect on the performers’ movements. When they branched off into counter-movements— interacting as individuals or smaller groups while executing different but coordinated movements or executing the same movements in different directions—the music unified them as they came together, moved apart, and danced at different paces and with different movement trajectories. From one perspective, music animated their bodies, guiding their movements as if originating within the space around them. From another perspective, the music came from within them, expressing itself through their voices, signing gestures, and physical movement through space. It was possible while watching these dance numbers to focus on the movement of single performers within the ensemble—I did this throughout as my eye was drawn to one performer or another, including the onstage musicians who played their instruments while moving to the music they helped ­create—but these kinesthetic affiliations never lasted long given the wider and forceful kinetic dynamic in which they participated. They did not need to: part of the pleasure in watching such sequences is kinesthetically enacting the interplay between individual and ensemble movement.

  KINESTHETIC RESONANCE   

173

The kinesthetic invitations of Deaf West’s Spring Awakening were more elusive—and fascinating—when it came to the production’s non-musical scenes. Because the actors signed their lines while they or the doubles who were matched with deaf actors spoke them aloud, their interactions with each other had a gestural component that musical theatre typically lacks (even when it features physically demonstrative vocal delivery). ASL makes use of the body’s signifying abilities to embody communication gesturally, and its use dramatically expanded the performers’ kinetic expressivity when they were dancing and when they were not. As someone who does not know ASL, I did not have access to the meanings that these gestures signified. The lyrics occasionally allowed me to map meanings onto the signed gestures in the way one can do when deciphering a passage in a foreign language with the aid of a facing-page translation (or reading projected translations during a foreign-language opera).69 But this is not the same as understanding their bodily articulation in the way someone experienced in sign language can do. One implication of this, of course, is that signed gestures are encountered and responded to differently by those who can “read” ASL and those who cannot. Those in the former category, I expect, could vicariously enact the hand, arm, and upper-body muscular contractions that generated these movements and the intentional trajectories they followed, thereby owning both the meanings and the kinetic/ kinesthetic dynamic that produced them. They could also, I am sure, inhabit the fluency of these gestures, particularly when these were executed by the native signers onstage. Logically speaking, this receptivity would entail grammatical, syntactical, and kinetic/kinesthetic apprehensions: a cognitive understanding of the connective tissue that develops signs into meaning-threads and a sensorimotor understanding of how gestural units anticipate and proceed from each other through integrated movement. Those in the latter category, such as I, have a different cognitive and kinesthetic experience in a performance such as this. Watching the signed dialogue in Spring Awakening, I was conscious of my own inability to understand the gestured meaning apart from the vocal restatement that accompanied them. As often happens when I watch people signing animatedly with each other, I felt dumb in the sense that I was unable to “speak” or understand this language. Entwined with the cognitive dumbness I experienced on the linguistic level, I felt kinetic/kinesthetically dumb: my arms, hands, and upper body could not execute these movements and movement sequences with anything resembling fluidly. But while I lacked

174  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

the motor intentionality and skeletomuscular practice to communicate in ASL’s gestural language, the performers’ signing movements were kinesthetically resonant in non-linguistic ways. When the performers signed to each other and to the audience, they expressively gestured toward and away from their bodies in intimate, highly expressive ways. When Wendla sang the opening song “Mama Who Bore Me,” for example, Sandra Mae Frank, who played her, moved her hands over and away from her body then down her waist when signing those words. This picked up her earlier gestures when she and her hearing double, played by Katie Boeck, faced each other through an oval mirror-frame and explored the contours of Wendla’s maturing body in mimicked movements. As the song continued, Frank reached toward and away from herself, moved her arms and hands in coordinated movements across space, and invested these movements with an emotional intentionality that was richly communicable. Throughout the musical, performers often touched each other while signing, establishing a tactile communication that was readable in intercorporeal terms. Deaf West’s Spring Awakening, not surprisingly, presented a more complex kinetic/kinesthetic performance field than the original, spoken-­ English-­only production nine years earlier (not that the resonance patterns of this or any other musical are simple). To the driving movement dynamics that characterize conventional musical theatre, Deaf West added performance variables that resisted kinesthetic uniformity or the illusion of it. Because motor intention expressed itself in words, gestured signs, and other bodily movements that blended with the signing gestures but did not belong to the ASL signifying system, the movement score of the performance was multi-channeled. Most theatrical movement is multi-­channeled in the sense that it integrates physical and verbal action in addition to the kinesthetic contributions of performance elements such as music. The performance kinetics and kinesthetic of the Deaf West Spring Awakening complicated this integration in the doubling of deaf and hearing actors. From the opening mirror-exchange between Wendla and her double, the production called attention to the collaboration that this device enabled. After approaching the oval frame from opposite directions and mirroring each other’s movements in careful symmetry, they left and returned carrying different objects. Boeck handed Frank the dress she would put on, and Frank handed Boeck her guitar. When they sang “Mama Who Bore Me,” their movements on either side of the frame no longer mimicked each other: Boeck played, Frank signed. Over the course of the song, they

  KINESTHETIC RESONANCE   

175

moved away from the mirror, at one point facing the audience on different sides of the stage. Where did the song and its expressive movements originate? Boeck sang as expressively as Frank signed, and her words “came from” Wendla as fully as Frank’s physical actions. Movement and sound were further distributed during this sequence by other performers on stage, who signed the word “heaven” along with Frank at two points in the song (hands rising in a weaving pattern then expanding outward in an arc over their heads), and by the musicians, who gradually joined in with their instruments. As with the dance movements discussed earlier, the effect was richly integrative, though this was not an integration that effaced the different contributions of its authors. The space between speaking and non-speaking performers left movement subjectivity decentered in an unusual and enriching manner. Individuals owned aspects of the experience being performed at any given moment; nobody owned it all. Phenomenologically, however, this decentering was also a bridging. Individuals acquired the expressivity of others: deaf performers took on the voices that were spoken or sung for them, while the doubles were given a physical expressivity through the signing that matched their words in a different register.70 As deaf reviewer Rachel Kolb noted in her review, this bridging was a remarkable achievement for the production’s spectators as well as its performers. “As a deaf individual,” she writes, “I have rarely encountered performance spaces that are neither deaf nor hearing but open to both.” Her description of this openness is worth underscoring: “Instead of h ­ aving the hearing actors merely ‘interpret’ or ‘translate’ for the deaf leads, Spring Awakening creates a space for deaf and hearing individuals to enter a relationship that feels two-sided, communicative, and almost unspeakably intimate.”71 Understanding the kinesthetic dynamics of Deaf West’s production allows a deeper appreciation of its daring play with difference, accessibility, and multi-directional resonance. As a non-signing audience member, I have already noted, I had limited access to the deaf performers’ gestural vocabulary and the movement habits that enable it. Given that deaf and hard-of-hearing spectators had limited access to the production’s verbal language, I suspect that only those hearing audience members who were fluent in ASL had anything resembling complete access to the gestural and vocal performances on stage. I, of course, do not understand the cognitive implications of this bimodal competence or what it means to register the kinesthetic languages of someone speaking, signing, and dancing at the same time. I suspect that even this expanded access includes

176  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

limits of one kind or another. For the majority of spectators who lack this double-competence, the experience of limits is fundamental to the pleasures—and the intimacy—that this integrated performance made possible. As I watched Spring Awakening, my kinesthetic engagement was heightened by the fact that I could not surrender myself to easy identification or direct my resonance enactments to single sources. My attention moved around the stage, watching voice stand in for gesture and gesture stand in for voice, enjoying those moments when everything synchronized and those moments when they diverged in different yet harmonious movements. Because performers and spectators alike engaged with the performance from a vantage point both inside and outside the expressive actions it contained, its achievement felt collaborative to an extent that theatrical performances rarely do—as if we were all engaged in the act of translation from where and who we were, switching kinesthetic registers, bridging gaps where we could, recognizing them when we could not. When it was over, the audience did what it always does at the end of a successful performance: reciprocate the performers’ movements with movements of its own. Some spectators clapped and cheered, others waved their hands, and some did both, switching between them.

Notes 1. Henry Charlton Bastian, The Brain as an Organ of Mind, 543. 2. Bastian, “The ‘Muscular Sense,’” 5. For an overview of recent research on kinesthetic sensation see Uwe Proske and Simon C. Gandevia, “Kinaesthetic Senses.” 3. For a discussion of the distinction between Körper and Leib see Edmund Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 107. 4. Ibid., 161. 5. Ibid., 217. 6. Robert Vischer, On the Optical Sense of Form, 104. 7. Ibid. 8. Theodor Lipps, “Empathy, Inner Imitation, and Sense-Feelings,” 379. 9. Lipps, Grundlegung der Ästhetik, 121 (my translation). 10. Lipps, “Empathy,” 381. 11. John Martin, America Dancing, 117. 12. Martin, Introduction to the Dance, 53. 13. Martin, Modern Dance, 13. 14. “Movement [. . .] is the link between the dancer’s intention and your perception of it” (Modern Dance, 12).

  KINESTHETIC RESONANCE   

177

15. Martin, Introduction to the Dance, 53. 16. Martin, American Dancing, 124. Hanna Järvinen argues that kinesthetic sympathy’s privileging of kinesthesia and natural movement reflected a late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century conservatism that viewed movement as an antidote to modernization (“Kinesthesia, Synesthesia and Le Sacre du Printemps,” 75). 17. Foster, Choreographing Empathy, 161. 18. Martin, The Dance, 12. 19. Martin, Modern Dance, 15. 20. Martin, The Dance, 7. 21. Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy, 161. 22. Martin, America Dancing, 118. In The Modern Dance, Martin describes the same phenomenon: “It was their own consciousness of gravity which held them to the earth that made them applaud the feat of some one else in defying it” (15). 23. Mark Franko, Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics, ix. 24. Martin, Introduction to the Dance, 54. 25. Martin, America Dancing, 122. 26. Martin, Modern Dance, 12. 27. Ibid., 48. 28. Martin, America Dancing, 118. 29. Ibid. 30. Personal disclosure: as someone of limited flexibility, I find the performances of contortionists almost unwatchable. It seems entirely likely that someone more flexible than I could watch such performances without discomfort, maybe even with Martin’s “vicarious experience of motor freedom.” 31. See Giacomo  Rizzolatti and Corrado  Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, 82–84; and Marco Iacoboni, “Within Each Other,” 47. 32. Evelyne Kohler, et al., “Hearing Sounds, Understanding Actions,” 847. 33. Emiliano Ricciardi, et al., “Do We Really Need Vision?” 34. Comparative analysis of this kind considers brain areas that are homologous in anatomy and function in the two species. 35. See Christian Keysers and Valeria Gazzola, “Social Neuroscience: Mirror Neurons Recorded in Humans” and Roy Mukamel et al., “Singe-Neuron Responses in Humans during Execution and Observation of Actions.” 36. For a bracing if one-sided critique of mirror-neuron claims, see Gregory Hickok, The Myth of Mirror Neurons. J. M. Kilner and R. N. Lemon’s article “What We Know Currently about Mirror Neurons” offer a more balanced account of what scientists know and do not know about mirror neurons in monkeys and humans. 37. Iacoboni makes this point in “Within Each Other,” 54. 38. Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, “Interview with Vittorio Gallese,” n.p.

178  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

39. V.  Kosonogov, “Why the Mirror Neurons Cannot Support Action Understanding,” 500. 40. For a discussion of recent research on mirror neurons, see Pier Francesco Ferrari and Giacomo Rizzolatti, eds., New Frontiers in Mirror Neuron Research. 41. Bruno Wicker et al., “Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula,” 658. 42. Christian Keysers and Valeria Gazzola “Expanding the Mirror,” 670. 43. Christian Keysers, The Empathic Brain, 122. 44. Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, “The Functional Role of the Parieto-Frontal Mirror Circuit,” 264; Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2. In phenomenology, noetic refers to the subjective side of the intentional relationship between consciousness and its object. 45. Benjamin Libet, “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative,” 536. 46. Seymour M. Berger and Suzanne W. Hadley, “Some Effects of a Model’s Performance on an Observer’s Electromyographic Activity.” 47. According to Freeberg and Gallese, the viewer of a painting or sculpture responds empathically to two aspects of the work: (1) the actions, intentions, objects, emotions, and sensations depicted in the work and (2) “the visible traces of the artist’s creative gestures, such as vigorous modeling in clay or paint, fast brushwork and signs of the movement of the hand more generally” (“Motion, Emotion, and Empathy in Esthetic Experience,” 199). Sheets-Johnstone’s critique is directed at the priority given to the automatic neural mechanism over the body’s kinesthetic capabilities. 48. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “Movement and Mirror Neurons: A Challenging and Choice Conversation,” 387. 49. Ibid., 389. 50. Ibid., 392. 51. Caroline Catmur et al., “Sensorimotor Learning Configures the Human Mirror System,” 1527. 52. Amir Lahav et  al., “Action Representation of Sound Audiomotor Recognition Network While Listening to Newly Acquired Actions.” 53. B. Calvo-Merino et al., “Action Observation and Acquired Motor Skills: An fMRI Study with Expert Dancers,” 1243. 54. Matthew Reason and Dee Reynolds, “Kinesthesia, Empathy, and Related Pleasures: An Inquiry into Audience Experiences of Watching Dance,” 71. 55. Foster, Choreographing Empathy, xx. 56. Rizzolatti, and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, ix. 57. Philipa Rothfield, who is a trained dancer as well as a philosopher, acknowledges these boundaries in her discussion of watching Francis Angol, a UK-based dancer who specializes in contemporary African dance: “The flow, rhythm and energy of the movement was unfamiliar, very possibly having origin or reference to certain African dance forms. Although the

  KINESTHETIC RESONANCE   

179

audience was told [ . . . ] that rhythm is central to African dance, and that, once established, its absence is also pertinent, I could not ascertain what rhythms may have been referenced in their absence nor the energetic consequences of these nuances. The problem expressed by several participants was that people lacking in literacy were not aware of that lack but exercised their own kinesthetic sensibilities mixed with certain essentializing notions of African dance” (“Differentiating Phenomenology and Dance,” 51). 58. For a neuroscientific account of action understanding that centers on inferring or predicting intentions, see Karl Friston et al., “Action Understanding and Active Inference.” 59. Trevor P.-J. Chong et al., “Selective Attention Modulates Inferior Frontal Gyrus Activity during Action Observation,” 304. 60. George Home-Cook, Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves, 42. Renaud Barbaras describes this dynamic interactivity: “[Attention] must be defined as the act of ‘stopping there,’ as the delimitation of the object that, by chiseling out its contours, detaches it from its surroundings and enhances it. It is a grasping, comparable to the act by which I take an object in my hand; like manual grasping, attention draws near to the object and detaches it by delimiting its surface. Attention is therefore an act that implies mobility” (Desire and Distance, 90). 61. Christian Keysers, personal communication, April 18, 2016. In this communication Keysers noted that there is little scientific research on the relationship between resonance systems and attention. 62. “Mirror Neurons.” 63. Joseph Roach, “A Feeling for Risk: Notes on Kinesthetic Empathy and the World Performance Project,” 8. 64. Corinne Jola and Matthew Reason, “Audiences’ Experience of Proximity and Co-presence in Live Dance Performance,” 81. In a related study of body presence and spatial perception, Giorgia Committeri and Chiara Fini ask whether “resonance mechanisms can be modulated by the physical distance between the observer and the observed body. Usually, when we go to the theatre, we try to book a seat nearest to the stage so as to have a deep aesthetic contact with human acting. Our choice is mainly driven by the attempt to have a better view of the stage, but it could be also implicitly determined by the attempt to have a better ‘resonance’ with the movements and the gestures of the actors, in order to be part of this ‘near,’ shared common space” (“Body Presence and Extra-Personal Space Perception,” 34). 65. The text of this exchange can be found in Harold Pinter, The Homecoming, 33–35. 66. Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. Excerpts from Hall’s film production, including most of the glass of water scene, can be found on YouTube.

180  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

67. The account that follows describes the Broadway production, which I attended in December 2015. The musical Spring Awakening (2006), with book and lyrics by Steven Sater and music by Duncan Sheik, is an adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play by the same name. 68. Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, 155–56. Marian T. Dura surveys phenomenological accounts of the music-listening experience in “The Phenomenology of the Music-listening Experience.” 69. The production also featured closed captions, presumably for those deaf speakers who did not understand ASL, but these captured only part of the spoken and signed meanings. 70. The relation between the deaf performers and their speaking doubles changed throughout the production. At times the doubles who spoke and sang were relatively out of the way and not immediately locatable; at other times, they interacted with their counterparts—gesturing encouragement, for example. Because the production was miked, it was also sometimes hard to tell where the voices were coming from: none of the voices could be exactly pinpointed to the figures who spoke them or the signing individuals they “came from.” With performers often echoing the signing gestures of others, a similar effect sometimes characterized the signing, as well. 71. Rachel Kolb, “Spring Awakening and the Power of Inclusive Art.”

Bibliography Arvidson, P. Sven. 2006. The Sphere of Attention: Context and Margin. Dordrecht: Springer. Barbaras, Renaud. 2006. Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Paul B. Milan. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bastian, Henry Charlton. 1880. The Brain as an Organ of Mind. New  York: Appleton. ———. 1887. The ‘Muscular Sense’: Its Nature and Cortical Localization. Brain 10: 1–89. Berger, Seymour M., and Suzanne W. Hadley. 1975. Some Effects of a Model’s Performance on an Observer’s Electromyographic Activity. American Journal of Psychology 88 (2): 263–276. Calvo-Merino, B., D.E.  Glaser, J.  Grèzes, R.E.  Passingham, and P.  Haggard. 2005. Action Observation and Acquired Motor Skills: An fMRI Study with Expert Dancers. Cerebral Cortex 15 (8): 1243–1249. Catmur, Caroline, Vincent Walsh, and Cecilia Hayes. 2007. Sensorimotor Learning Configures the Human Mirror System. Current Biology 17 (7): 1527–1531.

  KINESTHETIC RESONANCE   

181

Chong, Trevor P.-J., Mark A. Williams, Ross Cunningham, and Jason B. Mattingley. 2008. Selective Attention Modulates Inferior Frontal Gyrus Activity During Action Observation. NeuroImage 40: 298–307. Committeri, Giorgia, and Chiara Fini. 2016. Body Presence and Extra-Personal Space Perception. In Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience, ed. Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia, and Victor Jacono, 23–34. London: Bloomsbury Methuen. Dura, Marian T. 2006. The Phenomenology of the Music-Listening Experience. Arts Education Policy Review 107 (3): 25–32. Ferrari, Pier Francesco, and Giacomo Rizzolatti, eds. 2015. New Frontiers in Mirror Neuron Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foster, Susan Leigh. 2011. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. London: Routledge. Franko, Mark. 1995. Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Freeberg, David, and Vittorio Gallese. 2007. Motion, Emotion, and Empathy in Esthetic Experience. Trends in Cognitive Science 11 (5): 197–203. Friston, Karl, Jérémie Mattout, and James Kilmer. 2011. Action Understanding and Active Inference. Biological Cybernetics 104 (1–2): 137–160. Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. Directed by Peter Hall, performances by Paul Rogers, Cyril Cusack, Ian Holm, Vivien Merchant, Terence Rigby, and Michael Jayston. 1973. DVD. New York: Kino Video, 2003. Hickok, Gregory. 2014. The Myth of Mirror Neurons: The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition. New York: Norton. Home-Cook, George. 2015. Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Iacoboni, Marco. 2011. Within Each Other: Neural Mechanisms for Empathy in the Primate Brain. In Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, 45–57. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ihde, Don. 2007. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. 2nd ed. Albany: SUNY Press. Järvinen, Hanna. 2006. Kinesthesia, Synesthesia and Le Sacre du Printemps: Responses to Dance Modernism. The Senses and Society 1 (1): 71–92. Jola, Corinne, and Matthew Reason. 2016. Audiences’ Experience of Proximity and Co-presence in Live Dance Performance. In Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience, ed. Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia, and Victor Jacono, 75–92. London: Bloomsbury Methuen. Keysers, Christian, and Valeria Gazzola. 2009. Expanding the Mirror: Vicarious Activity for Actions, Emotions, and Sensations. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 19 (6): 666–671.

182  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

———. 2010. Social Neuroscience: Mirror Neurons Recorded in Humans. Current Biology 20 (8): R353–R354. Kilner, J.M., and R.N.  Lemon. 2013. What We Know Currently About Mirror Neurons. Current Biology 23 (23): R1057–R1062. Kohler, Evelyne, Christian Keysers, M.  Alessandra Umiltà, Leonardo Fogassi, Vittorio Gallese, and Giacomo Rizzolatti. 2002. Hearing Sounds, Understanding Actions: Action Representation in Mirror Neurons. Science 297: 846–848. Kolb, Rachel. 2015. Spring Awakening and the Power of Inclusive Art. The Atlantic, October 18. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/ ar chive/2015/10/spring-awakening-and-the-power-of-inclusiveart/411061/. Accessed 14 July 2015. Kosonogov, V. 2012. Why the Mirror Neurons Cannot Support Action Understanding. Neurophysiology 44 (6): 499–502. Lahav, Amir, Elliot Saltzman, and Gottfried Schlaug. 2007. Action Representation of Sound: Audiomotor Recognition Network While Listening to Newly Acquired Actions. Journal of Neuroscience 27 (2): 308–314. Libet, Benjamin. 1985. Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action. Behavioral Brain Science 8: 529–566. Lipps, Theodor. 1903. Grundlegung der Ästhetik. Hamburg: Leopold Voss. ———. 1960. Empathy, Inner Imitation, and Sense-Feelings. 1903. Trans. Max Schertel and Melvin Rader. In A Modern Book of Esthetics: An Anthology, 3rd ed, ed. Melvin Rader, 374–382. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Martin, John. 1936. America Dancing: The Background and Personalities of the Modern Dance. New York: Dodge. ———. 1939. Introduction to the Dance. New York: Norton. ———. 1946. The Dance. New York: Tudor. ———. 1965. The Modern Dance. 1933. Brooklyn: Dance Horizons. “Mirror Neurons.” Nova, hosted by Robert Krulwich, broadcast 25 January 2005. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/mirror-neurons.html. Accessed 17 July 2016. Mukamel, Roy, Arne D.  Ekstrom, Jonas Kaplan, Marco Iacoboni, and Itzhak Fried. 2010. Singe-Neuron Responses in Humans During Execution and Observation of Actions. Current Biology 20 (8): 750–756. Pinter, Harold. 1965. The Homecoming. New York: Grove. Proske, Uwe, and Simon C. Gandevia. 2009. The Kinaesthetic Senses. Journal of Physiology 587 (17): 4139–4146. Reason, Matthew, and Dee Reynolds. 2010. Kinesthesia, Empathy, and Related Pleasures: An Inquiry into Audience Experiences of Watching Dance. Dance Research Journal 42 (2): 49–75. Ricciardi, Emiliano, Daniela Bonino, Lorenzo Sani, Tomas Vecchi, Mario Guazzelli, James V. Haxby, Luciano Fadiga, and Pietro Pietrini. 2009. Do We

  KINESTHETIC RESONANCE   

183

Really Need Vision? How Blind People ‘See’ The Actions of Others. Journal of Neuroscience 29 (31): 9719–9724. Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Corrado Sinigaglia. 2008. Mirrors in the Brain—How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions. Trans. Frances Anderson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. The Functional Role of the Parieto-Frontal Mirror Circuit: Interpretations and Misinterpretations. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11 (4): 264–274. Roach, Joseph. 2012. A Feeling for Risk: Notes on Kinesthetic Empathy and the World Performance Project. Theatre 42 (1): 7–9. Rothfield, Philipa. 2005. Differentiating Phenomenology and Dance. Topoi 24 (1): 43–53. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 2012. Movement and Mirror Neurons: A Challenging and Choice Conversation. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 11 (3): 385–401. Vischer, Robert. 1994. On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics (1873). In Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, introduced and translated by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, 89–123. Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. Wicker, Bruno, Christian Keysers, Jane Plailly, Jean-Pierre Royet, Vittorio Gallese, and Giacomo Rizzolatti. 2003. Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula: The Common Neural Basis of Seeing and Feeling Disgust. Neuron 40 (3): 655–664. Wojciehowski, Hannah Chapelle. Interview with Vittorio Gallese. https://cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt56f8v9bv/qt56f8v9bv.pdf. Accessed 22 Aug 2017.

Language, Speech, and Movement

Moving Words In The Moving Body Jacques Lecoq quotes a poem by Eugène Guillevic that opens with the lines, “Outwardly, / You make no move. / You sit there motionless, / You stare into space, / But within you / Movements are tending.”1 As these movements stir, grasp, and penetrate, they “give bodily shape / To indistinct flutterings / Which slowly turn into words / Into scraps of sense.” In Guillevic’s meditation on poetic creation, the poem’s “you” occupies a state of absorption, looking off with an unfocused gaze that seems directed inwardly more than outwardly. Is this “you” alone at a writing desk? Is she sitting in a café surrounded by bustle and conversation? The connection between whatever movements there are in the environment and those arising within the imagined subject is left unspecified. What matters are the creative process and the transformation it effects: “A rhythm begins / And you acquire worth.” In addition to the subject’s stare, there are two additional acts of looking at work here: the poetic speaker’s, which is directed at the sitting “you” with attentiveness and precision, and the reader’s, which is directed at the other two lookers. The dynamics described and achieved by Guillevic’s poem are complex. While the speaker addresses the sitting subject from what seems to be a separate vantage point, the fact that the latter’s creative process is i­ magined and given words through an act of poetry-writing gives this description a self-referential quality. Similarly, while the reader joins the speaker in observing © The Author(s) 2018 S. B. Garner, Jr., Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre, Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91794-8_6

185

186  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

the sitting subject, the pronoun “you” with which the speaker addresses this unidentified other implicates the reader (the poem’s actual “you”) in the act of creation being observed. What seemed at first glance to be a purely private phenomenon turns out to be intricately intersubjective. Through the poem’s complex referentiality, subject, speaker, and reader are joined in mutually reflecting creative motion. If we imagine its motionless sitter in a theatre auditorium or in engaged encounters in the world outside it, Guillevic’s poem evokes the inner, kinesthetic action expanded upon in the chapter “Kinesthetic Resonance.” There, too, inner movements “tend” and “grasp,” this time in coordination with the movements encountered in the subject’s environment. What interests me in this chapter is the association between inner movement and language that Guillevic’s poem addresses. Words, it suggests, emerge from and are constituted by movement. They take form within the body, but as they do so they affect the body in turn, giving corporeal shape to what is indistinct while tuning the body to its rhythms. As they form themselves into poetry—or any language form—they integrate their kinesthetic properties in a grammar of virtual movement. In the section of The Moving Body where Guillevic’s poem appears, Lecoq recounts the mimodynamic procedures he asks his students to apply to the bodies of words. “Mimodynamics,” in Lecoq training, makes use of the human tendency to mime the world, to replicate its dynamics emotionally and kinesthetically.2 Focusing on individual words, then on poetry, Lecoq asks his students to find the body of words—their particular form of embodiment and animation—and to convey this dynamic through their own bodies. They work with the same word in different languages, each with its own relation to the body and its specific impetus and movement shape. (The German Ich nehme, for instance, means to pick something up, while the English I take includes the dynamic action of snatching it).3 By putting words into embodied motion, Lecoq suggests, mimodynamics captures the animation of words that translation into another language loses. In my earlier book Bodied Spaces I challenged the disembodiment that characterized discussions of language in literary and performance theory in the early 1990s and continues to mark some discussions almost twenty-­ five years later. From a phenomenological perspective, I argued that theatrical language is inescapably embodied: physicalized through the act of utterance, bodying forth its own phenomenality through the linguistic presencing of corporeal experience, and retaining traces of its embodied origin even when dissociated from the speaking body in writing.4 What I

  LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND MOVEMENT   

187

propose to do in this chapter is to develop this argument by expanding on the kinetic and kinesthetic dynamic of theatrical language. As Lecoq and Guillevic both recognize, language entails movement, and any account of its role in performance must take this fact into account. Similarly, any account of the audience’s kinesthetic response to theatrical performance must consider the profound and complicated ways that speech and language influence this engagement. As I noted in this book’s introduction, most attempts to understand kinesthetic spectatorship—including recent elaborations of the “kinesthetic empathy” model and related attempts to apply mirror-neuron research to performance—focus on dance, physical theatre, and other predominantly non-verbal performance forms. While this focus has taught us much about how we perceive and engage with movement unaccompanied by speech, it sidesteps the question of how language enters into and modifies kinesthetic experience. Kinesthetically, what happens when we speak (or whisper or yell)? When we observe someone else speak? When we observe an actor move while speaking, speak while moving? How do we engage with performance when speech is the only, or most important, movement on stage? These questions are dense with phenomenological and cognitive implications for an understanding of movement, movement perception, and kinesthetic enactment. In the pages that follow I will consider two ways that language and speech condition theatrical kinesthesis. The first is through utterance, the kinetic process by which the body moves to produce meaningful sound. The second is through language itself, which—grounded in the body’s sensorimotor capacities—carries its own, linguistically embodied modes of action. As spectators, we respond to these movements with kinesthetic engagements of our own.

Utterance and Articulation While I sat in the audience before the start of Deaf West’s Spring Awakening at the performance I described at the end of the previous chapter, I looked around at the other audience members who were seated with me. Some sat looking through their programs or quietly taking in the stage; others talked with each other. A few rows behind me to my left, several individuals conversed in sign language, their hand, arms, and upper bodies moving animatedly. Six or seven rows ahead of me a non-deaf woman was talking to her companion with equal animation, gesticulating with the same parts of her body as she spoke. Too far away to hear what

188  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

she was saying, I was struck by the fact that her gestures were as unreadable to me as the ASL communication I had just observed. I was able to understand something of her emotions from the expressive shape of her hand movements and the physical manner in which he spoke, but I was able to feel this in the movements of the signing spectators, as well. What I lacked in both cases was the ability to confidently read what their gestures were saying. In the case of the woman ahead of me this resulted from my inability to hear what she was saying, which would have allowed me to integrate verbal and manual gestures with their jointly articulated linguistic meaning. In the case of the signing conversation across the aisle I was unable to understand what they were saying because I do not belong to the linguistic community within which they communicated. In the end it did not matter, of course, since neither conversation was any of my business. The discussion of Spring Awakening that closed the previous chapter underscored the gestural component of language performance. This gesturality includes the physical movements required to produce the utterance as well as the intention to produce a meaning immediately or potentially understandable by someone else. Deaf West’s Spring Awakening, with its differently embodied linguistic systems, makes it apparent that English and other spoken languages share a gestural foundation with ASL and other forms of sign language even though they employ vocally produced sound as their primary medium of communication. To speak is to produce what linguists, speech pathologists, and vocal trainers refer to as “articulatory gestures.” The sense of gesturality is central to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological understanding of speech. In a chapter of The Phenomenology of Perception entitled “The Body as Expression, and Speech” he writes: “[T]he contraction of the throat, the sibilant emission of air between the tongue and the teeth, a certain manner of playing with our body suddenly allows itself to be invested with a figurative sense and signifies this externally.”5 For these phonetic gesticulations to make sense, they must “make use of an alphabet of already acquired significations, and the verbal gesture must be performed in a certain panorama that is shared by the interlocutors, just as the comprehension of other gestures presupposes a perceived world shared by everyone in which the sense of the gesture unfolds and is displayed.”6 Rejecting the intellectualist tradition that considers language an externalization of thought, Merleau-Ponty argues that language accomplishes thought by producing “a certain structuring of experience, a certain modulation of existence.”7 Like other forms

  LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND MOVEMENT   

189

of gesture, speech is neither an intellectual operation nor a motor phenomenon but both, entirely and at the same time. As a meaning-­producing act, gestural communication falls within the kinetic/kinesthetic dynamics that characterize intentional movement of any kind. In an earlier section of the chapter Merleau-Ponty writes: Communication or the understanding of gestures is achieved through the reciprocity between my intentions and the other person’s gestures, and between my gestures and the intentions which can be read in the other person’s behavior. Everything happens as if the other person’s intention inhabited my body, or as if my intentions inhabited his body. The gesture I witness sketches out the first signs of an intentional object. The object becomes present and is fully understood when the powers of my body adjust to it and fit over it.8

Gesture manifests intention through the body’s kinetic operations, and its meanings are shared through a kinesthetic embodying of the movements observed. In the case of verbal gesture, comprehension occurs through a reciprocal engagement involving orofacial muscles, tongue, teeth, lungs, and body. In an important sense, I inhabit what you say through the articulatory operations you employ in saying it. Merleau-Ponty’s insight finds corroboration in the fields of psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. In Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought, psycholinguist David McNeill explores the systematic connection between language and gesture. “[G]estures are an integral part of language as much as are words, phrases and sentences,” he writes; “gestures and language are one system.”9 While McNeill is specifically interested in the movement of arms and hands that accompany speech, his argument that these gestures do not merely illustrate speech but share a broader linguistic function suggests an important connection between the gesturality of speech and the intentional, meaning-bearing quality of gesture considered more broadly. In linguistics, proponents of the Motor Theory of Speech Perception argue that gesturality is the key to how we perceive and process speech. Against those who maintain that people understand speech by identifying the sound patterns that speech generates, Alvin M. Liberman and Doug H. Whalen argue that “the phonetic elements of speech, the true primitives that underlie linguistic communication, are not sounds but rather the articulatory gestures that generate those sounds.”10 These gestures are produced by “invariant motor

190  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

commands that call for movements of the articulators through certain linguistically significant configurations”—positioning the tongue tip at the bottom of the front teeth, for example, rounding the lips, and emitting air with deliberate percussive force.11 When we perceive an utterance, we do so in terms of these articulatory gestures. The role of our own articulatory gestures in this perception is confirmed by neuroscientific experiments on speech perception. In one such experiment, a team of Italian researchers studied the speech-related motor centers of subjects while they passively listened to a sequence of words and pseudo-words that involve specific tongue movements on designated phonemes. What they found was that the cortical areas associated with the articulation of specific phonemes were activated—or primed—when these phonemes were heard. This activation, which occurred below the threshold for actual speech generation, was stronger in the case of words than in the case of “pseudo-words” and particularly strong in the case of phonemes that require a heightened use of tongue muscles—in the Italian researchers’ experiment, the double, or “rolled,” r in such words as carro (cart) or terra (ground).12 Would the motor areas overseeing tongue movement be activated in the same way or to the same extent for an English or Hindi speaker hearing the double r pronounced in Italian, Spanish, or the other languages that employ it? The fact that speakers of other languages have a difficult time pronouncing this consonant demonstrates the fact that phonemic sequences are produced and recognized in terms of language-specific articulatory repertoires. By responding to articulatory gestures that the perceiving subject already knows, what Luciano Fadiga and his colleagues call the “acoustic/motor ‘resonance’ mechanism” resembles other forms of kinetic/kinesthetic resonance discussed in the previous chapter.13 As with these other forms, however, the boundaries that distinguish articulatory gestures one is familiar with from those one is not are not necessarily barriers. Just as one can learn to play a musical instrument by incorporating the skills one observes in someone else, so one can expand one’s articulatory abilities by modulating the vocal sounds one can produce in the direction of new sounds one encounters. While infants start out babbling in pretty much the same way, by one year of age their babbling reflects the vocalizations they encounter in their environment: “French infants babble with French speech units, Russian infants with Russian, and Japanese with Japanese.”14 The influence of speech perception on verbal articulation is also evident when one acquires a foreign language through immersion: by listening to the sounds of native speakers, one takes on the articulatory

  LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND MOVEMENT   

191

gestures and rhythms of its production in an acoustic/sensorimotor mirroring. Even within one’s own language community, and without being aware it, one can take on another’s accent or verbal mannerisms by absorbing and replicating the vocal patterns one listens to. In some individuals this mimetic tendency is particularly strong. Both speaking and listening to speech, then, are kinetic activities, the former through the activation of specialized muscles and the latter through a reciprocal aural-kinesthetic engagement with this body-performance. While most of the time this engagement occurs at the pre-conscious level as a backdrop for linguistic understanding, it can become an object of consciousness through the kinesthetic awareness that accompanies utterance. When I speak, I am aware of my lips, tongue, facial muscles, jaw, and neck; of my lungs contracting and expanding; of the air leaving my body at a precise exit point. I hear my words inside my body, though “hearing” in this sense involves the resonant vibrations that accompany the sounds I make. From a phenomenological perspective, it is my whole body that speaks. When I pay attention to someone else speaking, I notice similar kinesthetic sensations in response to the articulatory gestures that I visually observe and that I recognize behind and in the words that are spoken. At times—when the person raises or lowers her voice, for example, speaks in an unfamiliar accent, or recites a poem with a heightened concern for articulation—the sense of inhabiting that person’s articulatory actions can be quite strong. At other times—when the person delivers a lecture with relatively flat delivery, for instance—a listener’s kinesthetic involvement in the act of speaking will be minimal. All of this will change, of course, if the speaker runs into difficulty reading a sentence and has to repeat it for clarity’s sake—or swallows a sip of water the wrong way and has a hard time speaking at all for several seconds. To repeat, most of our encounters with the world take place without attending to the acoustic/motor resonance we experience in response to what we hear and see. In such instances, utterance establish a background kinesthetic melody for the interactions that take place. By its very nature as a performance medium, on the other hand, theatre foregrounds the articulatory gesture, whether this takes the form of speech, sign language, or other non-verbal gestural systems (such as fingerspelling). In productions like Deaf West’s Spring Awakening, different articulatory systems are brought into dialogue in a way that highlights their discrepant kinetic, kinesthetic, and syntactic/semantic underpinnings. But speech and other forms of gesturality are foregrounded even without such juxtaposition as

192  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

a result of the dynamic of display that characterizes all theatrical phenomena. Just as actors perform with an awareness of being seen, most of the time they speak with an awareness of being heard and being seen to speak. Skilled actors can shape articulatory resonance through vocal strategies that play with and against the vocal rhythms of a given phrase, line, or exchange. Successful Shakespearean actors, for example, deliver their iambic pentameter lines with a range of expected and unexpected cadences: riding or resisting the articulatory smoothness of a metrically regular sequence, navigating sequences of metrical irregularity, maintaining a base-line rhythm that keys the spectator’s acoustic expectations and offers departures from these expectations’ kinesthetic weight. But even when theatrical speech imitates the “natural” mode of conversation outside the theatre, it is marked by ostensive self-awareness. Actors speak to be heard by spectators throughout the auditorium, and they articulate their words with practiced control even when performing inarticulateness. Some actors make articulation a defining part of their performance identities. In the 1987 Broadway production of August Wilson’s Fences, James Earl Jones’s Troy Maxson was a vocal as well as physical presence. Jones used his basso profondo voice, imposing body, and broadly expressive face to assert his stature in the face of everything that has denied it since childhood. His words carried much of this anger, but what gave them their force was the power of their utterance—his mouth and face rounding the vowels, the consonants caressed at times and almost barked out at others, his chest, lungs, and stomach pressing the sounds out of his body like the bellows of a Renaissance organ. To watch Jones’s performance—live, as I was able to do during the production’s original run, or on a video screen— is to inhabit this kinesthetically eloquence. Typically, the resonance dynamic that accompanies utterance lies in the background, overshadowed by broader theatrical movements and the language-­actions represented and enacted by the words being spoken. Utterance becomes a point of attention in its own right when it is thematized as such (in George Bernard Shaw’s elocutionary play Pygmalion, for instance, or in multi-lingual plays) or when it constitutes the principal action of a theatrical work (the agonized delivery of Beckett’s Not I comes to mind). Utterance is also foregrounded as a kinesthetic phenomenon when ability boundaries are brought into play. An example of this is Joseph Chaikin’s 1988 solo play Struck Dumb (co-written with Jean-Claude van Itallie), which he presented four years after suffering a stroke and finding himself afflicted with aphasia. While therapy restored much of Chaikin’s

  LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND MOVEMENT   

193

speech, his performance retained a pronounced physical and verbal impairment. His delivery and intonation were labored, and his words lacked the articulatory coherence that characterize non-impaired speech. When I watched his performance three years later at New York’s American Place Theatre, I was viscerally attuned to his vocal efforts at the precarious ­border between success and failure: retrieving words, struggling to articulate them, and reaching for an articulatory flow that always eluded him. This effort manifested itself in his vocal apparatus and on his face, neck, and upper torso, which participated in getting the words out the best he could. The tension I felt while watching Chaikin’s courageous performance originated in these same body areas. Figuring out the words as he tried to say them, I often found myself pronouncing them in my own mind, pushing for the enunciation and syntactic flow that he intended but failed to achieve. It was an exhausting performance for someone with aphasia and other cognitive/motor impediments, but it was kinesthetically tiring to watch, as well, because my co-enactment of his articulatory gestures was itself halting and imprecise, subject to interruptions and asynchrony. Chaikin’s impairment manifested itself as resonance impediments in the performer–spectator relationship.15 A similar kind of engagement makes itself felt in relation to dramatic characters who cannot speak and are unable to make themselves understood in a speech-hearing context. A well-known example of such a character is Kattrin, the mute daughter in Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. Kattrin was born able to speak but lost this ability as a child, her mother recounts, when a soldier stuck something in her throat. She, of course, does not speak during the play but communicates, when she needs to, through non-linguistic vocalizations and other gestural means. At several points during the play’s action her inability to communicate using words becomes an urgent matter. One of these points comes in Act 3 when her brother, Swiss Cheese, is in danger of being apprehended by the Sergeant for taking the regiment’s cash box. Kattrin has seen the Sergeant and a man later identified as an informant and “does everything she can,” Brecht specifies, “to make him aware of the danger he is in.”16 In the 1948 Berliner Ensemble production, which toured during the 1950s, was filmed in 1961, and is available on YouTube, Angelika Hurwicz gesticulates frantically while trying to mime the men’s presence and the fact that they are after him; she makes urgent sounds and grabs his arm and shoulder to keep him there. Swiss Cheese is unable to understand her gestures and vocalizations and leaves with

194  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

the cash box they are looking for. When Mother Courage enters with the Cook, Kattrin desperately tries to let her mother know what is happening, and Courage is able to decipher her signals by urging her to “take your time and don’t try to talk, use your hands. I don’t like it when you howl like a dog.”17 Deaf actress Alexandria Wailes gave an equally physicalized performance of Kattrin’s effort to communicate in the 2006 Shakespeare in the Park production of Brecht’s play, running back and forth on the stage, almost fighting with her brother. Unbound from the restraints of language, her high-pitched, desperate vocalizations had a visceral impact. Brecht’s scene enacts the efficacy and failure of non-verbal gesturality in a situation where speech is the communicative norm. Some of Kattrin’s gestures are readily interpretable—her pointing arm and finger indicate direction, while her movements and utterances convey the panic driving her behavior. But until Courage disciplines her panicked gestures into the signed language they both share, most of what she wants to communicate is understood only with difficulty or not at all. The spectator’s experience of this interaction is particularly tense given that we have witnessed everything that has happened on stage and know what Kattrin is struggling to articulate with her damaged voice and body. Kinesthetically and emotionally, we register her urgency as well as her inability to communicate the source of it. It would be so easy if she could speak what Swiss Cheese needs to hear: “Two men from your regiment are looking for you.” That she is unable to say this and must convey it through other means presents an impediment to our own parallel desire to carry through the intention she desperately pursues. Watching this scene in both productions, I felt a physical desire to make the communication happen: to press against Kattrin’s inability to make herself clear and her brother’s inability to understand her. “If only you could speak!” he says before running off.18 It is a desire to speak on Kattrin’s behalf, to translate utterance and physical movement into the words that would make her non-verbal speech-act efficacious. That neither she nor I can do so within the performance event that Kattrin and her spectators inhabit creates a kinesthetic frustration that lasts well beyond these interactions and may find temporary relief only when Kattrin makes a drum shout for her in Mother Courage’s final scene by banging on it to wake the sleeping villagers. If we look for the phenomenological underpinnings of Brechtian alienation, the interplay of kinesthesia, intentionality, and emotionally driven motor resonance is one place to start.

  LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND MOVEMENT   

195

Sounding Brando As the example of Kattrin demonstrates, when utterance asserts itself as an object of perceptual attention, it relinquishes the seeming transparency that allows us to disattend to it and asserts its phenomenological role in the production and perception of speech. The experiential connection between speech and utterance has a robustness that reveals itself despite modernity’s many experiments in separating voice from speaking body. I can feel the articulatory effort in the voice I hear on a telephone, the soprano’s performance I listen to in an opera broadcast, and the recorded message on the airport intercom that reminds me not to leave my bags unattended. So strong is this mutual entailment that I feel an articulatory origin—or utterance function—in electronic voices that were produced without actual human speakers. These voices may lack the rich textures of human speech, but even at their most monotonous and machine-like I can find myself mimicking their delivery as I listen. Like the perceptual predilection for biological movement, humans seem cognitively predisposed to recognize articulatory gestures, even when they may not physically be there. Understanding that spectators respond to articulation in the words they hear as well as in the vocal gestures as they observe helps us appreciate the kinesthetic underpinning of theatrical techniques that effect a disjunction between vocality and the speaking body: digitally recorded and projected voices, voices that are miked and therefore mediated by sounds systems, and voices that belong to one actor but are delivered by another. I will explore these disjunctions more fully in the final section of this chapter. Most of the times we encounter utterance in hearing-based theatre, though, we do so through the vocal efforts of the speaking actor. To further refine my account of the kinetic and kinesthetic dynamics involved in theatre’s vocal performance, I will consider one of the theatre’s most iconic utterance performances: Stanley Kowalski’s forsaken calls to his wife in A Streetcar Named Desire’s balcony scene. I choose this moment not only because Marlon Brando’s “Stell-lahhhhh!” represented a virtuoso articulatory achievement, but also because its memorialization in Elia Kazan’s 1951 Warner Bros film of Streetcar engendered the cultural phenomenon of people appropriating and reperforming its kinesthetically resonant action. Ned Flanders reenacted this performance in a 1992 episode of The Simpsons entitled “A Streetcar Named Marge,” as did Elaine Benes in Seinfeld and Cam Tucker in Modern Family. YouTube is

196  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

littered with videos of non-celebrities trying their hand at it for the camera, angling for parody, authenticity, or both. The scene has sparked a number of contests across the country, most notably in New Orleans, where a Stanley and Stella Shouting Contest has been held for over thirty years as part of the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival. This contest, which I attended (but lacked the courage to enter) in March 2016, attests to the scene’s performatively rich afterlife and its irresistible kinetic/kinesthetic solicitations. The Stella-shouting sequence in the 1951 film is actually quite short; from the moment when Stanley emerges from the bathroom downstairs and realizes that Stella is gone, until she appears on the landing above in response to his cries, a little over a minute passes. He shouts her name four times, the first two times while Eunice yells back at him from the balcony. The iconic moment comes with his third shout, which is captured by a camera looking down on him from a position on the stairway he faces. The frontal angle provides a close-up view of Brando’s face and upper body as he cries out Stella’s name. His torn shirt hanging off one shoulder, hair and clothes drenched from the shower that Stanley’s poker companions administered after his violent outburst, Brando looks ahead, eyes abject and bewildered. After slumping slightly with his hands on his hips, he raises his arms, clutches the sides of his head with both hands, leans his head back, and yells “Hey, STELL-LAHHHHH!”19 The camera peers into his mouth, showing lips, teeth, tongue, throat, and, it feels like, vocal chords straining at their limit. As one sees in his neck, shoulders, and back when he shouts her name the first two times, these utterances are full-­body events. It can be painful to watch, and listen to, Brando’s total vocal release. In his 1935 essay “An Affective Athleticism,” Antonin Artaud refers to the actor’s “affective musculature,” and it is hard to imagine a more apt description of Brando’s body clenching and releasing its desperate, even violent, need in the form of sound.20 Revolutionary in an age of Hollywood men, like Humphrey Bogart, whose delivery was far more contained, Brando’s unbounded utterance is still shocking many decades later. The fourth time that Brando calls to his wife he is off camera while Stella listens to his cries with a dream-like gaze. Even though we do not see Stanley making these sounds, their broken-pitch raspiness carries the labor of their production. Writer and actor Elena Passarello, who entered and won the 2011 Stanley and Stella Shouting Contest, evocatively describes the mechanics of Brando’s signature delivery:

  LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND MOVEMENT   

197

Most speech teachers will tell you the best way to tax your “instrument” is either to flatten the sound hole made by your lips, jaw, and throat or to finish your words in the rear of the mouth, rather than at the lips and front teeth. Throughout his movie career, Brando, the forebear of Mumblecore, rolled his voice toward his molars, where it slumped over his epiglottis like a delinquent schoolboy at the back of the bus. “Stella!” is no exception. That clenched neck squashes his airway, and his downturned mouth and retracted tongue reduce resonance. The bared teeth add grit and rape tone. If this voice had come from an inanimate instrument—a trombone, say—it would be one whose bell and slide had been run over by a streetcar.21

The effort of Brando’s articulatory performance makes itself felt in the words he utters. As Passarello observes: “We hurt as he winces through the pained ‘Hey’ and the bitten first vowel of her name. When he opens to that oft-mimicked, strained ‘aaaaugh,’ something gravelly and hoarse is hefted from within him, but can’t quite make it out of his mouth, and that halted timbre hurts us, too.”22 It hurts because we feel the stress in our own vocal organs as we vicariously exert our lungs, throats, and bodies in this self-ravaging manner. Because those who witness this performance are kinesthetically implicated in Brando’s articulatory gesture, in short, it is impossible for them to hear this shout-scream entirely from the outside. The sheer extremity of Brando’s performance in this scene and its power to seize the body that listens to it are two of the reasons that his Stella shout has been so widely imitated and parodied. Because of the intense resonance experience in which these imitations are grounded, Stella reenactments offer a fascinating glimpse into the ways that kinetic/kinesthetic performances circulate and are transformed by others in mutually reflecting acts of enactment and spectatorship. The Stanley and Stella Shouting Contest is held annually beneath the balcony of the Pontalba Apartments in New Orleans’ Jackson Square. These days, a small staging platform is set up and is gradually surrounded by spectators and those who wish to perform as contestants. The contestants (there were twenty-five when I observed it in 2016) include men, women, and children, people who travelled long distances to participate, and those who learned about the contest when they just happened to be walking by. A number are repeat contestants. The event is well known, and when the contest begins hundreds of people are sitting, standing, and

198  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

shifting around to get a better view. One of the first to arrive, I am three or four feet away from the contestants at the front of one of the side rows. Contestants are given numbers and take the stage one after the other. For gender and sexuality diversity, contestants are allowed to shout “Stanley,” though most women contestants opt for the canonical “Stella.” A woman dressed as Stella stands on the balcony to receive the anguished calls; her banter to and about the contestants throughout the contest—“Surely you can be a little louder than that,” “Take your shirt off, honey”—ratchet up the distractions and the performance stakes.23 When all the contestants have performed, the judges select a group of finalists, who compete in a second round to determine a winner. The routine that most contestants follow involves shouting Stella’s name (or Stanley’s) three times, each time with greater intensity, and ending up on their knees or prostrate on the ground in emotional exhaustion. Male contestants often wear a t-shirt to rip open at a climactic moment, and some douse their head and chest with a water bottle before starting. Going back to Kazan’s film after attending the contest, I am struck by ways that this template modifies Brando’s performance: the number of shouts is off by one, Brando’s t-shirt is torn before he ever comes outside, and Stanley drops to his knees only when he is done shouting and Stella starts down the stairs. No matter: this is the shape in which Brando’s iconic acting has migrated from the screen back to live performance. Around this template, contestants vary widely in what they do and how they perform it. One woman strummed a guitar frenetically when she fell to her knees during her final shout. In 2014 a male contestant brought his wife and three children on stage to shout with him; when they were done they lifted their shirts to reveal the letters of Stella’s name written on their stomachs. That same year a mime performed the scene in silence. One of the greatest Stanleys on YouTube clips from past contests is a four-year-old boy who, after being led out by his mother in 2006, fed off the crowd’s applause and nailed his performance. While some contestants have clearly studied Brando’s cinema performance, others have not. Occasionally, a contestant admits to never having seen the film. What matters in the competition is that participants capture the abandon of Brando’s utterance and the emotional intensity that seizes one’s body in its release. Intensity on its own is not enough: the Stanley and Stella Shouting Contest is filled with contestants who act out strong emotion without the intentional arc that propelled and animated Brando’s performance. Some add extra gestures and lines in an attempt to squeeze

  LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND MOVEMENT   

199

out more intensity. The really good Stanleys (and Stellas), on the other hand, identify Brando’s pain and express it with an articulatory force using their entire bodies. Theirs is a kinesthetic response to Brando’s performance—inhabiting its force from within—instead of just going through the motions. In these gestural reenactments it does not matter if they imitate Brando precisely. Lacking Brando’s vocal chords and body, they would find it hard do so even if they tried. Instead, they reenact the scene’s resonance effects with their own bodies, often improvising as they do so. In her award-winning 2011 performance, Passarello allowed the vocal force of each “Stellahhhhh” to exhaust itself as her body went limp with the expended effort. By the second shout she was on her knees, and when she raised her upper body for the final shout she shook her torso to find energy for this last, ear-splitting scream. At the end of her performance, she was on the floor, head down. It was not Brando exactly and yet it was, kinesthetically unfolding from the same place.24 Even though I had seen videos of earlier Stanley and Stella Shouting Contests before traveling to New Orleans, I was not sure what to expect when I attended it. Like most performances, of course, it is different live than it is on film or videotape. With its makeshift stage, non-paying spectators, and sunny early spring afternoon, this was street theatre taking place in a square filled with shoppers, tourists, and people hanging out. Watching the contest in the midst of these distractions, I watched the twenty-five contestants trying to do Brando, trying to outdo Brando, and not particularly trying to do Brando at all. I watched a woman who seemed to be in her eighties call for Stanley in a voice that was barely above a ­whisper. In a few instances I felt I heard Brando himself—not the bellowing, scratched voice but the unique force of utterance that makes my body resonate when I hear it and see it on film. It must have been something to witness his performance on stage. I was surprised by the number of spectators and passers-by I overheard at the shouting contest who had never seen the film; some had never even heard of Streetcar. Their experience of the competition was very different from that of the woman I stood next to, who had seen the film when she was younger and attends the contest every year. As someone who knows the film backwards and forwards, my response to the contestants’ vocal performances was influenced by the body-memory that Brando’s Stella has left me with. We carry articulatory and other performances that move inside us like this in a kinesthetic repository that functions as an archive we can share with others. It is hard to hear a different actor shout Stella’s name without having Brando as an acoustic and muscular point of comparison.

200  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

At the same time, it is easy to overstate the role of memory in perceptual and cognitive encounters. Kinesthetic attunement draws its most powerful energy from the moment itself. While I felt particular resonance when the contestants matched my visceral memory of Brando’s performance, as I watched them deliver their “Stellas” one after the other a couple of hundred yards away from the Mississippi River I entered into a variety of articulatory styles and efforts, often quite powerfully. The shouters were so close to me I could touch them. Everyone around me was attuned to them, the way they moved and moved their voices, their pauses and ad libs; as audiences do, we fed off each other’s engagement as well as off the performances themselves. For those who did not know the performance that most of the contestants were trying to imitate, it was glorious exhibitionism, with strangers casting off inhibitions and making a shouting spectacle of themselves. For those who knew the film and its corporeal solicitations, it was this and more. On the periphery of muscle memory was Brando himself: appearing in those utterances that echoed his own, standing to the side of those who tried too hard, and disappearing from view when a contestant launched a cry so original it became a phenomenon of its own.

Language and Kinesthesia The analysis I offered in the chapter “Kinesthetic Resonance” of the “glass of water” scene between Lenny and Ruth in Act 1 of Pinter’s The Homecoming traced the visual kinetic/kinesthetic dynamic of their exchange: the physicalized contest over the handling of a glass of water; the proxemic interaction of the characters as they sit, stand, and move in relation to each other; and Ruth’s kinetic peripeteia in the sequence’s climax. This dynamic, I argued, finds an equivalent in the audience’s kinesthetic participation. In order to concentrate on the phenomenology of movement observation in this exchange, I largely bracketed out the linguistic component of the characters’ interaction. Let us return to this scene and consider the role of language in its kinesthetic negotiations. Here, as in most dramatic performance, movement manifests itself in what actors say as well as what they do with their bodies. Words extend movement, sharpen its sensorimotor and affective outlines, and clarify its intentional arc. When Ruth rises and approaches Lenny with the glass in her hand, her words create a shifting, intensely imaged kinetic/kinesthetic scenario:

  LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND MOVEMENT   

201

RUTH: Have a sip. Go on. Have a sip from my glass. He is still. Sit on my lap. Take a long cool sip. She pats her lap. Pause. She stands, moves to him with the glass. Put your head back and open your mouth. LENNY: Take that glass away from me. RUTH: Lie on the floor. Go on. I’ll pour it down your throat. LENNY: What are you doing, making me some kind of proposal? She laughs shortly, drains the glass.25

This verbal scenario neither duplicates the exchange’s visual action, nor does it supplant it in the audience’s perception of what takes place. Rather, words and gesture interact with parallel and divergent kinesthetic solicitations. It is worth dwelling on this segment of their exchange. Visually, the audience sees a seated woman talking to a standing man; she stands up, approaches him, and speaks some more while standing there with a glass pointed at his face. Verbally, the audience is given two rival movement scenarios, one of which is an intensification of the other. In the first, Lenny sits on Ruth’s lap and holds his head back to receive a drink. In the second, delivered while Ruth stands enticingly and threateningly close, Lenny lies on the floor and Ruth pours the water down his throat in an uncomfortably asphyxiating scenario. The intentional force of the action she proposes is anchored in the action verb “pour,” which evokes hand, arm, and shoulder movements and an upper-body dominance that immobilizes Lenny as passive vessel. While the visual interaction between the two is choreographed with a precise eye to its movement dynamic, its kinesthetic effect on the play’s spectator is also determined by the way their interaction is verbalized. Ruth’s two-pronged invitation to Lenny opens a field of gestural possibilities within the movements we observe; it takes the kinesthetic subtext of their conversation and actualizes it with startling directness. Given that the actors’ physical movements are kept to a minimum at this point, the actions she describes elicits particularly strong kinesthetic identifications. At the same time, the fact that Ruth’s invitation is not physically carried out preserves its propositional status. Having seized control of the encounter with her experientially intense verbalized gestures, she can deflect them with a laugh and a swallow. Her words conclude, but their menacing eroticism lingers as a kinesthetic after-image.

202  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

Considering the dynamics of kinesthetic resonance in this way complicates our sense of what happens in The Homecoming or any other play or piece of theatre that includes spoken language. In Pinter’s play, movement perception hinges as much—or more—on what is said as what is physically executed. During the conversational sequence preceding the negotiations over the glass, Lenny delivers two monologues recounting acts of violence that he claims to have committed against women who offended or irritated him. In Peter Hall’s film, Ian Holm walks around leisurely while recounting these stories to a seated Merchant, but these ambulatory movements are gesturally and kinesthetically secondary to the actions he describes. In the first, he assaults a woman who propositioned him down by the docks; in the second, he hits an elderly woman who asked him to help her move an iron mangle that was delivered to the wrong room of her house. In both monologues, he describes his acts of violence in precise motor terms. He “clumped” the first woman then gave her “another belt in the nose and a couple of turns of the boot.”26 When the second woman enraged him by not helping move the heavy appliance, he gave her “a short-arm jab to the belly” before jumping on the bus outside.27 The latter act happens at the end of his embodied account of trying to move the mangle: “It must have weighed about half a ton. How this brother-in-law got it up there in the first place, I can’t even begin to envisage. So there I was, doing a bit of shoulders on with the mangle, risking a rupture, and this old lady just standing there, waving me on, not even lifting a little finger to give me a helping hand.”28 By focusing attention on the subjective experiences of the “I” who dominates these narratives, Lenny establishes a kinesthetically realized surrogate who dominates his surroundings and the women unfortunate enough to find themselves in his territory. The aggressiveness he recounts—and the aggressiveness he enacts in telling these stories to a sister-in-law he has just met—raise the interpersonal stakes of this already awkward conversational situation. With the exception of one moment when physical violence actually erupts on stage (Max hits Joey in the stomach), much of The Homecoming’s movement interaction is realized verbally rather than physically. This statement should not be taken to imply that verbal forms of movement in the theatre are separable from the physical movements that accompany and usually produce them. Rather, these two modes of kinesthetic enactment contribute to a movement experience that is multi-modal and mutually transforming. The recounted actions of Pinter’s play are grounded in the intricately choreographed physical interactions we observe, while even

  LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND MOVEMENT   

203

the simplest of those actions is shadowed by the kinetic and kinesthetic possibilities that the play’s words evoke. Much of what we think of as subtext in plays such as The Homecoming, No Man’s Land, or Party Time is the result of mutually unsettling kinesthetic claims, neither of which stands below the other as the prefix sub implies. The kinesthetic stirrings one feels in one’s shoulder, arm, and hand when Vivien Merchant describes pouring the water she holds down Ian Holm’s throat—and the swallowing/gagging impulse one can feel when shifting one’s attention to Lenny’s point of view—reflect the experiential connection between enacting or observing physical movements and listening to (or reading) the words that describe these movements. Shaun Gallagher writes: “Language is a modality of the human body. It is generated out of movement.”29 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone makes the same point more forcefully: “[R]ather than speak of the period before language as the pre-linguistic, we should speak of the advent of language as the post-­kinetic.”30 The world that language embodies is constituted through and in terms of sensorimotor experience. Cognitive linguists— especially those working in the area of embodied semantics—have argued that the human body’s spatial orientation and movement capabilities structure even the most abstract concepts and conceptual structures.31 Cognitive scientists exploring this connection have shown that that the sensorimotor areas of the brain used for conducting an action are also used for linguistic representations of the same action. Hearing or reading action words involving the hand or leg (grasp and kick, for instance) activates premotor and motor areas of the brain that are involved in the same actions. These somatotopically mapped activations occur even when the action words are used idiomatically or abstractly (“John grasped the idea” or “Pablo kicked the habit”).32 Damage to areas of the brain associated with action execution impairs the conceptual knowledge and linguistic processing of action.33 The fact that several of the areas identified in studies of this connection are also ascribed to the human mirror system suggests a cognitive overlap between language comprehension and the resonance mechanisms we have already discussed in the context of nonlinguistic action. As cognitive psychologist and language researcher David Kemmerer puts it, “the motoric aspects of the meanings of action verbs are not part of an abstract symbolic representation in the brain (like the neural analogue of a dictionary entry), but are instead linked with the same frontal cortical structures that subserve action execution and observation.”34

204  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

There are differences, to be sure, between observing an action and listening to that action being described. In an article on the motor system’s role in understanding action sentences, Giovanni Buccino and colleagues note that whereas observed action is followed in its entirety, verbally presented action is not.35 The sentence “He kicked the ball,” for example, provides a kinetic summary of an action rather than an unfolding intentional event. Action sentences—especially decontextualized sentences such as that one—also provide limited information about the actor performing the action. Despite these limitations, described action can be a powerful conveyer of kinetic and kinesthetic information, especially in discursive contexts (dialogue, narrative, performance) that fill in and amplify sensorimotor, affective, and situational detail. Indeed, while language may not be able to capture movement in the fullness of its unfolding, it is nonetheless capable of highly nuanced kinesthetic distinctions. Moving from a fairly general action verb such as touch to the words that describe different ways of touching something or someone with the human hand, one finds a vivid field of sensorimotor discriminations: poke, caress, fondle, press, paw, palpate, shove, pat, graze, rub, scratch, pet, grope, flick, rap, stroke. Experientially, each verb indicates a specific shape for the hand, and arm; a particular deployment of the muscles; a distinctive movement arc; and specific kinesthetic sensations. As Guillemette Bolens notes in this respect, the verbs clutch and snatch do not feel or look the same.36 Distinctions such as the ones provided by the synonyms for touch are language specific; languages other than English discriminate kinesthetic experiences differently. In Philosophy in the Flesh, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson offer examples of this: In Tamil, thallu and ilu correspond to the English push and pull, except that they connote a sudden action as opposed to a smooth continuous force. The latter reading can be obtained by adding a directional suffix, but there is no way to indicate smooth pushing or pulling in an arbitrary direction. In Farsi, zadan refers to a large number of object manipulations involving quick motions. The prototypical zadan is a hitting action, though it can also mean to snatch (ghaap zadan) or to strum a guitar or play any other musical instrument. In Cantonese, /mı̄t/ covers both pinching and tearing. It connotes forceful manipulation by two fingers, yet it is also acceptable for tearing large items when two full grasps are used.37

Because English, unlike French and the other Romance languages, has a wide variety of manner-of-motion verbs, its action verbs are especially rich

  LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND MOVEMENT   

205

in kinetic and kinesthetic information. As psycholinguist Dan Slobin points out, English and the other Germanic and Slavic languages use the main verb to indicate the manner of movement and a particle or auxiliary to indicate the path of that movement (“He ran into the house”). By contrast, the Romance languages (and certain other languages such as Turkish, Hebrew, and Japanese) indicate the path with the main word and the manner in an auxiliary (“Il est entré dans la maison en courant” [while running] or, dropping the auxiliary entirely, “Il est entré dans la maison” or “il est entré”).38 Hence, English has an abundance of verbs describing manner of motion: the various ways that one can crawl, sneak, barge, bolt, or slip into a room, for instance. Speakers of the first group of languages, Slobin suggests, “have been trained, by their language, to make more distinctions of motor pattern, rate, affect, and evaluation of movement” in comparison with speakers of the second group.39 Analysis of the theatrical spectator’s kinesthetic experience must therefore acknowledge language’s power not only to accompany the action we see on stage but also to articulate movement scenarios that elicit kinesthetic attention on their own terms. Phenomenologically, visual and linguistic action “take place” on stage and in the audience’s virtual engagement. At times, verbalized action can register more powerfully and viscerally than the movements we observe on stage, as in the Messenger’s kinesthetically unsparing report of Oedipus’ self-blinding in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex: “He rips off [Jocasta’s] brooches, the long gold pins / holding her robes—and lifting them high, /looking straight up into the points, / he digs them down the sockets of his eyes.”40 A well-known example of verbal staging is Edgar’s description of the view below as he feigns standing on Dover cliffs with the blind Gloucester in Act 4, Scene 6 of King Lear: Come on, sir, here’s the place; stand still. How fearful And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low! The crows and choughs that wing the midway air Show scarce so gross as beetles. Half way down Hangs one that gathers sampire, dreadful trade! Methinks he seems no bigger than his head. The fishermen that [walk] upon the beach Appear like mice, and yond tall anchoring bark, Diminish’d to her cock; her cock, a buoy Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge, That on th’ unnumbe’red idle pebble chafes,

206  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more, Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight Topple down headlong.41

A tour de force of perspectival description, this passage positions Gloucester and the spectator that listens to it on “th’ extreme verge” of its linguistically imagined prospect.42 Its powerfully vertiginous effect is the result of specific kinesthetic strategies. While the scene it describes is teeming with movement, the observed movements it details are distanced and miniaturized to the point that kinesthetic connection with them is minimized: the waves make no sound, the walking men become mice. One cannot orient oneself to these moving entities in the same way one can when observing movement on one’s level and at closer proximity. The vacuum opened by this attenuated involvement is occupied by the body’s kinetic unsteadiness when it confront such unmeasurable expanses. As Bert States writes in his phenomenological analysis of this scene, “vertigo is not simply fear of falling; it is a particular collusion of the senses through which the body overextends itself and participates in space.”43 The kinesthetic panic in Edgar’s description is generated by the verb cast—which has a sharply active kinetic meaning—and carried through in the verbs turn and topple. By casting “one’s eyes so low,” one propels or hurls oneself downward, as if the act of looking at objects disorientingly far below one triggers the impulse to join them. The stage the actors stand on, of course, is flat, and there is no verge from which one could gaze out over a vast depth, let alone jump or fall into it. The movements preceding these lines are minimal: the two walk together and stop, Edgar guides his father a step or two to the imagined edge, and Gloucester falls on the stage. If one were unable to hear their lines or watched the scene in an unfamiliar language, one would have perceptual and kinesthetic access to their simple physical actions. ­ Shakespeare’s language provides an additional kinesthetic dimension rooted in the body’s sense of posture and balance and its sensorimotor encounter with a verbally actualized environment. The poignancy and bathos of Edgar’s description and the actions that follow it depend, of course, on the visual knowledge that none of it is real. But cognitively and phenomenologically, this verbal sequence does take place through the images it creates and the kinesthetic involvements it stimulates. In the end, the dizzying view from the Dover cliffs is one of the most viscerally memorable scenes in Shakespeare’s tragedy, even though we never actually see it.

  LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND MOVEMENT   

207

Acting with Words As this chapter has argued, language constitutes a movement medium through the movements it semantically enacts and the articulatory gestures that turn language into speech. This fact indicates the major kinesthetic difference between spoken theatre and non-verbal performance forms such as dance, acrobatics, and mime. In these forms the spectator’s kinesthetic involvement derives from physical movement perception with reinforcing kinesthetic sensations provided by music and other performance elements. In the case of spoken theatre, on the other hand, the spectator’s kinesthetic faculty is addressed through different, sometimes competing kinesthetic channels. If the audience’s perceptual identification with physical movement alone must contend with multiple claims on attention—six actors doing different things on stage at the same time, for instance—then the introduction of language to the kinesthetic equation makes the movement-perception dynamic even riskier to generalize. Empirical studies provide insights into the way we kinesthetically respond to observed movement and the way languages semantically embody movement, but they have little to say about the interaction between these two modalities in real-life kinesthetic encounters. To frame this in the context of theatre, what happens when a performer recounts one action while physically enacting another? If we assume that someone cannot kinesthetically inhabit two movement or discursive subject positions at the same time, what if different performers talk at the same time? From the spectator’s point of view, does physical action have kinesthetic priority over recounted action, or vice versa? In short, are all action modalities created equal? The overwhelming predominance of performance, phenomenological, and scientific studies that discuss motor resonance in connection with visually observed movement might tempt one to conclude that a performer’s physical actions take kinesthetic priority over linguistic ones. Someone who would make this into a general rule for theatrical performance, however, has never heard James Earl Jones tell a story on stage or stood with Edgar and his blinded father on Dover cliffs. As the Messenger’s description of Oedipus’ self-blinding suggests, linguistic action can play an oversized role in our perceptual encounter with what we see on stage. In the end, as I have suggested, perceptual priorities are situational. The sometimes competing claims that theatre makes on the spectator’s kinesthetic investments are subject to the interactions of audience attention

208  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

with the moment-by-moment performance decisions made by the performer and her theatrical collaborators. Because actors recount actions as well as—and while—engaging in physical actions, they join these kinetic modalities in spoken performance. We have already considered the fact that utterance is a kinetic action that communicates directly through the articulatory resonances it activates in its listener/observer. But as David McNeill has demonstrated in his pioneering psycholinguistic analysis alluded to earlier, gesture is a crucial contributor to semantic meaning as well. “Gesture and speech,” McNeill writes, “are semantically and pragmatically co-expressive. That is, the gestures that accompany utterances also present the same or closely related meanings semantically and perform the same functions pragmatically.”44 Gestures can parallel and reinforce spoken meaning, as when a speaker in one of McNeill’s examples lifts his hand and pulls his arm back with his hand in a grabbing position when describing a scene from a comic book where a character bends a tree back to the ground. They can serve other purposes, as well, such as accentuating salient aspects of an utterance or presenting information not provided by speech. For example, speakers of languages that do not indicate manner of motion through verbs (such as Spanish) often use physical gestures to provide this information while speaking.45 Gesture in these and other situations, McNeill insists, is not something added to a meaning already worked out in linguistic terms; rather, it operates in dialectical relation to speech as part of a single, integrated performance. Indeed, McNeill argues, gesture is one of the ways in which human thought is accomplished.46 Inside and outside the theatre, it is also one of the ways in which kinesthetic enactment and perception are achieved. Actors train in the physical performance of their lines beyond the act of articulating them, and they do so with an eye to semantic embodiment: opening their arms and bodies when indicating expansiveness, perhaps, enumerating points with their hands, underscoring oppositions by shifting their bodies in contrasting ways. In the work of an accomplished actor, these gestures are responsive to the movements, thoughts, and affective shifts contained in the language being performed. This gesturality varies according to theatrical convention: one gestures differently in traditional Noh theatre than in method acting, and these gestures are experienced differently by audiences familiar with these conventions. But what joins these discrepant movement styles is the mutual inherence of the linguistic and the gestural, and the fact that the two co-contribute kinesthetic and other forms of theatrical meaning.47 Kinesthetic analysis of theatrical language, then, must acknowledge that textually-described movement receives specific articulation in the

  LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND MOVEMENT   

209

actor’s bodily performance, which includes and exceeds the act of vocal utterance. Actors accentuate certain kinetic/kinesthetic elements of a spoken text by emphasizing particular words or physicalizing them in certain ways, and they leave others non-accentuated. The relationship of the verbal and the physical is dynamic and integrative, as are the kinesthetic engagements they solicit. The kinesthetic connection between language and gesture can be direct, as it was in John Douglas Thompson’s performance in the Irish Repertory Theatre’s acclaimed 2009 New York production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. As befits a character who talks big (“Ain’t a man’s talkin’ big what makes him big—long as he makes folks believe it?”), Thompson made Jones’s lines part of his swagger in the play’s early scenes.48 Not only did Thompson accentuate his delivery, calling attention to certain words and speaking with a force and volume that dominated his environment, but he also acted them out, physicalizing them at every opportunity. At one point in his conversation with Smithers in the opening scene, Jones describes the island’s natives “kneelin’ down and bumpin’ deir head on de ground like I was a miracle out o’ de Bible” when he tells them that only a silver bullet can kill him. “Oh Lawd, from dat time on I has dem eatin’ out of my hand. I cracks de whip and dey jumps through.”49 Delivering these lines, Thompson dropped onto his hands and knees, mimed their self-abasement, then stood up and beat the cloth-covered throne that dominated the stage with his riding crop. These gestures were not redundant to Thompson’s verbal account; rather, his decision to reenact these actions while recounting them intensified his self-embellishing performance. In an intensely kinetic performance such as this, where action crosses from language to gesture and back again, recounted gesture is given powerful kinesthetic underscoring. The effect of seeing O’Neill’s lines delivered in this way differs dramatically from the act of reading them. What we see plays on what we hear; what we hear plays on what we see. This dynamic can take less direct forms, as well. When Judi Dench delivered her “unsex me here” soliloquy as Lady Macbeth in the 1976 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Shakespeare’s play, the scene’s kinesthetic effect arose from the reinforcements and tensions between these perceptual registers. In order to demonstrate this, I quote the majority of this speech: Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

210  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood, Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between Th’ effect and [it]! Come to my woman’s breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murth’ring ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark To cry, ‘Hold, hold!’50

The kinetic/kinesthetic dynamic of Shakespeare’s lines here differs in interesting ways from the dynamics I have traced in earlier examples. For one thing, the verbs that embody these actions (Come, unsex, fill, make thick, stop up, take [exchange], pall [wrap], even the participial murth’ring) are kinesthetically general rather than designating specific sensorimotor gestures. For another thing, the speech’s actions take the form of second-­ person commands instead of descriptions of what one might witness another enacting or enact oneself. The perspective organizing these actions is that of the speaker, Lady Macbeth, who envisions the approach of malevolent powers and the impact their intervention will have on her body and spirit. Fill, make thick, and stop up are transitive verbs that can also be inhabited from an intransitive point of view (as in “I’m full” or “I’m stopped up”). Lady Macbeth, in other words, becomes the object, not the initiator of the actions she describes. Imagining this encounter, commanding it into existence, she dissociates herself from outwardly directed action and its intentional/affective trajectories. As she renders herself passive, she seeks the power to act without remorse: “That my keen knife see not the wound it makes.” Dench’s delivery of this passage physicalized the effort required to will this dehumanization, and it did so in powerfully kinesthetic terms.51 After calmly delivering the soliloquy’s opening lines (“The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements”), Dench walked in a slow circle then lowered herself into a half-­ crouch facing forward.52 As she prepared herself to evoke the “spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts” she extended her left arm and spread her fingers while holding her right hand semi-clenched by her side. Balancing awkwardly on one knee and one foot with one’s arms held rigidly in

  LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND MOVEMENT   

211

positions they usually do not hold is an unnatural and uncomfortable position that requires considerable effort to maintain (try it). The strain that Dench experienced as she held this position was evident throughout her body; the fingers on her extended hand, for instance, were stretched so wide (and for so long) that they clearly hurt. Reflecting the intensity of her desire and a certain fear of it as well, the concentrated emotion and physical effort evident while she spoke overwhelmed her when she reached the line “fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty.” Her half-whispered delivery rose in volume, her posture wavered slightly, and as she uttered the word “cruelty” she shrieked, stood up, and recoiled from the word and where it had led her. After retreating momentarily into the darkness that surrounded the lighted circle where she had been speaking, she resumed her previous position and held it with even deeper resolve. Her voice began as a whisper, but as her invocation centered more firmly on her own body with the lines “Come to my woman’s breasts, / And take my milk for gall, you murth’ring ministers,” she became increasingly animated by the words she spoke. Her voice rose in volume and pitch, her articulation became more passionate, and her head and body moved under the force of what she was saying. During her final lines she slowly raised her arms and extended them outward and uncomfortably behind the rest of her body in an ecstasy of possession. Her eyes unseeing, Dench delivered the final “hold” in a cry that came from the depth of her body. Embodied in these ways, the soliloquy’s climax was a study in conflicting impulses. While her body allowed itself to be taken over, or “filled,” by what she was saying, the command “Hold, hold!” that she voiced also indicated her resistance to the words she was embracing and the dark images they conjured up. As anyone who has watched the filmed version of this scene will agree, these verbal-gestural meanings are embodied in precisely unfolding kinesthetic terms. Forty-two years after seeing this Macbeth at the RSC’s Other Place studio theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, Dench’s performance here and at other crucial moments of the play still haunts my body-memory.

Verbal/Kinesthetic Immersions The examples of language’s impact on kinesthetic spectatorship up to this point have been taken from the dramatic theatre, where individual actors speak their lines while enacting non-verbal movements and gestures or refraining from overt movement by stilling themselves. The relationship of

212  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

recounted action to observed action in these examples hinges on the act of utterance, which joins the two in the actor’s physical performance. But the kinesthetic work of language does not depend on this body–word union. Contemporary theatre offers many examples of language dissociated from the speaking subject, set free from visible utterance. Beckett achieves this effect in his late plays, where language stands in often unclear relation to the performer who stands in front of us. In Not I (1972), the stream of words that pours from Mouth, the play’s protagonist, feels at times as if it originates in the darkness surrounding this fragmented organ. We see no head, after all, and no chest that moves to produce what we hear; in the absence of the pronoun “I,” Beckett severs the deictic linkage between language and speaker.53 Drawing on his work with radio and other media, Beckett’s late plays also stage recorded voices in various relationships to the speaking performer. The advent and refinement of contemporary sound technology has opened the theatre to new kinesthetic possibilities and new ways of orienting the spectator in relation to these possibilities. George Home-­ Cook offers a phenomenological account of how this technology elicits kinesthetic and other forms of audience engagement. “Designed sound,” he writes, “directs the attention of the audience in various ways, and, in so doing, manifestly motivates varied acts of movement, both actual and imagined.” Home-Cook is careful to add that this motivation is not a one-­ way process and that the spectator’s attentional freedom “troubles and subverts” sound design’s intended engagements.54 In an effort to broaden my discussion of language and utterance beyond the traditionally staged speaking actor, I conclude this chapter by considering the kinesthetic dynamics of a recent sound, language, and movement-intensive production, Complicite’s The Encounter, which was conceived, directed, and performed by Simon McBurney.55 Involving its audience to an unusual extent in the perceptual contours of its theatrical exploration, McBurney’s play is an example of “immersive theatre.” While this term has been applied to so many kinds of production that it risks losing its usefulness as a critical category, the immediacy and multi-sensory engagement it invokes are central to McBurney’s performance. The Encounter was inspired by Petru Popescu’s book Amazon Beaming, which tells the story of American ­photojournalist Loren McIntyre’s 1969 journey into a remote region of the Amazon rain forest and his encounter with the Mayoruna tribe, which had had little previous contact with the outside world. Without a compass or map and eventually without his watch and camera, McIntyre lost all

  LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND MOVEMENT   

213

sense of orientation and had to surrender himself to the Mayorunan perception of time and the natural/material world. From his ambiguous place in this community whose language he could not understand (and who understood none of the languages he knew), he found himself sharing radically different awarenesses, rituals, and channels of communication. In his attempt to bring McIntyre’s story to the stage, McBurney devised an aural and visual experience that recreated the photojournalist’s disorientation and sensory-perceptual receptivity. Spectators were provided with individual Sennheiser headsets that they wore throughout the performance, and these devices provided an ever-shifting soundscape comprised of live, technically enhanced, and pre-recorded sounds. Some of the sounds were transmitted from the stage from a binaural mannequin head that employed two microphones to create the impression that the spectator was in the middle of the sounds being produced. Other sound sources included McBurney’s live voice, which was manipulated at times to become McIntyre’s lower (and slower) American voice; the recorded voices of scientists, philosophers, activists, Popescu, Amazon tribesmen living in Britain, and McBurney’s five-year-old daughter; and additional pre-recorded sounds (some, like the sounds of the rainforest, had been recorded binaurally by McBurney and sound designer Gareth Fry in the Amazon). McBurney also played audio recordings into the microphone using his cell phone and operated a loop pedal “to create exterior soundscapes and the interior worlds of the characters,” while offstage sound operators played and mixed sounds in relation to McBurney’s performance on stage.56 In addition to the binaural head facing the audience (and later turned around to parallel their orientation), the setting of The Encounter consists of a table and chair, microphones and speakers, and multi-packs of bottled water positioned around the stage. The kinesthetic involvement that McBurney elicited throughout this innovative performance design was rooted in a proprioceptive and perceptual uncertainty. When McBurney spoke into the ear of the binaural head in the 2016 performance I attended, I experienced his words in my ear as if he was standing next to me. Given that he spoke these words into a ­stationary onstage ear, it also felt as if I was standing up there with him. When the sound of a mosquito came through the headsets (was it live or pre-recorded?), some spectators unthinkingly raised their hand as if to brush it away. When McBurney began recounting McIntyre’s Amazon experiences, this sense of proprioceptive displacement became even more acute. He described the Cessna pontoon plane that brought

214  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

McIntyre to the Javari Valley near the Peruvian border by passing a small hand-held speaker over the top of the binaural head and, through their headsets, the spectators’ heads. He stood back from the head with a stick in his hand and watched it fly overhead. Recounting the landing, he drank from a large water bottle then shook it while walking around the head to create the sound of the river as McIntyre’s plane descended onto it. Perceptually and proprioceptively, the sequence located its spectator in multiple sites that oscillated experientially as action and awareness shifted. After simulating the slightly vertiginous body-awareness of watching a plane flying overhead, McBurney’s aural performance summoned the experience of floating, then wading through, unfamiliar water. These proprioceptive experiences alternated ambiguously between the experience of standing on stage where McBurney was creating these effects and sitting in the auditorium where the sound experience was taking place. Movement was everywhere in The Encounter, from McBurney’s athletic performance to the Amazon itself, which teemed with activity large and small. Speech and language played essential roles in generating and constituting these movement landscapes. As befits a story told by a American photojournalist to a Romanian-born writer, conveyed in writing to a British actor/artistic director, and performed before audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, the act of recounting was distributed and multi-­channeled. Following Popescu’s account, McBurney narrated McIntyre’s story in the third-person past tense using his own voice, but, as stated, he also used a technologically lowered version of his voice to deliver the latter’s firstperson account. He also spoke for himself outside McIntyre’s story. Other, recorded voices were interwoven with his own to create a constantly switching, multi-vocalized sound-field. Much of the time the line between live and recorded seemed fairly clear, but there was no knowing for sure given the sophisticated sound processing that McBurney openly played with. At one point, he picked up a phone and seemed to talk with Rebecca Spooner, a campaigner for tribal people’s rights, but his words turned out to be recorded when the onstage McBurney began speaking over them. At other points, McBurney’s live words were looped in a technologically generated echo. In these instances and numerous others throughout the performance, the headsets provided an ambiguous boundary between the liveness of the actor and the voice(s) we listened to; vocality was released from its traditional origins in the actor’s body and became a product of the performance space itself, as often happens when vocal performances in an

  LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND MOVEMENT   

215

overly miked production appear to come from everywhere. Those of us in the audience projected what we heard onto the stage, but it was all in our heads, and the correspondence between what we heard and what was going on outside our headsets was precarious. Some spectators who took their headsets off during the performance reported afterwards that the theatre was eerily quiet, with McBurney’s unmiked voice difficult to hear from where they were sitting. Having kept my headset on throughout The Encounter, I was not sure until I heard these reports that McBurney’s voice had been live at any point during what I had seen and heard. Could he have lip-synced his entire performance? At the same time, the closed aural world provided by the headsets made the voices and what they said immediate in a deeply kinesthetic way. Even when they were clearly recorded and the bodies that originally produced them were not present, the voices had a timbre and grain that elicited an awareness of their delivery. McIntyre’s voice, for example, was deep and chest resonating, and his American accent embodied a flattened vocal delivery in contrast to McBurney’s higher-pitched English accent. These kinesthetic qualities could be felt even though McBurney, with his visibly different body and singular vocal apparatus, produced McIntyre’s lines (as noted earlier, the voice we heard through our headsets was digitally modulated). The kinesthetics of vocal delivery joined the narrated movements of McIntyre and those he encountered while lost in the Amazon. Alternating between first and third person, McIntyre’s story recounted his efforts to move in an environment that he could neither read nor predict. The sensory and kinesthetic immediacy of his movements were often rendered in precise sensorimotor terms, as in this first-person description of McIntyre trying to find his way back to the Mayoruna camp after being abandoned to die by some of its members: “I jackknife and fall on my stomach on rotting leaves. I order myself to crawl but my body refuses to obey and I remain lying, thinking of what will happen to me if I lose consciousness.”57 Or this, from McIntyre’s description of the Mayoruna destroying their possessions as part of a ritual return to their beginnings: What they can’t break with their hands, they crush with their feet. They grind the pots into pieces, crack the trophy skulls, snap the bows and arrows. They shatter the whole pile into bits of wood and bone, feather, husks and loose human teeth strung on necklaces.58

216  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

Reinforced by the non-verbal sound effects that situated the spectator in the midst of McIntyre’s actions, this language elicited strong kinesthetic engagement from those who listened. The aural immediacy of The Encounter’s soundscape was not unlike what one experiences listening to a radio play or book on tape with headsets. Some spectators closed their eyes for stretches of the performance; others surrendered themselves so completely to what they were hearing that they dozed off. But the immersive pull of this sonic environment and its aurally inhabited movements was counterpointed by McBurney’s physical actions on stage. Several times McBurney departed from McIntyre’s story with his own meditations on the events he was recounting, with the recorded voices of those he interviewed, or with the interruptions of his five-year-old daughter, who was unable to fall asleep offstage. But he also moved throughout his narration himself, acting out McIntyre’s movements and those of the Mayoruna with intense physical concentration. At a critical point in his stay with the Mayoruna, McIntyre decided to resist the hex that some members of the tribe seemed to be casting on him by running a number of laps around the perimeter of the village and hammering his fists and feet whenever he passed the leader of the unfriendly faction. While recounting this, McBurney ran around the stage enacting the same gestures accompanied by the slapping sound of feet on leaves.59 With McBurney’s movements reinforcing McIntyre’s first-person account (and vice versa), the feeling that we, too, were inhabiting this manic muscular performance was a multi-channeled kinesthetic accomplishment. While what we saw and what we heard interacted with each other, they retained their perceptual independence in a kinesthetic gestalt that included McIntyre and McBurney running— simultaneously and ­non-­simultaneously—in circles. Depending on how one’s attention moved throughout this verbal/physical sequence, each running-effort occupied the kinesthetic foreground while the other occupied an equally animate background. At moments as I watched and listened, the two men merged into one, but this was a temporary achievement in a broader kinetic exchange between enactive present and narrated past. In the end—and despite the inward draw of the production’s headset technology—this was McBurney’s performance as he conjured up McIntyre and the uncharted world he found himself in through both innovative and traditionally physical theatrical means. Narrating and recreating McIntyre’s journey, he physically enacted his own. Nowhere was this clearer than in the climax of The Encounter, when McBurney as McIntyre

  LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND MOVEMENT   

217

imagined those in the West “burning our possessions so as not to remain still in time.”60 After voicing McIntyre’s fantasy of affluent American streets, the Library of Congress, and the White House in flames as people burn their belongings, McBurney called on the audience to destroy their past as well. He attempted to break a plastic water bottle, smashed a glass water bottle, attacked the speakers, violently swept objects onto the floor, and took a hammer to his work desk in “a frenzy of destruction.” His daughter’s final interruption is the only thing that kept him from destroying the entire stage while we watched. An outburst of total exertion, McBurney’s movements were violent, unpredictable, and kinesthetically acute. They brought the kinetic body to the forefront by physicalizing and contemporizing the movement scenario that McBurney had just recounted. From one point of view, language erupted on the stage, driving the actions we observed. From another point of view, physical action subsumed language, imparting actuality and force to what we had heard. Spectatorship, of course, was implicated in both. Complicite’s The Encounter underscored two important features of kinesthetic engagement in the theatre. First, the experiential concentration of McBurney’s performance made clear how deeply embedded the kinesthetic is in other, less explicitly kinetic, aspects of spectatorship. In The Encounter as in other forms of theatrical performance, human movement and its perception were inseparable from affect, sensation, and attention. Affect colors, accentuates, and motivates the arc of action; sensation corporealizes one’s encounter with the world; and attention navigates the field of kinesthetic solicitations. When we move our bodies, we move in these three realms, as well. Second, and equally important, language mediates these kinesthetic dimensions in life and in performance. Whether spoken onstage or technologically relayed, words generate kinesthetic experiences, articulate them, and engage what we visually observe with kinesthetic reinforcement and counter-solicitations. To recall Eugène Guillevic’s resonant phrase, “movements tend” in what we hear as well as what we see, and in the complex phenomenality of verbal theatre their interplay is a performance of its own.

Notes 1. Jacques Lecoq, The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre, 52. 2. Lecoq does not distinguish between emotion and movement: “Etymologically, the word emotion means ‘setting in motion’” (Moving Body, 48). This understanding parallels Sheets-Johnstone’s phenomeno-

218  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

logical insight: “In the ordinary course of everyday life, the affective and the kinetic are clearly dynamically congruent: emotion and movement coincide” (Primacy of Movement, 454). 3. Lecoq, Moving Body, 51. 4. See Stanton B. Garner Jr., Bodied Spaces, 120–158. While the embodied nature of language and the conceptual structures it represents have become an important topic in cognitive science and linguistics since the late 1980s, the phenomenological account of these is comparatively undeveloped. 5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 200. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 199. 8. Ibid. 9. David McNeill, Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought, 2. 10. Alvin M. Liberman and Doug H. Whalen, “On the Relation of Speech to Language,” 188. 11. Alvin M.  Liberman and Ignatius G.  Mattingly, “The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Revised,” 2. 12. Luciano Fadiga et  al., “Speech Listening Specifically Modulates the Excitability of Tongue Muscles: a TMS Study,” 401. A different experiment by K.  E. Watkins et  al. also associated auditory and visual speech perception with increased activity in the motor system involved in speech production (“Seeing and Hearing Speech Excites the Motor System Involved in Speech Production”). 13. Fadiga et al., “Speech Listening,” 401. 14. Andew N. Meltzoff, “Elements of a Developmental Theory of Imitation,” 28. Also see Bénédicte de Boysson-Bardies et  al., “A Crosslinguistic Investigation of Vowel Formants in Babbling.” 15. For fuller discussions of Struck Dumb, see Garner, Bodied Spaces, 120–22. 16. Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children, 54. 17. Ibid., 55. 18. Ibid. 19. This sequence can be found in Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, 59–60. 20. Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 133. Later in the same essay, Artaud observes, “No one in Europe knows how to scream any more, and particularly actors in trance no longer know how to cry out. Since they do nothing but talk and have forgotten they ever had a body in the theater, they have naturally also forgotten the use of their windpipes” (ibid., 141). 21. Elena Passarello, Let Me Clear My Throat, 5. 22. Ibid., 6. For a discussion of Brando’s vocal performances in A Streetcar Named Desire and The Godfather, see Katherine Kinney, “The Resonance of Brando’s Voice.” 23. A man also is available on the balcony to stand in for Stanley when his name is shouted.

  LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND MOVEMENT   

219

24. Passarello’s performance can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=r-b6BZwfahw 25. Harold Pinter, Homecoming, 34. 26. Ibid., 31. 27. Ibid., 33. 28. Ibid. 29. Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 107. 30. Sheets-Johnstone, Primacy of Movement, xxxi (emphasis in original). 31. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; Johnson, The Body in the Mind; and Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh. 32. See Friedemann Pulvermüller, “Brain Mechanisms Linking Language and Action”; Pulvermüller and Luciano Fadiga, “Active Perception: Sensorimotor Circuits as a Cortical Basis for Language”; and Véronique Boulenger et  al., “Grasping Ideas with the Motor System: Somatic Somatotopy in Idiom Comprehension.” 33. David Kemmerer, “Action Verbs, Argument Structure Constructions, and the Mirror Neuron System,” 359. 34. Ibid., 359. For a discussion of these overlaps in the context of the mirrorneuron model, see G.  Buccino et  al., “Listening to Action-Related Sentences Modulates the Activity of the Motor System: A Combined TMS and Behavioral Study.” 35. Kemmerer, “Action Verbs,” 361. 36. Guillemette Bolens, The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative, 39. 37. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 576. 38. Dan I.  Slobin, “Verbalized Events: A Dynamic Approach to Linguistic Relativity and Determinism,” 108 (italics and underscoring mine). 39. Ibid., 113. 40. Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, 218. 41. Riverside Shakespeare, 1333. 42. Ibid. 43. Bert States, “Standing on the Extreme Verge in King Lear and Other High Places,” 425. 44. McNeill, Hand and Mind, 23. 45. David McNeill and Susan D.  Duncan, “Growth Points in Thinking-forSpeaking,” 150–52. 46. McNeill, Hand and Mind, 245–72. 47. In their cognitive studies of acting, John Lutterbie and Rick Kemp provide fuller analysis of the language–gesture relationship from the performer’s point of view. Both draw upon McNeill’s analysis of this relationship, while Kemp integrates McNeill’s framework with Lecoq’s movement-based actor training. See Lutterbie, Toward a General Theory of Acting, 117–28,

220  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

and Kemp, Embodied Acting, 63–92. In Cognition in the Globe, Evelyn B. Tribble argues that the coupling of language and gesture was an attentional and communicative resource for early modern actors and playwrights (85–110). Tribble credits Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy with the technical innovation of “yoking [. . .] action and accent such that the word extends into the world through the medium of the body” (105). 48. Eugene O’Neill, Four Plays by Eugene O’Neill, 120. 49. Ibid. 50. Riverside Shakespeare, 1364. 51. Dench’s performance can be viewed in the 1979 television version of the Royal Shakespeare Company Macbeth, which replicates the staging of the 1976 theatrical production. See Macbeth. 52. Riverside Shakespeare, 1364. 53. For a fuller discussion of this, see Garner, Bodied Spaces, 131–36. 54. George Home-Cook, Theatre and Aural Attention, 167. 55. The Encounter premiered in August 2015 at the Edinburgh International Festival and opened at the London Barbican Theatre six months later. I attended McBurney’s production on tour at New York’s Golden Theatre in December 2016. 56. Complicite and Simon McBurney, The Encounter, 3. 57. Ibid., 41. 58. Ibid., 47. 59. The sound of leaves crunching underfoot was produced by McBurney scrunching the plastic packaging of a water multi-pack around the binaural head. 60. Ibid., 48.

Bibliography Artaud, Antonin. 1958. The Theatre and Its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove. Bolens, Guillemette. 2012. The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Boulenger, Véronique, Olaf Hauk, and Friedemann Pulvermüller. 2009. Grasping Ideas with the Motor System: Somatic Somatotopy in Idiom Comprehension. Cerebral Cortex 19 (8): 1905–1914. Brecht, Bertolt. 1955. Mother Courage and Her Children. English version by Eric Bentley. New York: Grove. Buccino, G., L. Riggio, G. Melli, F. Binkofski, V. Gallese, and G. Rizzolatti. 2005. Listening to Action-Related Sentences Modulates the Activity of the Motor System: A Combined TMS and Behavioral Study. Cognitive Brain Research 24 (3): 355–363.

  LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND MOVEMENT   

221

Complicite and Simon McBurney. 2016. The Encounter. London: Nick Hern. de Boysson-Bardies, Bénédicte, Pierre Halle, Laurant Sagart, and Catherine Durand. 1989. A Crosslinguistic Investigation of Vowel Formants in Babbling. Journal of Child Language 16 (1): 1–17. Fadiga, Luciano, Laila Craighero, Giovanni Buccino, and Giacomo Rizzolatti. 2002. Speech Listening Specifically Modulates the Excitability of Tongue Muscles: A TMS Study. European Journal of Neuroscience 15 (2): 399–402. Gallagher, Shaun. 2005. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garner, Stanton B., Jr. 1994. Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Home-Cook, George. 2015. Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kemmerer, David. 2006. Action Verbs, Argument Structure Constructions, and the Mirror Neuron System. In Action to Language via the Mirror Neuron System, ed. Michael A.  Arbib, 347–373. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kemp, Rick. 2012. Embodied Acting: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Performance. London: Routledge. Kinney, Katherine. 2014. The Resonance of Brando’s Voice. Postmodern Culture 24: 3. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/589569. Accessed 20 July 2016. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Lecoq, Jacques. 2002. The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre. Trans. David Bradby. Rev. ed. London: Methuen. Liberman, Alvin M., and Ignatius G.  Mattingly. 1985. The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Revised. Cognition 21 (1): 1–36. Liberman, Alvin M., and Doug H. Whalen. 2000. On the Relation of Speech to Language. Trends in Cognitive Science 4 (5): 187–196. Lutterbie, John. 2011. Toward a General Theory of Acting: Cognitive Science and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Macbeth. 2004. Directed for Television by Philip Casson, Performances by Ian McKellan and Judi Dench. 1987. DVD. Santa Monica: Lionsgate. McNeill, David. 1992. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McNeill, David, and Susan D.  Duncan. 2000. Growth Points in Thinking-for-­ Speaking. In Language and Gesture, ed. David McNeill, 141–161. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

222  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

Meltzoff, Andew N. 2002. Elements of a Developmental Theory of Imitation. In The Imitative Mind: Development, Evolution, and Brain Bases, ed. Andrew N.  Meltzoff and Wolfgang Prinz, 19–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge. O’Neill, Eugene. 1998. Four Plays by Eugene O’Neill. New York: New American Library. Passarello, Elena. 2012. Let Me Clear My Throat. Louisville: Sarabande. Pulvermüller, Friedemann. 2005. Brain Mechanisms Linking Language and Action. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 6 (7): 576–582. Pulvermüller, Friedemann, and Luciano Fadiga. 2010. Active Perception: Sensorimotor Circuits as a Cortical Basis for Language. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11 (5): 351–360. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin, 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 2011. The Primacy of Movement. Expanded second ed. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Slobin, Dan I. 2000. Verbalized Events: A Dynamic Approach to Linguistic Relativity and Determinism. In Evidence for Linguistic Relativity, ed. Susanne Niemeier and René Dirven, 107–138. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Sophocles. 1982. The Three Theban Plays. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Viking. States, Bert O. 1982. Standing on the Extreme Verge in King Lear and Other High Places. Georgia Review 36 (2): 417–425. Tribble, Evelyn B. 2011. Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Watkins, K.E., A.P.  Strafella, and T.  Paus. 2003. Seeing and Hearing Speech Excites the Motor System Involved in Speech Production. Neurospsychologia 41 (8): 989–994. Williams, Tennessee. 1947. A Streetcar Named Desire. New York: Signet.

Empathy and Otherness

What Is Empathy? It is hard to escape the word empathy these days. In his 2006 graduation address at Northwestern University, future US President Barack Obama urged graduates to cultivate this critical social capacity: “There’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit—the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us— the child who’s hungry, the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room.”1 In the aftermath of his presidential successor’s surprise election ten years later, technology writer Om Malik charged Silicon Valley with having displayed a “distinct lack of empathy for those whose lives are disturbed by its technological wizardry.”2 Questionnaires measure “empathy quotients,” and programs fostering empathy development are offered by schools, medical/health facilities, and prisons. Empathy has also been heralded as a key to successful leadership, business communication, and competitiveness.3 In the era of late capitalism, it seems, even empathy can be monetized. What, though, is empathy? As I noted in the introduction to this book, the term is notoriously imprecise, carrying with it the philosophical, scientific, psychological, psychoanalytic, aesthetic, and popular histories of its use since Edward Titchener introduced the word in the early twentieth century.4 The term is sometimes confused with sympathy, which may owe © The Author(s) 2018 S. B. Garner, Jr., Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre, Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91794-8_7

223

224  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

something to the fact that David Hume and Adam Smith used the latter term in the eighteenth century to describe other-directed engagements that would subsequently be attributed to empathy. Today the word sympathy denotes a concern for another’s suffering, while empathy typically refers to the act of recognizing and sharing another person’s feelings, sensorimotor experiences, and/or perspectives. When it comes to the specific engagements that empathy opens up or the exact operations that underlie it, the study of empathy has been an arena of conflicting definitions and operations. As noted in my introduction, cognitive scientists, psychologists, philosophers of mind, and neuroscientists propose different kinds of empathy or empathic mechanisms.5 One of the most common of these involves a distinction between motor empathy, emotional or affective empathy, and cognitive empathy (the ability to understand another’s perspective or mental state).6 Another frequently proposed distinction is that between lower-order and higher-order empathic mechanisms. In this framework, largely automatic forms of self–other matching such as motor resonance or emotional contagion are distinguished from conscious processes such as perspective taking or imagining how one would feel if one were in the other’s shoes.7 While some who adopt this framework see the former providing a foundation for the other (bottom-up processing), others consider higher-order empathy—the ability to imagine the minds of others—to be the guiding operation in empathic encounters (top-down processing). The frameworks that scientists and philosophers adopt for understanding empathic processes—and the empathic elements within those frameworks that they choose to study—can provide different, seemingly incompatible accounts of empathy and the operations that underlie it. A way out of this situation is offered by those who argue that empathy is a multi-faceted phenomenon, with different processes working together to register and explore the experience of others. As Christian Keysers suggests, “Empathy should thus be seen as a mosaic of subcomponents that together build up the final image of what goes on in other people.”8 Empathy, we know, is an individual and variable activity: some people are more easily attuned to the emotions, intentions, or perspectives of others, and the same individual can empathize in different ways and to different degrees based on the individuals she observes or engages with and the situations in which empathic opportunities arise. While empathy is clearly automatic in some of its operations, it is also context and target dependent. Social neuroscientist Jamil Zaki argues that empathy is a motivated phenomenon in which observers are predisposed to experience empathy

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

225

or avoid it.9 They do so order to avoid painful emotions and costly ethical demands (giving to a charitable organization to help alleviate hunger, for instance), to reap the benefits of identifying with positive emotions, to enhance competitiveness, to benefit from the positive self-image that empathy can confer, and to strengthen group affiliation. This last motivation explains the fact that people have stronger empathic responses when witnessing people whom they identify with experiencing pain than with those they do not.10 In sharply demarcated in-group/out-group identifications (a bitterly contested sports rivalry, intense racial antagonism) detachment from empathic engagement may turn into counter-empathy, enjoyment of another’s pain. According to Zaki, individuals employ regulatory strategies to enhance or inhibit empathic response. In one of these, situation selection, observers choose to put themselves in, or take themselves out of, situations where empathy may arise, thereby “making choices about empathic engagement before being exposed to targets at all.”11 In another, attentional modulation, observers direct their attention away from or toward empathic targets and affective cues—choosing to look away from someone whose suffering causes distress, for example, or toward someone whose excitement one wants to share. With the final strategy, appraisal, observers make assessments concerning the intensity, meaning, or value of a target’s affective states—deciding, for instance, that a hungry person’s situation results from a failure of personal responsibility (an appraisal that may curtail empathy) or that it results from unjust economic policies (an appraisal that may facilitate it). These strategies for regulating empathy operate in tandem with each other at the pre-­deliberative level to establish individual, contextually responsive attunements and engagements. From the writings of Edith Stein and Edmund Husserl to the present, phenomenology has adopted a different perspective on empathy than those adopted by empirical science. Detailed discussion of this perspective is beyond my purpose here, but I will identify some of its features that bear on my analysis of kinesthesia, resonance, and empathic engagement in this book.12 When phenomenologists talk about empathy, they do so as part of the broader question of intersubjectivity. How do I apprehend the minds and experiences of others, and in what ways are these given to me? Rejecting any suggestion that this apprehension entails an inference based on one’s own experience, phenomenologists insist that one experiences the other directly through the gestures and actions that express her emotions and intentions. I do not infer that a child running toward me is

226  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

frightened or happy, for example; I observe these states directly in her expression and movements. Consciousness, phenomenologists claim, is open and directed to the experience of others just as it is open and directed to the world it inhabits. Indeed, the objective world discloses the other to me at the same moment it discloses itself, for my knowledge that a rock facing me has another side involves an awareness that it is seeable from other vantage points. The same thing applies to me, since I exist for others and derive my awareness of myself, in part, through the other’s awareness of me. The world, the other, and I myself, in other words, are constituted intersubjectively, which is another way of saying that the consciousness of the other—or my consciousness-of-the-consciousness-of-the-other—is phenomenologically irreducible in my experience. In her 1917 treatise On the Problem of Empathy, which originated as a dissertation written under Edmund  Husserl’s supervision, Edith Stein applies the term empathy to all “acts in which foreign experience is comprehended.”13 This is at once a broader and more restricted definition of the term than many of the definitions surveyed above. Because the experience of others is something I can directly observe in their actions and expressions, Stein distinguishes the apprehension of another’s experience from the apprehension of non-experiencing objects. When someone tells me that he has lost his brother, she writes, I become aware of his pain. Although I perceive the person’s pain in his countenance, it is not given to me as a thing; rather, “I perceive this countenance outwardly and the pain is given ‘at one’ with it.”14 In this sense, the pain I perceive is not given to me “primordially” in the same way that the appearance of a tree (or the pained countenance) is.15 This distinction is amplified in all levels of empathic engagement. Imagining the sight of a person sitting at a table, Stein writes: The hand resting on the table does not lie there like the book beside it. It “presses” against the table more or less strongly; it lies there limpid or stretched; and I “see” these sensations of pressure and tension in a con-­primordial way. If I follow out the tendencies to fulfillment in this “co-­comprehension,” my hand is moved (not in reality, but “as if”) to the place of the foreign one. It is moved into it and occupies its position and attitude, now feeling its sensations, though not primordially and not as being its own.16

Like Husserl, Stein rejects Lipps’s suggestion that the observer watching an acrobat becomes one with the moving figure in an act of empathic

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

227

merging: “I am not one with the acrobat but only ‘at’ him. I do not actually go through his motions but quasi.”17 This distinction is useful when it comes to measuring claims about what empathy accomplishes and what it does not. Empathy manifests itself in multiple ways, according to phenomenologists, but these processes or types of empathy are not as sharply distinguished as they are in psychological or neuroscientific accounts, nor are they attributable to separate faculties, cognitive or otherwise. Rather, they represent different accomplishments within a common self–other orientation. What Stein calls reiterative empathy, for instance—my awareness that I exist as an empathic target for the other as she exists for me—is both a form of empathy and an elaboration of the same intersubjective awareness that underlies all of one’s encounters. Evan Thompson draws on this tradition and the holistic understanding of empathy it provides in order to propose a “phenomenological typology” of empathic experience. According to Thompson, empathy entails the following modes, or levels: 1. the passive or involuntary coupling or pairing of my living body with your living body in perception and action; 2. the imaginary movement or transposition of myself into your place; 3. the understanding of you as an other to me, and of me as an other to you; 4. the moral perception of you as a person.18 Operating at the level of gesture, posture, and movement, Thompson’s first type of empathy refers to the sensorimotor and affective attunement (or resonance) of self and other. It extends beyond the recognition of the other as an object of comprehension to the “experiences of another as a living bodily subject like oneself.”19 Because it establishes the intercorporeal basis of intersubjectivity, it serves as a support for the other empathic levels and accomplishments. Thompson’s second type of empathy involves exchanging places with the other so that one can imaginatively assume the other’s perspective. This transposition is a more active process than sensorimotor or affective resonance, according to Thompson, and it is a necessary achievement for the third empathic type, which encompasses Stein’s reiterative empathy. By allowing me to achieve an intersubjective perspective on myself as a participant in social interactions, the ability to understand myself as an other for someone else lays the ground for language acquisition, symbolic representation, and communicative conventions.20

228  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

Thompson’s final type of empathy is the perception of the other as a being who merits concern and respect. Thompson is careful to point out that this type of empathy is not the same as particular feelings of concern (sympathy or compassion, for instance); rather, “it is the underlying capacity to have such other-directed and other-regarding feelings of concern.”21 In referring to this capacity as “moral perception,” Thompson broadens the notion of moral obligation from the determination of right and wrong to the recognition of the other as a subject who exists in and of herself and who possesses dignity and worth. The word concern also raises the issue of ethical responsibility.

Empathic Solicitation The cognitive and phenomenological models of empathy touched on have much to offer the study of empathy in the theatre. The former models highlight empathy’s neurocognitive mechanisms, and they offer empirical insight into how external and motivational factors influence empathic operations. The latter models, using different but equally rigorous methods, provide an integrated, experientially oriented account of empathy that considers its embodied, intersubjective underpinnings. One considers empathy a cornerstone of social cognition; the other considers it the vehicle by which “self and other bring forth each other reciprocally.”22 My own contribution to these theories in the present chapter and the ones that precede it is to explore the sensorimotor dimension of empathy in the context of performance. To the extent that kinesthetic resonance is a form of empathy—and it is in all of the theories considered above—then the previous chapters have explored this subject without using the word. Focusing on movement perception and all it entails makes this choice less restrictive than some empathic models suggest. While neuroscientists may distinguish sensorimotor empathy from emotional empathy in terms of the neural regions involved, for instance, we have seen how integrated the two are in intentional movements: when two hockey players start fighting during a game, our perception of their emotions is inseparable from the spectacle of their flailing arms (and vice versa). Empathy studies that focus on sharing the emotions of another often neglect the sensorimotor aspects of this affective transposition, and these include the study of affect in performance theory. Similarly, the distinction that some empathy models establish between lower-order and higher-order empathic processes—with motor resonance restricted to the former category—is challenged by our investigation so far. Language,

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

229

which is intimately involved in the cognitively “higher” activities of imaginative transposition, perspective taking, and reiterative empathy, also involves kinesthetic resonance. While sensorimotor engagement is not the only route to empathic comprehension, in short, it is hard to imagine an empathic situation that does not involve it to some degree or another. This is acutely the case, of course, in the theatre’s kinetic/kinesthetic environment, where bodies move and words do, as well. Approaching one’s engagements with others from the perspectives of movement and movement perception underscores the extent to which empathy is a dynamic, enactive process rather than a stance one adopts and holds in unchanging form. Theorists and researchers who distinguish empathic processes as lower level or higher level often restrict temporality to the motor and affective resonance systems that comprise the former while imagining upper-level processes as states of mind. As John H. Muse notes, “Discussions of empathy by psychologists, philosophers, and performance theorists largely ignore the issue of time.”23 Some of empathy’s accomplishments do, of course, persist beyond the moment in a settled identification with another. But even these are modified by developments, adjustments, and reorientations. Within the sensorimotor/affective attunement that marks all my encounters, empathy intensifies and attenuates, shifts registers. I can phase in and out of empathy—realizing it in a moment of identification, losing it in a moment of distraction or redirected attention. From this viewpoint, empathy’s achievement lies less in what we are left with than what we enact along the way. The analysis I have pursued throughout this book demonstrates another aspect of kinesthetically oriented empathy and the attentional faculty that directs it. As we have seen, attention is a selective mechanism: I engage with certain movements in my perceptual environment more strongly than others, and these movements are intensified for me as a result of this awareness. Inhabiting the experience of others often requires the ability to select among competing empathic solicitations. As David Krasner points out, “Empathy elicits possibilities rather than certainties.”24 Neuroscientific accounts of mirroring mechanisms tend to stress the automaticity of motor resonance: because neuronal activity takes place at the pre-conscious level, these accounts suggest, mirroring and its empathic operations take place outside one’s control. Something of this attitude informs cognitive theatre theorist Bruce McConachie’s characterization of empathy as “a proactive search engine that is always ready to engage intentional onstage action and mirror it for meaning.”25 While McConachie’s metaphor effectively cap-

230  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

tures the dynamic, exploratory nature of empathic engagement, its mechanistic orientation risks eliding empathy’s elective dimension. The work of Zaki and others on empathic motivation offers a way of thinking about empathy that includes automatic as well as non-automatic factors. One’s resistance to looking at someone sleeping on an urban sidewalk vent on a cold night involves pre-conscious motivations, but one has a choice about whether to look away—or keep looking away if one initially averted one’s eyes. Different choices in a situation like this have different empathic consequences. Within the center–periphery framework of awareness, certain objects and individuals solicit attention more than others. This phenomenon is certainly true in the theatre, where actors are often foregrounded on stage according to their attentional importance. Empathic engagement can follow these cues, it can resist them, or it can direct itself to different objects with varying intensities. At other times, attentional objects are more dispersed, and empathic mechanisms identify specific targets while relegating others to the empathic margins (Anton Chekhov is a master of empathic decentering). In a field of competing attentional claims, spectators can find themselves torn between empathic targets. Sometimes these conflicts involve different kinds of empathic investments—between sensorimotor resonance and moral alignment, for instance. In medieval morality drama, to suggest an example, the vice figures who harass and tempt the central character are kinetically more engaging than the virtue figures who represent their moral superiors: they prance around the stage, manipulate objects, and physicalize their distractions in movement, gesture, and ­kinesthetically evocative language. Compared to the virtue figures, who move less and whose homiletic speeches tend to be kinesthetically static, these figures steal the scenes they are in. For virtue to triumph in morality drama, as it inevitably does, the spectator’s kinesthetic identification with vice must give way to more sober empathic alignments: with virtue’s defender and, more crucially, with the allegorical human figure who heeds his exhortations.26 The kinesthetic and moral stakes of this empathic dynamic are easily contained in morality drama: resonance with the mischief figures’ antics engages us vicariously in venial transgressions, but the moral consequences of serious involvement are precluded by the comic tone of these antics and the triumph of right action in the plays’ resolution. But conflict can be sharper and more intractable, especially in instances when unexpected kinesthetic solicitations arise to trouble our engagement with what we observe.

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

231

The blinding of Gloucester in Act 3, Scene 7 of King Lear is an acute example of this. Audience members have fainted during an act that Samuel Johnson considered “too horrid to be endured in dramatick exhibition,” while many others over the centuries have closed their eyes or looked away.27 Averting or closing one’s eyes does not entirely protect one from the scene’s horrific action—one hears Gloucester’s cries, fills in the visuals with what one imagines, senses the shock in the bodies of other spectators—but it does enact a reflexive urge to absent oneself from what takes place, even if this attempt is ultimately unsuccessful. Having closed my eyes for years at a scene I still find difficult to watch, I initially explained this avoidance as a way of staving off Gloucester’s trauma by shutting my eyelids in sympathetic protection of his eyes as well as my own. Sigmund Freud describes the fear of blindness in terms of castration anxiety, and losing one’s eyes is more broadly traumatic in an ontological/epistemic order where vision is closely aligned with subjectivity and the eyes constitute one of the seeing self’s primary ways of “having” its world.28 It was only later that a more uncomfortable avoidance rationale suggested itself to me: that my resistance to watching Gloucester’s blinding was directed at its perpetrator’s actions as well as its victim’s suffering. It was Cornwall, in other words, from whom I was driven to dissociate myself as he pushed forward and plucked out the old man’s eyes. Kinesthetically and gesturally, I felt his action in my own body as if I was co-enacting, against my will, the cruelty I witnessed.29 On the surface, in other words, the scene’s empathic claims seem fairly simple: whatever kinesthetic, emotional, and moral alignments the spectator may have established with the character during the play’s earlier acts, empathic allegiance with Gloucester is morally imperative when he undergoes the atrocity of having his eyes plucked out. The kinetic initiatives in this brutal encounter, though, are taken by Cornwall, who describes what he is about to do in starkly visceral language then carries it out forcefully with his fingers, arms, and shoulders. One can appreciate the strength of these counter-solicitations in King Lear’s blinding scene by considering the care with which Shakespeare calls attention to the blinding as a sensorimotor act. In Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, which provided Shakespeare with his Gloucester subplot, the blind King of Paphlagonia mentions his blinding and the mistreatments that preceded and followed it as a single completed event: I had left myself nothing but the name of a king; which he shortly weary of too, with many indignities (if anything may be called an indignity which was

232  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

laid upon me) threw me out of my seat, and put out my eyes; and then, proud in his tyranny, let me go, neither imprisoning nor killing me, but rather delighting to make me feel my misery—misery indeed, if ever there were any—full of wretchedness, fuller of disgrace, and fullest of guiltiness.30

Distancing what happened through the act of narration, the king provides no details of the blinding itself or the experience of being subjected to it. Shakespeare, by contrast, emphasizes the sensorimotor dynamics of blinding: the effort that Cornwall’s servants have to make to hold the chair so that he can exert the required force and immobilize a powerless Gloucester, the sequence of removing one eye then the other, and the viscosity of the second eye when he digs it out (“Out, vile jelly”).31 The intentionality and force of Cornwall’s gestures is reinforced by verbal references throughout this scene to blinding and other forms of tearing into the flesh of others. When Goneril exits the stage at the scene’s beginning, for instance, she tells Cornwall that he should “[p]luck out” the old man’s eyes.32 Gloucester subsequently anticipates this action in kinetically violent terms when he responds to Regan’s question “Wherefore to Dover?” by saying, “Because I would not see thy cruel nails / Pluck out his poor old eyes, nor thy fierce sister / In his anointed flesh [rash] boarish fangs.”33 Given, as we have seen, that action verbs trigger motor resonances similar to the ones we experience when observing an action, the plucking, piercing, and tearing in these and other references frame violence from the perpetrator’s point of view. If an involuntary kinesthetic affinity with Cornwall’s violent action is something we try to shield ourselves from, what are we trying to escape? In a provocative essay entitled “Empathy for the Devil,” Adam Morton argues that individuals internalize a code of behavior that blocks their capacity to empathize with those who perform atrocious acts.34 This “decency barrier” limits not only one’s ability to understand and make an ethical assessment of others but also one’s ability to recognize potentialities for human action within oneself, as well. By presenting morally unacceptable actions alongside the ones we incur comparatively little psychic cost in identifying with, theatre challenges these empathic barriers. If the spectator’s moral allegiance occasions horror, outrage, and a sensorimotor/kinesthetic identification with Gloucester as he struggles against a violation he is unable to escape, a strong counter-identification with Cornwall as the agential focus of this interaction kinesthetically implicates the

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

233

s­ pectator in his cruel actions and the sadistic intention they enact. While the motor initiative of this sequence is momentarily seized by Cornwall’s servant, who directs the duke to “Hold your hand” and engages him in combat, whatever ethical relief the spectator is allowed through these gestures of resistance is brief: the servant is killed from behind and Cornwall reasserts his ability to act on Gloucester with impunity by plucking out his other eye.35 Our engagements here, as elsewhere in this scene, are conflicting and painful: we share the servant’s outrage at what is happening to Gloucester (“Nay then come on, and take the chance of anger”), but, kinesthetically speaking, we are complicit in his blinding.36 While the self-­ repressing cognitive mechanisms that protect us from identifications with an action this unconfrontable will work to disown this recognition, the empathic dissonance produced by Shakespeare’s brief but savage sequence violates any pretense of spectatorial distance with a directness that protective mechanisms cannot contain. Morton’s concept of a decency barrier suggests that the cognitive wounding of an empathic encounter with those who commit atrocious acts lies primarily in an individual’s moral self-regard. Because my sense of myself hinges on my belief that I am a good person, I cannot allow an empathic response that aligns me with morally objectionable actions. This notion has obvious applicability to King Lear, the actions of which assail decency at every turn. But the refusal to engage that decency barriers attempt is only one aspect of the spectator’s engagement with a spectacle as kinesthetically conflictive as Gloucester’s blinding. If sensorimotor resonance with intentional action is automatic, as researchers on this mechanism agree, then the spectator has already empathized with the act of blinding by the time the impulse to disavow this act arises. Rather than refusing to engage Cornwall’s actions, the effort to shield oneself acknowledges an identification that has already taken place pre-consciously or on the margins of awareness. We know what it is like to blind someone because—vicariously, at least—we find ourselves doing it. Inhabited by what it abhors, spectatorship is doubly unmoored by the scene’s extremity. What does it mean to engage kinesthetically with acts of atrocity? Do we disavow empathy by closing our eyes or looking away? What responsibility does witnessing such acts entail, even when these acts are representational, not actual, and we know that the actor playing Gloucester will step forward when the play is over, eyes intact, and watch us applaud him? Cornwall’s assault on Gloucester’s defenseless eyes raises these questions

234  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

with painful immediacy. In Totality and Infinity Emmanuel Levinas identifies the Other’s face with the ethical claims of alterity. The Other, Levinas writes, “remains infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign; his face in which his epiphany is produced and which appeals to me breaks with the world that can be common between us.”37 This alterity, which asserts itself beyond my egoistic projects, “presents itself as a face in the ethical resistance that paralyzes my powers and from the depths of defenseless eyes rises firm and absolute in its nudity and destitution.”38 The Other’s face represents both the temptation to murder and the ethical prohibition against doing so: in Roger Burggraeve’s words, “The face of the other signifies for me the experience of violence as continuous enchantment and real possibility, and thus immediately the ethical ‘shame’ that I must not be the murderer of the other.”39 Murder, in Levinasian terms, is an effort to remove the Other’s alterity in a gesture of omnipotence; to blind someone, following this logic, is to wound the Other’s I/eye with a gesture that leaves one’s victim alive to testify to this loss. It is also an attempt to consolidate the ego’s autonomy by removing the eyes that look back. Looking and looking back, of course, are intrinsic to theatre, with looking understood as a perceptual and intersubjective access that is not limited, necessarily, to the sense of vision. The ethics of alterity that Shakespeare’s blinding scene foregrounds in starkly kinesthetic terms characterizes all theatrical encounters, not just those where physical violence is enacted or simulated. As this book has asked from its earliest pages, what can we know or understand about others through empathy, and how ready are we to acknowledge the line between what we may have access to and what we do not? At the level of kinesthetic engagement, how can empathy bridge the gap between individuals without eclipsing the other within the self’s projections? The next section addresses these questions by returning to the issues of difference and kinesthetic knowability introduced in the chapter “Movement, Difference, and Ability” and continued in the chapters that followed. Here, as elsewhere throughout this study, disability provides an important field for thinking about the kinesthetic apprehension—and ethics—of otherness.

Empathy and Alterity Empathy, to some, is an all-or-nothing accomplishment. From one point of view, empathy confers total (or near total) access to the experience of others: when I empathize with you, I overcome the boundaries that differentiate us and achieve a kind of merging. Mirror neuron enthusiasts

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

235

often subscribed to this view in the decade and a half after their discovery. In a 2009 lecture neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran described what he called “empathy neurons”: “You are, in fact, connected not just via Facebook and [the] Internet, you’re actually quite literally connected by your neurons. And there is [sic]  whole chains of neurons around this room, talking to each other. And there is no real distinctiveness of your consciousness from somebody else’s consciousness.”40 Empathy skeptics, on the other hand, view others as unknowable and attempts to know them as self-referential exercises doomed to fail. This view underlines the epistemological relativism of Luigi Pirandello’s plays, where mirrors only reflect one’s own image, and it is often implicit in the writings of identity theorists who consider such categories absolute and unbridgeable. Individuals who meet certain identity parameters, a version of this belief implies, have a built-in pathway to empathic understanding, while those who fall outside these parameters lack this (or any kind of) access. This position, it should be noted, has a basis in fact: as we have seen, neuroscientific accounts of human mirroring systems demonstrate a connection between one’s experiential history and the intensity of one’s motor resonance responses to others. In-group identifications motivate empathy engagement, while those who share identity affiliations often share the experiences and histories that empathy nourishes itself on. From one vantage point, problems arise when intersubjectivity is understood as an unimpeded access between selves; from the other vantage point, they arise when difference is construed as an intersubjective barrier. With those we share things with and those we do not, empathy is never an all-ornothing affair. As both vantage points acknowledge, empathy is a function of otherness. If my subjectivity were one with everyone else’s, there would be no empathy, language, or other intersubjective achievements. Empathy arises when another subjectivity impinges on my mine, announces itself as a limit to my egocentric world. To Levinas, this other is transcendent—outside and beyond my experience, “irreducible to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions.”41 Epitomized in the face-to-face encounter, this transcendence “introduces into me what was not in me” and summons me to responsibility for the other and for myself.42 Philosophical and political systems have responded to this shock of alterity, according to Levinas, by totalizing or assimilating difference within the same, thereby neutralizing its ethical challenge. While Levinas did not explicitly address empathy in his writings, his theory of the other’s radical claim clarifies the limit, and the condition,

236  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

of sensorimotor and other forms of it. On one hand, the other confronts me with an alien subjectivity and, in so doing, ruptures my assumptions of sameness: “[The Other’s] face in which his epiphany is produced and which appeals to me breaks with the world that can be common to us, whose virtualities are inscribed in our nature and developed by our existence.”43 Empathy, from a Levinasian perspective, can never overcome the other’s alterity; indeed, it suppresses this alterity when it claims to possess it. On the other hand, by summoning me to what Levinas calls responsabilité (in the dual sense of “responsibility” and “response-ability”), the other’s transcendence frees me from solipsism and makes a genuine social and ethical relationship possible. Language, for Levinas, is the primary vehicle of this relationship, but we can broaden his notion of human sociality to include other forms of self–other response-ability, including empathy. Like language, empathy is an attempt to engage alterity—to enter a relationship with another through the encounter with what is not me. The comparison is fitting, since language is an important empathic channel. By reminding us that the inter in intersubjectivity is a betweenness, not a merging, Levinas’s insistence on the Other’s transcendence is a rejoinder to empathy theories and theories of sensorimotor resonance that blur the line between self and other. One of the ways that empathy can go wrong, a Levinasian perspective suggests, is when the subject appropriates the Other’s difference within what it already knows and fails to acknowledge the Other as other. Matthew Ratcliffe, who has considered depression from a phenomenological point of view, writes: “When you attempt to understand someone’s experience but concede defeat, you at least recognize that there is a difference. A more profound failure of empathy, ­however, is when you fail to recognize that there is a difference. Here the possibility of empathizing with the other person’s experience is not even entertained.”44 When this situation arises—usually because one assumes commonality where it is absent or where the experience in question is attenuated or contingent in ways that one does not consider—the other becomes an extension of the self and its experiential/social categories. A corresponding way that empathy can go wrong, of course, is when alterity is recognized but disowned through any one of several strategies: ignoring or denying it, treating it as an object of repugnance or ridicule, or relegating it to a limiting identity category.45 If the first misstep is a failure to recognize alterity’s transcendence, the second is a failure to acknowledge its solicitations—to engagement, response, and dynamic intersubjectivity. Empathy, when it does its work, avoids both missteps.

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

237

The imperatives of otherness shape my account of kinesthetic spectatorship throughout this book. They inform my appropriation of Husserl’s I can/I cannot in the chapter “Movement, Difference, and Ability,” where the concepts of ability and inability characterize not just my experience of sensorimotor possibility but also my efforts to experientially comprehend the movements of those who inhabit their bodies and move through the world differently than I do. Otherness also informs my analysis of movement and movement perception in theatrical and performative contexts— most obviously in the case of disability performance (AXIS Dance Company, Deaf West, and others) but also in the examples drawn from non-disabled performance. The “glass of water” encounter between Lenny and Ruth in Peter Hall’s production of The Homecoming, for example, enacts a fierce negotiation of the self–other boundary at the level of sensorimotor and other modes of empathic identification. As the characters wrest physical and verbal initiative from each other, the scene’s shifting and competing kinesthetic solicitations draw the spectator toward one figure and away from the other. Since it is impossible to inhabit both perspectives at the same time, each character withdraws into otherness from the spectator’s point of view when attention is seized by his or her interlocutor. Like other forms of performance, this sequence suggests, theatre is a privileged site for the staging of otherness: actors inhabit the stage and interact as competing subjectivities and as attentional objects to each other and to us. The issues involved in empathy, alterity, and divergence were sharply foregrounded in Sam Gold’s 2017 Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. This production, which starred Sally Field and Joe Mantello as Amanda and Tom Wingfield, was marked by its departure from Williams’s atmospheric stage directions. Gone were the “rather dim and poetic” interior setting with its wistful portrait of the father who abandoned the family years earlier; gone, as well, were the lighting and music that intensify the feel of gauziness, transparency, and illusion in conventional productions of Williams’s play.46 The Belasco Theatre’s stripped-­ down stage consisted of a black stage wall with a single exit door, a folding table and chairs, a Victrola phonograph, and a cart off to the side that provided actors with additional props. Gold’s rejection of the atmospheric and the symbolic was also reflected in his decision to cast Madison Ferris, an actor with muscular dystrophy, as Laura Wingfield. In making this choice, Gold responded to an invitation that Williams’s text both extends and qualifies. A childhood bout of pleurisy has left Laura “crippled,” according to Williams’s character description, with one leg slightly

238  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

shorter than the other, a leg brace, and a perceptible limp. This “defect,” however, need only be suggested on stage. The stage directions involving Laura stress her unearthliness as well as the “exquisite fragil[ity]” that links her to the figures in her glass collection.47 Accentuating rather than undermining her delicacy, disability here functions less as a physical condition than as a symbol of her inner unfitness for the world outside her apartment’s walls. Explaining his decision not to sublimate disability as Williams’s text encourages, Gold commented, “The Glass Menagerie is one of the few plays in the canon where there’s a character with a mobility disability, and I’d never seen it done with an actor with a mobility disability. I thought that it would be a shame to do the play again and not give that opportunity to an actor that has a mobility disability.”48 By bringing disability out into the open, Ferris’s presence gave the play a dramatically different Laura than the one portrayed in most productions of The Glass Menagerie. Unable to stand or walk on her own, Ferris uses a wheelchair, and when she moves without its aid she does so by elevating her bottom at a sharp angle, balancing her body on her hands and toes, inching forward with her hands, then catching up with her hind quarters or slowly walking on all four limbs. When she sat outside her wheelchair during the play, she often squatted with her body balanced on her feet; when she danced with Jim, they both squatted. Gold’s production went to unusual lengths not to hide Ferris’s disability or the physical effort her compromised mobility required of her and the play’s other actors. When Tom delivered his opening monologue to the audience, the other performers entered unobtrusively from a side door of the auditorium—Ferris in a wheelchair pushed by Field—and faced the audience in front of the stage. They eventually joined him onstage using a set of wooden stairs that had been constructed for this purpose. When it was Ferris’s turn to climb the stairs, she got out of her wheelchair by balancing her weight on her hands and inching backwards onto the first step. Maneuvering her bottom up one step at a time, she pulled her legs up with the help of Field, who hauled the unwieldy wheelchair to the stage before returning to assist her. The laborious sequence took several minutes to complete.49 While Ferris’s performance in Gold’s production was widely praised, her casting proved controversial. Some found the use of a disabled actor exploitative in a production that displayed her impairments so nakedly, while others pointed to the mismatch between Ferris’s physical limitations and the actions her character is credited with, such as spending days

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

239

walking around the city when she is supposed to be in typing class. A third group—which may include members of the first two and others who did not say anything one way or the other because they were embarrassed to admit this response—had a visceral response to Ferris’s condition and the alienness or apparent awkwardness of her movements. In a harshly uncharitable review, Rex Reed wrote: Then there is the harrowing presence of newcomer Madison Ferris, who plays Tom’s sister Laura as a pathetic and deformed social reject. Based on Tennessee’s real sister Rose, Laura is written as a shy, fragile girl with no self-­reliance and no social skills. Ferris makes her a pitiful, grotesque invalid. This is no fault of her own. Showing a sadistic streak that is far from flattering, Sam Gold must have considered it larky and bold to cast an actress who has actual muscular dystrophy victim [sic] in the role, but it’s a gimmick that backfires. [ . . . ] Ferris is attractive and capable, but when she moves, she raises herself with her stomach, spine and two hands and the other actors have to fit her into a wheelchair. Forgive me if it’s not a politically correct thing to say, but I found her struggle alarmingly distracting enough to throw the whole play off balance.50

I cite Reed’s review because I believe that the discomfort it articulates is kinesthetic as well as aesthetic. Like the contortionist that occasions revulsion in John Martin’s account of kinesthetic empathy in modern dance, Ferris’s disability disrupted the normative movement assumptions that able-bodied actors and spectators share when they perform and witness theatrical action: I move in a world where others move as I do, and the movements I observe resemble the movements I habitually execute. When these expectations are not met—when movement perception confronts an otherness outside the kinetic repertoire it is familiar with—the kinesthetic mechanisms involved in resonance and sensorimotor empathy are challenged. As disability theorist Tobin Siebers points out, “Taste and disgust are volatile reactions that reveal the ease or disease with which one body might incorporate another.”51 Phenomenological attention clarifies the nature of this challenge. Watching Ferris’s performance from the front of the auditorium (the stairs were eight or nine feet away from me), I indeed found her movements difficult to understand or recognize. She seemed to be in control of her movements, but I had no way of knowing since I could not project myself into her movements or imagine how they were executed. Since muscular dystrophy involves a progressive weakening and breakdown of skeletal

240  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

muscles, exactly which of her muscles were weakened and to what extent? What muscles did she rely on when she moved her body, and how did these combine in order to translate intention into movement? Twice during the performance I attended, Ferris slipped and fell while conducting movements, and the other actors responded by helping her. Were these accidents scripted or were they unplanned? Because hers was a different kind of embodiment with a different set of kinetic capabilities than the ones I am familiar with, at moments her actions felt alien, as if she were someone whose body had evolved differently than mine. The able-bodied actors who shared the stage with her were kinesthetically accessible in a way that she was not, and this difference was particularly clear when they physically interacted with her. Though the otherness of Ferris’s motor capabilities in relation to my own was considerable, however, the act of watching her was charged, for me, with unexpected kinesthetic affinities. As with Dwayne Schuenemann’s wheelchair performance in the AXIS Dance Company production of Divide, I resonated kinesthetically with the feeling of one’s limbs not moving when commanded to do so, though my experience of this has been temporary and not the result of a permanent mobility condition. I felt, as well, a powerful sense of her determination to move—even if I could not grasp her motor strategies—and the discipline she marshaled to do so. This was in keeping with the character she worked to convey. Self-possessed and independent, Ferris’s Laura turned out to be the play’s strongest survivor: while Tom’s candles were blown out in the play’s closing moments, hers remained lit. In a Levinasian paradox, the dignity I observed in Ferris’s performance was related to the fact that the impediments she dealt with and the motor resources she displayed eluded my grasp. The nakedness and opacity of her disability were presented to me without apology, explanation, or the need to accommodate them to my expectations. The fact that I can only guess what it is like to be her was my issue, not hers. While motor resonance may provide limited access to an embodiment appreciably different from one’s own, in other words, its failure opens up other possibilities for spectatorial engagement, including empathy. Different empathic channels may counter this dissonance: verbal articulation of a character’s experiences and intentions, for example, summon the spectator to inhabit her first-person perspective. But genuine otherness—that which transcends the perceiving subject—remains intransigent in its resistance to phenomenological and cognitive absorption. In her study of trauma representation in contemporary art, Jill Bennett advocates “an empathy

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

241

grounded not in affinity (feeling for another insofar as we can imagine being that other) but on a feeling for another that entails an encounter with something irreducible and different, often inaccessible.”52 We have already noted Wanda Strukus’s observation that “while it is more pleasant to imagine that the cognitive mechanisms of empathy allow us to truly connect with one another, instead of giving us a very convincing illusion of connecting with one another, knowing that we are always missing the mark is useful information for strengthening empathic bonds.”53 Strukus believes, as I do, that such strengthening is possible, that an observer’s motor repertoire can be expanded and refined, establishing empathic inroads into what was previously seen as “othered.” Where identification ends, in other words, other forms of perception and relationship begins. As Gold’s The Glass Menagerie progressed, I grew more accustomed to the skeletomuscular dynamics of Ferris’s movements—not as something I could imagine myself experiencing but as an alternative set of movement possibilities in my understanding of the world. What initially felt awkward acquired a gracefulness and vitality beyond the aesthetic predispositions that most in the audience had brought to the theatre. David Vincent Kimel, one of the play’s other reviewers, describes a similar experience: A long silence ensued as the performers went through the cumbersome process of lifting Ferris’ wheelchair onto the stage. My heart skipped a beat. I had no idea that a performer with muscular dystrophy had been cast as Laura, who is described in the script as “crippled.” Out of her chair, back arched, and down on all fours, she moved with an indescribable elegance, flowing like water across the stage. I’d never seen a production before where the physical components of Laura’s handicap were explored with such nuance. Both the challenges and elegances of physical movement are so central to Ferris’ characterization that it almost feels at times like a dance performance. [ . . .] There is no awkwardness on display here, usually par for the course in performers’ interpretations of the shy and fragile character. Ferris’ Laura is long acclimated to the challenges of her difference. She owns them. And in her space, Laura moves confidently, uniquely, and quite elegantly.54

Confronting the unfamiliar as well as the familiar, the spectatorial engagement Kimel describes is marked by empathy, appreciation, and wonder. Kimel’s experience—and mine—differed dramatically from that of Reed and others who felt disturbed by Ferris’s performance and criticized it for that reason. Not all kinesthetic-empathic solicitations are responded

242  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

to. Jolting the framework of what we are accustomed to—a response like Reed’s suggests—alterity can be difficult to bear. As a consequence of this discomfort, it can be reified in ways that deny the possibility of commonality and relationship. In this sense, the hyper-othering of those with disabilities may be the greatest inhibitory mechanism to kinesthetically grounded empathy in the realm of corporeal difference. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson points out in Staring: How We Look, the stares of able-­ bodied individuals directed at non-normative corporeality stigmatize those who do not fit the visual status quo. This othering, Garland-­Thomson suggests, conceals—and is driven by—powerful and uncomfortable recognitions. Disability and non-normative embodiment call attention to my own body’s contingencies and vulnerabilities, to the fact that “[e]ach one of us ineluctably acquires one or more disabilities—naming them variably as illness, disease, injury, old age, failure, dysfunction, or dependence.”55 A phenomenologically and cognitively nuanced understanding of kinesthetic spectatorship clarifies the perceptual and corporeal dynamics of this recognition. Encountering disability can be uncomfortable for the non-disabled observer, in part, because this observer reproduces disability as a vicarious and potentially ownable form of kinesthetic experience. In this as in other cases of vicarious enactment, resonance originates in recognition. Those having this response may seek to disown their recognition through aversion, denial, fear, ridicule, or pity, but the cognitive act of incorporating disability entails an unavoidable, pre-­reflective intimacy—what Margrit Shildrick elegantly terms “the imbrication within difference that weaves together two apparently distinct forms of embodiment.”56 Insofar as disability exists as a kinesthetic actuality or potential, then, one’s engagement with it accrues experiential weight through the observer’s own bodymemory, which holds unacknowledged affinities with divergent forms of embodiment. In this, as in all instances where otherness is at stake, we do well to remind ourselves, in Michael Taussig’s words, that alterity is “a relationship, not a thing in itself.”57

Acting Disabled While Madison Ferris was not the first disabled actor to perform the role of Laura Wingfield, as the first wheelchair-bound actor to appear on Broadway in a non-musical role she was certainly the most visible.58 The vast majority of Lauras, of course, have been played by non-disabled actors who put on a leg brace, adjust their movements, and play down to limitations they do

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

243

not actually possess. This longstanding convention of non-­disabled performers taking on disabled roles remains highly controversial within the disability rights community and on the part of those who support it. Given the historical backdrop of disability caricature, non-disabled representations of disability have been viewed by many as the equivalent of blackface. The popularity of disability impersonation reinforces this critique. The fact that Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Daniel Day Lewis, Eddie Redmayne, and others have been popularly and critically rewarded for their onscreen performances of impairment while disabled actors are rarely cast in mainstream roles reflects what many see as the public’s voyeuristic/sentimental consumption of disability representation and the marketability of nondisabled actors “cripping up.”59 Those who hold this view found plenty of support in the 2014 Broadway revival of Bernard Pomerance’s 1977 play The Elephant Man, which starred Bradley Cooper as Joseph Merrick, the well-known nineteenth-century British man who suffered from Proteus syndrome, a rare genetic condition that causes abnormal growths and deformities.60 The New York production became a star vehicle for Cooper, who had been named the “Sexiest Man Alive” by People magazine in 2011 and was also being lauded when the production was announced for his performance in the film American Sniper. Production photos featured Cooper standing in a pair of boxer shorts both as himself and with his body contorted as Merrick, his chiseled body and photogenic features establishing an uncomfortable contrast to the historical Merrick’s disfigurement.61 Wondering “why in this day and age an attractive, charismatic, successful guy plays arguably the most famous and famously deformeddisabled person in all of modern history,” Gregg Mozgala, who founded a disability-oriented theatre company called The Apothetae, staged a reading of Pomerance’s play shortly after the Cooper production opened featuring actors with disabilities.62 In conjunction with this reading he produced photos of his actors in poses that imitated Cooper’s revealing publicity shot. Those who object to non-disabled actors playing disabled characters point to a number of issues: the unwillingness of most directors to consider disabled actors for these roles, the public’s obvious preference for non-disabled actors who interpret these roles from the vantage point of ability, and the widespread access problems by which actor-training programs, theatre facilities, and rehearsal/performance practices fail to accommodate the disabled and their needs. Accompanying these charges is the belief that performers who are not disabled take on the mannerisms

244  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

of those who are and think they know what it is like to be disabled based on this superficial mimicry. Lennard Davis describes an everyday equivalent of this: The average person imagines what it would be like to be blind, deaf, or lame by the simple act of closing one’s eyes, stopping one’s ears, or walking with a limp. After a few seconds of this deprivation, one generally rushes back to the comfort of “normality.” This process creates in reality not understanding, but an “us–them division” which also neatly enforces the hegemonic demands that one be “normal.”63

Such performances—in situations like the one Davis describes and in mediums such as theatre—slide easily into a kind of disability shtick. I am deeply sympathetic with these objections and the concerns that motivate them. As my analyses of actual disability performances throughout this book suggest, I recognize the extent to which theatre, dance, and the other performing arts have been transformed and redefined by the ­participation of those with divergent embodiments. At the same time, I resist the assumptions, which often underlie the mimicry charge, that disability experience is walled off from those not included in this category and that only those with disabilities can ethically play disabled characters. This assumption, I believe, reinforces the “us– them” division that Davis cautions against and reinforces a social categorization that marginalizes the subjects it cordons off. It homogenizes the experiences of those who consider themselves disabled as well as the experiences of non-disabled individuals, and precludes the intersubjective and intercorporeal engagements that make theatre—and social life more broadly—possible. Finally, it denies the phenomenological, scientific, linguistic evidence that our interaction with others is grounded in kinesthetic, affective, and cognitive receptivity and diminishes what can be accomplished through empathy despite—and because of—its limits. Lack of empathy on the part of the non-disabled when it comes to disability is, of course, one of the problems that people with disabilities face: the failure of sensorimotor empathy, for instance, when able-bodied people at a meeting fail to rearrange their chairs before leaving so that a wheelchair-bound participant can make her way to the door.64 The issue of empathy is complicated in the case of able-bodied disability performance, of course, by the fact that spectators engage not with an

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

245

actual disabled body but with a performer who mediates the encounter by standing in for the absent body. Clearly, this “as if” alterity is not the same thing as the actual alterity represented by Ferris’s performance in The Glass Menagerie. To entirely derogate this mediation as a form of mimicry, however, is to overlook the fact that all acting involves acts of impersonation in the term’s multiple senses of taking in, re-presenting, and “manifest[ing] or embody[ing] in one’s own person” someone or something that one is not.65 Even Ferris performed someone whose embodiment differed from hers. In doing this, acting draws on mimetic behavior more broadly, which incorporates the performances of others by negotiating what it knows and what it does not know. To quote Taussig again, “Pulling you this way and that, mimesis plays this trick of dancing between the very same and the very different. An impossible but necessary, indeed an everyday affair, mimesis registers both sameness and difference, of being alike and of being Other.”66 Underscoring the actor’s interpretive role in this negotiation at this late point in the book reminds us that the actor’s mimetic act of incorporating a role involves kinesthetic and empathic operations similar to those that the spectator undergoes while watching the results of that act.67 All actors engage otherness to one extent or another (even when they play themselves): they feel their way into the characters they play, resonate with and enact the movements they discover, and sound the words they take into themselves vocally and kinesthetically. When directors, designers, other actors, and spectators engage vicariously with these enactments in rehearsal and performance, the empathic dialogue can be intricate. The following section will pursue this counter-line of inquiry on able-­ bodied disability performance by looking at a production that embraced the challenges inherent in this particular form of impersonation: Proteus Theatre’s 2007 performative retelling of the Joseph Merrick story, Merrick, The Elephant Man. Before I do so, I will develop my exploration of actors performing across identity categories by considering an area—cross-racial performance—that does not explicitly involve disability. Those who compare the practice of able-bodied actors “cripping up” to blackface performance reference the well-established history of white performers blackening their faces into caricatures of African Americans and employing stereotyped ways of walking, dancing, gesturing, and speaking for the consumption of spectators. Though blackface is widely considered racist inside and outside the theatre, however, recent discussions of this practice in theatre, performance, and critical race studies have demonstrated the complex negotiations at work in these and other forms of cross-racial

246  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

­ erformances as individuals and social groups inhabit, test, and transgress p the boundaries of otherness.68 Impersonating the physical and vocal mannerisms of a racially different person can be a form of mimicry (in the negative sense of caricaturing or ridiculing), but it can also involve an attempt to inhabit a different sensorimotor embodiment. That one can never experience this embodiment “primordially” (to employ Edith Stein’s term) does not negate the empathic inroads that can be made or the startling sense of transformation that spectators feel when such performances are done well. The nature and scale of this accomplishment can be appreciated in the work of Anna Deavere Smith, whose documentary style of theatre hinges on the impersonation of difference. In works such as Fires in the Mirror (1992), Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994), and the recent Notes from the Field (2015), Smith interviews people connected with the issues and events in question, then works with their taped voices in order to internalize her subjects’ kinesthetic/affective dynamics and the individual points of view embodied in their speech. She is interested less in what her subjects say but in how they say it: “This will make an impression on my body and eventually on my psyche. Not that I would understand it but I would feel it. My goal would be to [. . .] become possessed, so to speak, of the person.”69 The performances that result from this process, which involves extensive rehearsal, are highly individualized in posture, movement, gesture, mannerisms, and vocal delivery. Moving and speaking on stage, Smith conveys the social and institutional pressures that constrain her characters’ movement. In Notes from the Field, for example, a project that examines the pipeline linking school and prison for underprivileged African American, Latino/a, and Native American children, Smith gave a performance of Allen Bulloch, a Baltimore youth who was arrested and imprisoned for vandalizing a police car during the Freddie Gray riots. As he discussed what it means to be stopped by policemen in Baltimore, Smith’s Bullock avoided eye contact whenever he could, held his hands in his pockets, and turned in on himself most of the time he spoke in the hunched manner of someone not wanting to be seen. The intonations, mannerisms, and cadences of Bulloch/Smith’s speech amplified this kinesthetic portrait.70 Smith’s performances cross boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender, age, body type, and physical condition; she has played inner-city blacks, Hasidic Jews, a California Yurok fisherman, and white academics. She does so with

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

247

a necessary awareness of what she has access to and what she does not. Smith insisted on this point in a 2000 interview: I don’t believe that when I play someone in my work, that I “am” the character. I want the audience to experience the gap, because I know if they experience the gap, they will appreciate my reach for the other. This reach is what moves them, not a mush of me and the other, not a presumption that I can play everything and everybody, but more a desire to reach for something that is very clearly not me—my deep feeling of my separateness from everything, not my ability to pass for everything.71

“Reaching for the other” rather than “becoming the other” demarcates a space where otherness can be confronted and owned, where performers mediate between themselves, characters whose embodiment and experience differs from theirs, and spectators who are similarly othered. In the kinesthetic context of Smith’s performance method, this reaching acquires a haptic quality, as if empathy were a form of exploratory touch. To conceptualize empathy in this way clarifies the kinesthetic receptivity and effort that are necessary if one is to master one’s habitual ways of moving and speaking and use them to uncover different ways of being in the world. Richard Schechner has characterized Smith’s performance practice as “incorporating” her subjects through a process he terms “deep mimesis.” This process, he writes, is “less like that of a conventional Euro-American actor and more like that of African, Native American, and Asian ritualists,” or shaman. Incorporation, or deep mimesis, means “to be possessed by, to open oneself up thoroughly and deeply to another being,” a characterization that echoes Smith’s statement about becoming “possessed” by the people whose lives, words, and movements she takes on.72 Although Schechner’s account of incorporation does not address the limits of its reach, it does capture the uncanny experience that skilled and committed performers can convey of taking on, or inhabiting, the roles they play. In this sense, deep mimesis depends on, and facilitates, deep empathy. To my knowledge, Smith’s right and ability to incorporate someone other than herself—a white Hasidic Jew, for instance—have not been challenged, nor is her practice considered controversial. What happens if we apply the “deep mimesis” that Schechner recognizes in Smith’s performance to actor-role configurations in cross-ability performance? What happens when one tries to immerse oneself “deeply” in the experience,

248  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

posture, and movements of someone who is differently abled, and how can this be distinguished from the “shallow” empathy of someone pretending to be blind, deaf, or differently gendered for a few minutes? Can the actor-as-­shaman mediate between kinesthetic realms when a disability as severe as Joseph Merrick’s is concerned? How do spectators respond to this mimetic attempt?

Deep Mimesis In 2007 Proteus Theatre Company of Basingstoke, England, presented its one-man show Merrick, the Elephant Man.73 Proteus Theatre (no relation to the syndrome), which was founded in 1981, is a community-based, professional theatre company. In addition to offering three productions a year that tour throughout southeast England, the company provides numerous community-based workshops and projects. Proteus works with artists in photography, film, dance, music, and the visual arts—and incorporates circus, mime, puppetry, and other performance forms—to create multi-media productions that engage issues of concern to their community in theatrically innovative ways. Disability has played an important role in Proteus’s activities. Having worked with individuals with severe disabilities for a number of years, the company offers a workshop entitled “Breakout!” that provides those with disabilities the opportunity to explore the perceptions, myths, and challenges associated with disability and “to express themselves in new and creative ways.”74 All of Proteus’s productions and workshops are inclusive in that they involve participants of varying abilities without distinction. A number of productions, including Merrick, the Elephant Man, draw upon and explore the experiences of those with disabilities. When artistic director Mary Swan contacted actor Saul Jaffé in 2006 about collaborating on a one-man show, the two discussed the possibility of mounting a revival of Pomerance’s The Elephant Man, which the company had produced as part of its opening season. They decided against doing so for several reasons, including the fact that Pomerance’s play required sixteen actors. One of their dissatisfactions with Pomerance’s play was that, like David Lynch’s 1980 film The Elephant Man and most historical accounts of Joseph Merrick’s life, the portrait it offered was of a man whose life was largely determined by others and by his debilitating physical condition. Taking advantage of more recent social histories of the period, revisionist studies of freak show performers that stressed their

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

249

economic agency when it came to their own display, modern medical diagnoses of Merrick’s condition, and new perspectives on Merrick’s life and reception history, the two saw the opportunity for a different portrayal in which (as Jaffé describes it) “Merrick himself was the storyteller, an active participant in his own story.”75 Rather than presenting the show’s central character entirely in terms of what others projected onto him, they decided to present Merrick’s life from what they could discover about his differently embodied perspective. While the final production includes multiple characters, the actions of Merrick, the Elephant Man are oriented in terms of its central figure’s consciousness and memory. After conducting extensive research on Merrick and on Proteus syndrome, Swan and Jaffé developed a production that told Merrick’s story through the use of multiple media, burlesque, and acrobatic performance. Jaffé, who is an able-bodied actor, played a range of male and female characters including Tom Norman, the English showman and entrepreneur who exhibited Merrick to paying audiences in 1884; Frederick Treves, the surgeon who brought Merrick to the London Hospital in 1886 where he lived until his death in 1890; as well as numerous others who formed Merrick’s world during his childhood and adult life. Over the course of the performance, Jaffé, Swan, and their production team alternated between Merrick’s lived experience of disability and the public ways in which this disability was apprehended, described, and staged. Rejecting the use of prosthetics to represent Merrick’s deformities such as those that Lynch employed with actor John Hurt, Swan and Jaffé decided to show Merrick’s condition by kinesthetically embodying it through posture, gesture, movement, and voice. They agreed that the key to reembodying Merrick lay in understanding the ways in which he inhabited his body and the world around him. The search for kinesthetic clues to Merrick’s embodiment and the rehearsal work involved in physically incorporating these were extensive. While no film exists of Joseph Merrick in motion, the two were able to consult photographs of his skeleton and photographs of him clothed, semi-clothed, and naked taken during his lifetime. Displaying his body in a number of poses and from a number of angles, these photographs provide visual evidence of the postural distortions, asymmetrical body mass, and enlargements that conditioned Merrick’s movements and gestures. Swan and Jaffé supplemented the information provided in this kinesthetic archive with more current research. Working through the Proteus Syndrome Foundation, they were able to talk with and observe contemporary individuals afflicted with the

250  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

syndrome, read first-person accounts of how they coped with everyday life, and speak with family members. Based on their historical and contemporary research, they developed a kinesthetic theory of Merrick’s condition. In Swan’s words, We knew how the spine would bend, how the weight would pull the head back and how the foot on one side would drag—from that we were able to “find” him physically, and of course vocally, since the obstruction to the neck, lungs and chest from the spinal position, and what we know about the growths on his face, all lead to that voice being the only possible one for him.76

As part of this deep mimesis, Swan talked Jaffé through his body from the feet upward, getting him “to ‘put on’ the character like a full body mask.”77 Jaffé then spent hours kinesthetically imagining himself “inside” Merrick’s body, refining his sense of how it moved, sat, walked, stood, talked, and related to others. Working this way with his body’s posture and movements, the weight of its limbs, and the changed register of its vocalizations, Jaffé built a kinesthetic body awareness premised on simulated disablements. During the performance of Merrick, the Elephant Man he moved in and out of this disabled body, changing embodiments in swift transformations. Some of these transformations involved the play’s other characters, whom Jaffé played with their own kinesthetic signatures: hence, the shifts from Norman to Merrick to Treves and back to Merrick. Other transformations took place in his performance of Merrick himself. When Merrick addressed the audience as the play’s narrator, he did so without the disablement that marked his portrayal elsewhere in the production. In such moments, the audience was shown a Merrick whose subjectivity existed beyond its physically constrained public expression. Jaffé’s narrator-Merrick often spoke from a hanging trapeze, as if to suggest the freedom from gravity that marked the mind and spirit of a man whose head weighed so much that he could not sleep lying down for fear of breaking his neck. In one of Merrick, The Elephant Man’s late sequences, Merrick conversed with the actress Madge Kendal. His initial interaction with her was unencumbered—he even recited a speech from Romeo and Juliet—but when the actress declined his invitation to join him on a trip to the countryside, Jaffé pulled a ribbon from a corset on the dresser’s dummy to which he had been speaking, wrapped it around his face and head, and reverted to his newly

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

251

self-conscious physicality. Increasingly impeded by the ribbons, his voice became—as it was for the historical Merrick—the product of immense exertion. The practiced freedom with which Jaffé moved in and out of his protagonist’s encumbered form underscored the “as if” nature of performative embodiment. Jaffé’s freedom to undergo such transformation on stage stood in stark contrast to the historical Joseph Merrick’s inability to step outside his disablement. But deep mimesis of the kind Jaffé attempted is never as simple as putting something on and taking it off. Drawing on extensive historical research and interactions with those suffering from Proteus syndrome, Jaffé’s act of vicariously taking on—or “reaching for”— his “Merrick body” involved an engagement with unfamiliar, difficult modes of comportment and motility. Jaffé’s own body absorbed the costs of his portrayal; two years after his last performance, he still ­experienced joint problems in his neck as a result of having twisted his head to meet his shoulder and raising his larynx in order to distort his voice.78 In an email, Jaffé recounted an experience that evokes Schechner’s term “possession.” During a research trip to Leicester, the city of Merrick’s birth, Jaffé visited the site of the Victorian workhouse where Merrick stayed. As he was crossing a bridge on the way back, he lost the use of his legs and was temporarily unable to walk. As people passed him, he had to pretend that he was admiring the view so as not to call attention to himself. Noting that the growing weight of Merrick’s legs would have made it almost impossible for him to walk toward the end of his life, Jaffé reflected on his own unsettling experience this way: “[I]t seemed something had hijacked me. My understanding of him seemed so instinctive to the point that my own body was beginning to rebel against itself. [. . .] There was growing inside me a peculiar affinity.”79 The resulting production of Merrick, the Elephant Man went to considerable lengths to engage the audience kinesthetically and empathically in Jaffé’s performance while also contextualizing the experience it sought to portray. In the 59E59 Theatre space in New York where I saw the production with twenty able-bodied university students in December 2009, the performance took place in a relatively small acting area, with a proscenium halfway back, crimson curtains hanging on both sides of it on a framing metal bar, draped white curtains behind these, and a hanging picture frame with white background at center rear. A silver trapeze hung in front of this. The production’s few furnishings included a white folding screen; a chaise; three dressmaker’s dummies; a crimson-draped small table

252  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

holding a phrenology head; and a framed photograph of Merrick’s mother that was hung almost unnoticeably to one side. Recalling the backstage of an unused theatre or a second-hand store, the production’s set emphasized Jaffé’s role as animator of his surroundings. Whether he moved through space with Norman’s ease or Merrick’s labored difficulty, Jaffé directed attention to the body’s negotiation of space, material objects, and its own limitations. The production employed technical means to visually accentuate his character’s shape, carriage, and movement. When Jaffé appeared for the first time as Merrick behind a screen, a single backlight on the otherwise darkened stage cast a distorted shadow of his figure on the screen. Low-angled lighting cast similar shadows on the floor at various points throughout the production, thickening Jaffé’s trunk and enlarging his head and other limbs to grotesque proportions. By establishing parallel kinesthetic performances, these “shadow embodiments” intensified the perceived difficulty of Jaffé’s movements and the muscular effort required to sustain them. Merrick, the Elephant Man employed additional strategies for deepening kinesthetic engagement with its protagonist. The production opened with Jaffé in the role of Tom Norman addressing the audience as if they were spectators gathered to view one of his exhibits. In addition to joking with the audience about its variable forms of embodiment during the performance I attended—“Grab a seat . . . push the weak out [of] the way”— Jaffé directed impromptu remarks at individual audience members.80 His monologue was awkward for audience members who had come to see a show, not be part of it; and the embarrassment it occasioned owed much to their physical discomfort at finding themselves objects of spectacle. At this performance Jaffé further linked this awareness to Merrick’s kinesthetic experience by passing around a watermelon and calling attention to its weight: “Heavy, ain’t it? Well imagine carrying that around for a head? [. . .] Imagine what it must do to his neck?!”81 By foregrounding and thematizing what might normally be subliminal identifications, the empathic channels that this sequence seemed intent on opening prepared the audience kinesthetically for its perceptual encounter with Jaffé’s Merrick. His process of assuming Merrick’s posture and movements was gradual and deliberate, and the transitions into and out of this physicalization were presented with a gestural self-consciousness that foregrounded the kinesthetic efforts involved. These efforts had kinesthetic implications for those in the audience that watched them. As Jaffé’s body became rigid and started to twist, I experienced my own body tightening

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

253

as I watched him; in fact, as a frequent sufferer of neck and upper back pain, I found these transformations quite uncomfortable. Once he achieved the Merrick-body, Jaffé’s movements were slow and labored, calling attention to the body’s weight, to the effort and strain of individual muscle groups. As with Lipps’s acrobat, the trapeze contributed to this kinesthetic self-consciousness. Although the trapeze enabled Jaffé’s Merrick to stand above the action—outside his body, as it were—while narrating the events of his life, it also demonstrated his body’s susceptibility to gravity and its own weight. At several points during the production Jaffé slid his body down the ropes, stretched himself out on the trapeze in different positions, and contorted his body into various postures, including one where he balanced on the trapeze with his legs while the top half of his body hung upside down. While these practiced movements were virtuosic, they also provided the audience with an intensely vicarious experience of a body straining against its own weight and awkward form to achieve balance and fluidity of movement.82 Observing these difficult balancing acts, I felt my own body pull in different directions, and I experienced vicarious strain in my neck, shoulders, and legs. There was visceral relief when Jaffé left this body-performance for Norman, Treves, and Merrick-the-narrator. In a phenomenon familiar to spectators of tightrope and aerial acrobatic performance, my kinesthetic response to Jaffé’s trapeze convolutions was clearly intensified by the degree of risk he assumed. Jaffé’s movement between roles underscored the ethical dimension of his audience’s engagement with his performance. At the same time that it made spectators aware of their kinesthetic/empathic investments in Merrick’s disability, the production also asked them to assume the external perspectives by which his disfigurement was apprehended and responded to by those who interacted with him. Jaffé’s Norman invited the audience to adopt the showman’s perspective on the extraordinary body as spectacle, while Jaffé’s Treves framed Merrick’s disfigurement within the perspective of the medical case study, referring to him in a lecture as a “specimen.”83 Swan and Jaffé resisted oversimplifying these points of view. Though the historical Norman made money from the exhibition of human oddities and curiosities, his character questioned the spectatorial interest in this kind of display. For his part, Jaffé’s Treves combined a clinical interest in Merrick’s bodily condition with a humanitarian’s concern for his patient’s well-being. The distancing, potentially objectifying perspectives these characters represented was complicated, in other words, by an ethical awareness of Merrick’s embodied personhood. Both perspectives

254  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

stood in contrast to the brutal objectification to which Jaffé’s Merrick was subject by his stepmother and by the crowd that attacked him at Liverpool Street Station after he returned from the Continent, where he had been robbed and abandoned by one of his employers. Kinesthetic resonance illuminates the shifting empathic and ethical dynamics of Jaffé’s portrayals. As noted earlier in this chapter, empathic identifications during a production can be changing and contradictory. Two scenes from Merrick, the Elephant Man demonstrate the conflicting ways that the play’s spectators were implicated in what they observed. In the beating scene just referred to, Jaffé indicated Merrick’s struggle to make his way through the crowd at Liverpool station by using the folding screens to block his movements. Backing out of the screens, he ran into the dummies, knocking them off balance, and staggered among them as a way of representing their attack. The attacks reminded Merrick of his stepmother’s beatings, and as he recounted his childhood victimization, he positioned himself directly behind a hooped and corseted dressmaker’s dummy. Speaking his stepmother’s words, he addressed the smaller dummy from behind the larger one—then, removing a stick from the larger dummy, moved across the space, assumed his stepmother’s sadistic bearing, and beat the surrogate child. After a particularly strong blow, Jaffé and the child dummy collapsed on the floor, and Jaffé-as-Merrick handed Dr. Treves’s card to a solicitous policeman that the actor then proceeded to enact. Kinesthetically, the scene’s intricate movement between actions and figures entailed an equally precise choreographing of audience identifications. With a dynamic reminiscent of Gloucester’s blinding, spectators were invited to enact the vulnerable embodiment of a man pursued and treated as an animal or monster while alternately inhabiting the attitudes and gestures of those giving the blows. From a kinesthetic perspective, they were complicit in both. The scene may have resolved its kinesthetic dissonance in the policeman’s compassionate gestures, but whatever calm the audience felt at this point was troubled by the conflicting identifications it had undergone. An earlier scene also complicated the spectators’ empathic engagement by counterpointing it with technologically directed perspectives on Merrick and his condition. In this scene, Jaffé’s Norman used an overhead projector to illustrate Merrick’s journey to the Continent and his abandonment by the man who employed him there. Using colored markers he drew an outline of England, a boat, an anchor, a footprint, the sun, and a dark cloud on the transparency projection screen behind him. At the point

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

255

in his story where Merrick finds himself penniless and alone in the rain, Jaffé sprinkled water on the transparency, thereby blurring his illustration into multi-colored globs. With a pointed instrument he drew the water’s edges into thin filaments reaching around, between, and through the larger masses. As he did so, he changed character and, in the role of Treves, continued his earlier lecture on Merrick’s condition. Magnified on what increasingly looked like a medical slide, the reworked image became a cell from Merrick’s body, mutated and distorted by his disfiguring syndrome. The sequence effected a striking transformation from the biographical to the clinical, from the story of Merrick’s exhibition as spectacle to the cellular pathology that disfigured his body from within. Up to this point, Jaffé’s bodily attitude was easy, unencumbered, and his movements were subordinated to the acts of narration and illustration. At the end of Treves’s lecture, however, Jaffé moved between the projector and the screen and stood with his back to the audience. When he turned around, he faced the audience and slowly transformed his body into Merrick’s: first one arm, then the other, then his entire body. With his distended shadow lurching behind him, he attempted to hold his balance while the molecular image of his condition was projected on his face. As Jaffé’s Merrick stood unsteadily, framed by the freak show and clinical perspectives that had been brought to bear on him and were now superimposed on his body, the play’s audience was similarly framed in the act of spectatorship. Having been encouraged to adopt the cultural optics through which Merrick’s disability has traditionally been viewed, the audience found itself—as it had throughout the production—implicated in the kinesthetically grounded subjectivity these optics usually disown. As Norman remarked in his opening monologue: “You are here out of curiosity, either that or you were dragged, either way a sense of foreboding now settles on [the] proceedings, a sense of the heaviness to come as we participate in one man’s struggle for recognition as a human being!”84 By eschewing the use of prosthetics and embodying Merrick’s disfigurement through physicalized enactment, Jaffé and Swan directed attention to the kinesthetic nature of this awareness on the part of actor and spectator. In this sense, the humanity their representation seeks to affirm is more than the moral abstraction embodied in Norman’s remark. The recognition that others are human arises in a shared cognitive field where the perception and understanding of others is kinesthetically linked to an awareness of our own bodies. Difference—including difference as severe as Merrick’s—is neither erased in this process nor

256  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

entirely inaccessible. As I have argued throughout this study, such differences exist and are brought to awareness within a field of affinities and potentialities. There is no guarantee, of course, that audiences will inevitably or fully acknowledge the kinesthetic invitations that a production such as Merrick, the Elephant Man extends. As their responses after the performance we attended in New York indicated, the degree to which my students accepted the production’s invitation to apprehend and empathize with Jaffé’s Merrick varied widely. Some students seemed relatively disengaged during the performance and afterwards. Several mentioned how uncomfortable they felt when Jaffé addressed them directly as spectators at the start of the performance, which suggests that this strategy for implicating the audience in Merrick’s self-consciousness may have inhibited later empathic operations rather than facilitated them. In the case of some students, I suspect that the disavowal of engagement masked perceptions during the actual performance that they found unfamiliar and uncomfortable, experiences that challenged their own kinesthetic groundings. In contrast, several of the students in attendance seem to have achieved a high level of empathic engagement with Jaffé’s Merrick, including one who contacted Jaffé weeks later to learn more about his performance. Jaffé’s work with the trapeze seems to have been a particular occasion for kinesthetic resonance for many of these audience members. If Merrick was the empathic object of Merrick, the Elephant Man, Jaffé was its empathic vehicle. At no point during the production did Jaffé “become” Merrick in a literal sense, nor would his performance ever be mistaken for the figure he portrayed. As with Smith’s impersonations of the individuals she interviewed, Jaffé’s performance involved a “reaching for the other” rather than an appropriation. The performative nature of this enactment was reinforced by his deliberate movement into and out of it over the course of the play. Enhancing his own bodily repertoire with what he learned through research, he created a surrogate, or hypothetical, embodiment that gestured toward a historical Merrick who ultimately stood beyond its grasp. Other performers—including Bradley Cooper— create different surrogates, each with its own glimpses, if they are successful, into what this hard-to-imagine life might have been like. If and when disabled actors are given the chance to impersonate a figure that many in the disability community consider a forebear, they will illuminate aspects of his experience  less accessible to non-disabled actors—the crushing ­feeling of stigma, for example, and its effect on how Merrick held and conducted himself in his world. Disabled actors urgently deserve opportunities to explore mimetic performance on their own terms.85

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

257

In the end, of course, the historical Joseph Merrick is gone, and the embodied knowledge of his debilitating and progressive disfigurement is his alone. Physically alterted to the point where his humanity was questioned, Merrick exists as a field of kinesthetic traces, a vanishing point in history that calls to those who pursue it in particular body-performances and acts of spectatorship. As in all situations where otherness is evoked, the empathic connections this process brings into play form the basis for an ethics of performance, one that encourages performers and spectators to suspend what Petra Kuppers calls “non-disabled certainties about disability.”86 Faced with impairment and other forms of otherness as kinesthetic performances, able-bodied actors and spectators can own or disown the affinities they discover and have the opportunity to engage with empathically. If they choose the former and approach the act of identification with the humility that negotiating difference requires, then disability and disfigurement as severe as Merrick’s can be understood as kinesthetic possibilities in their own right, rendered apprehensible by the kinesthetic grounding we share and the effort we expend in engaging it at the borders of what we know and do not know.

Notes 1. Barack Obama, “Obama to Graduates: Cultivate Empathy.” 2. Om Malik, “Silicon Valley has an Empathy Vacuum.” 3. See Marie R. Miyashiro, The Empathy Factor: Your Competitive Advantage for Personal, Team, and Business Success. 4. For an interdisciplinary history of empathy theories, see Amy Copland and Peter Goldie, Introduction to Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. 5. An excellent overview of neurological research concerning empathy can be found in Boris C.  Bernhardt and Tania Singer, “The Neural Basis of Empathy.” 6. R. J. R. Blair, “Responding to the Emotions of Others: Dissociating Forms of Empathy through the Study of Typical and Psychiatric Populations,” 699. 7. Alvin I.  Goldman, “Two Routes to Empathy: Insights from Cognitive Neuroscience,” 36. 8. Christian Keysers, The Empathic Brain, 110. 9. Jamil Zaki, “Empathy: A Motivated Account,” 1608. 10. Grit Hein et al., “Neural Responses to Ingroup and Outgroup Members’ Suffering,” 155. In “I Feel How You Feel but Not Always,” Hein and Tania Singer discuss other individuating variables in pain-directed empathy.

258  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

11. Zaki, “Empathy,” 1631. 12. For a fuller discussion of phenomenological writings on empathy, see Dan Zahavi, “Beyond Empathy: Phenomenological Approaches to Intersubjectivity”; Zahavi, Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame, 112–52; and Dermot Moran, “The Problem of Empathy: Lipps, Scheler, Husserl and Stein.” These writings often display a reservation toward the term empathy. Although Husserl used the term Einfühlung in his writings, he was also critical of the term’s imprecision, calling it a “false expression” at one point because it was unclear whether it referred to the projection of oneself onto another body or the actual encounter with another embodied self (Zahavi, Self and Other, 114). Merleau-Ponty, whose writings on intersubjectivity have contributed to the phenomenological account of empathy, seems to have avoided the term. 13. Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, 6. 14. Ibid. 15. For a discussion of empathy and pain from a cognitive science perspective, see Amy Cook, “For Hecuba or for Hamlet: Rethinking Emotion and Empathy in the Theatre,” 79–80. 16. Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, 58. 17. Ibid., 16 18. Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, 392–93. Thompson offers this typology as a phenomenological framework for understanding recent studies in empathy and social cognition. For an earlier attempt at such a typology, see Natalie Depraz, “The Husserlian Theory of Intersubjectivity as Alterology: Emergent Theories and Wisdom Traditions in the Light of Genetic Phenomenology,” 172. 19. Thompson, Mind in Life, 393. 20. Ibid., 399. 21. Ibid., 401. 22. Ibid., 402. 23. John H. Muse, “Performance and the Pace of Empathy,” 273. 24. David Krasner, “Empathy and Theatre,” 256. 25. Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences, 72. 26. For a discussion of this theatrical dynamic in the fifteenth-century English morality play Mankind, see Stanton B.  Garner Jr., “Theatricality in Mankind and Everyman,” 275–81. 27. Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare, 2: 703. 28. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, 138–40. In “Smelling their Way to Dover: A Blind Director’s Take on Blind Gloucester,” David Richman offers the perspective of someone who cannot see on Gloucester’s blindness. 29. As a way of deepening my understanding of this sequence’s phenomenological and sensorimotor dynamics, I participated in April 2017 in an infor-

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

259

mal acting workshop on the blinding scene in which I had the opportunity to act the roles of Cornwall and Gloucester and observe their traumatic encounter up close. Moving into actions I still find difficult to watch, these rehearsals underscored the kinesthetic and sensorimotor investments linking spectatorship and enactment during this scene. 30. Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (New Arcadia), 182. 31. Riverside Shakespeare, 1329. 32. Ibid., 1328. 33. Ibid. 34. Adam Morton, “Empathy for the Devil,” 318. 35. Riverside Shakespeare, 1328. 36. Ibid., 1329. 37. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 194. 38. Ibid., 199–20 (my italics). 39. Roger Burggraeve, “Violence and the Face of the Other: The Vision of Emmanuel Levinas on Moral Evil and Our Responsibility,” 32. I am not the first to examine King Lear through a Levinasian lens; see, for example, David Goldstein, “Facing King Lear.” 40. Vilayanur Ramachandran, “The Neurons that Shaped Civilization.” 41. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 43. 42. Ibid., 203. 43. Ibid., 194 (emphasis in original). 44. Matthew Ratcliffe, Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology, 240. Central to all empathic achievement, Ratcliffe writes, is an “attentiveness to actual and potential degrees of phenomenological difference,” ibid., 248. 45. By consolidating the self in relation to an imagined opposite, otherness in the objectifying sense is different from genuine alterity, which challenges the subject’s self-regard. 46. Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, 21. 47. Ibid., 5. In contrast with the other characters, Williams specifies, Laura should be lit with a light that has “a peculiar pristine clarity such as light used in early religious portraits of female saints or madonnas” (10). 48. Sam Gold, quoted in Louis Peitzman, “Meet the Actor with a Disability Who Is Helping to Transform a Classic Play.” 49. For an interesting discussion of Ferris’s rehearsal work with Gold on meeting the challenges and opportunities of this role, see Sasha Weiss, “The Experimentalist on Broadway.” 50. Rex Reed, “Sam Gold Goes Gross with ‘The Glass Menagerie.’” 51. Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, 1. 52. Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art, 10  (emphasis in original); cited in Nicola Shaughnessy, “Knowing Me, Knowing You: Autism, Kinesthetic Empathy and Applied Performance,” 39.

260  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

53. Wanda Strukus, “Mining the Gap,” 103. 54. David Vincent Kimel, “Glittering Translucence.” 55. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look, 19. 56. Margrit Shildrick, Dangerous Discourses  of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality, 8. For more on this imbrication see Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, “Bodies Together: Touch, Ethics and Disability.” 57. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, 130. 58. Christine Bruno, who has cerebral palsy, played Laura Wingfield at the Fulton Opera House in Lancaster, PA, in 2001, while Regan Linton, who is paralyzed as a result of a spinal cord injury, played the role at the University of California, San Diego, in 2012. Both are wheelchair bound. Ann M.  Fox interviewed both performers for her essay “Reclaiming the Ordinary Extraordinary Body; Or, The Importance of The Glass Menagerie for Literary Disability Studies.” 59. For an excellent discussion of this controversy over the casting of nondisabled actors to play disabled roles, including the voices of those who defend the practice, see Kirsty Johnston, Disability Theatre and Modern Drama, 37–58. 60. This production originated at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2012 and transferred from New York to London in 2015. 61. In view of the fact that the historical Merrick received visitors from the Victorian upper classes in his hospital quarters, Cooper’s Elephant Man offered an ironic spectacle of able-bodiedness, celebrity, and disability. 62. Gregg Mozgala, “The Elephant in the Room.” 63. Lennard Davis, “J’Accuse: Cultural Imperialism—Ableist Style,” 36. 64. Animal science professor and autism spokesperson Temple Grandin describes a related instance of empathic failure: “Normal people have an incredible lack of empathy. They have good emotional empathy, but they don’t have much empathy for the autistic kid who is screaming at the baseball game because he can’t stand the sensory overload. Or the autistic kid having a meltdown in the school cafeteria because there’s too much stimulation. I’m frustrated with the inability of normal people to have sensory empathy. They can’t seem to acknowledge these different realities because they’re so far away from their own experiences” (“Q&A: Temple Grandin on Language”). 65. Oxford English Dictionary. 66. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 129. 67. Rhonda Blair discusses the actor’s use of empathy from a cognitive science perspective in “Cognitive Neuroscience and Acting: Imagination, Conceptual Blending, and Empathy,” 98–102. In a passage that supports the discussion in the remainder of this chapter, Blair writes, “Empathy can

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

261

be triggered by bottom-up or top-down processing; often both are involved simultaneously. Part of the actor’s work is to become more conscious of both of these perspectives, and to learn to manipulate these as effectively as possible through the use, for example, of physical mirroring exercises and imagination, based on research and the rehearsal process” (ibid., 100). 68. See, for example, Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class and Joseph Roach’s discussion of Mardi Gras krewes in Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, esp. 17–25. 69. Carol Martin and Anna Deavere Smith, “Anna Deavere Smith: The Word Becomes You. An Interview with Carol Martin,” 51. 70. A clip of Smith giving her performance of Allen Bullock during a lecture is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dili9CSKHtU. I attended Notes from the Field at New  York’s Second Stage Theatre in December 2016. 71. Dorinne K.  Kondo, “(Re)Visions of Race: Contemporary Race Theory and the Cultural Politics of Racial Crossover in Documentary,” 96 (italics mine). 72. Richard Schechner, “Anna Deavere Smith: Acting as Incorporation,” 63. 73. After a successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2008, Merrick, the Elephant Man was brought to New York in late 2009 as part of the Brits Off Broadway season. A one-minute promotional video of Merrick, the Elephant Man that includes clips from the production can be viewed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfQuQQEI4q8 (accessed 1 March 2018). 74. “Breakout! Blue Sky Thinking for Adults with Disabilities,” Proteus: The Changing Face of Theatre, http://www.proteustheatre. com/?page=BreakoutProject (accessed 30 June 2014). 75. Saul Jaffé, personal correspondence, 16 June 2011. 76. Mary Swan, personal correspondence, 8 August 2011. 77. Ibid. 78. The published text of Pomerance’s The Elephant Man includes the following warning: “No one with any history of back trouble should attempt the part of MERRICK as contorted. Anyone playing the part of Merrick should be advised to consult a physician about the problems of sustaining any unnatural or twisted position” (3). 79. Saul Jaffé, personal correspondence. 80. Mary Swan and Saul Jaffé. “Merrick, The Elephant Man (final draft),” 1. 81. Ibid., 8. 82. Jaffé commented on the ironic relation between able-bodiedness and disability in this trapeze work: “[T]he trapeze can be quite tortuous, so the inevitable irony then is that an able-bodied actor has to disable himself on

262  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

it in order to make the disabled character appear able-bodied” (personal correspondence). 83. Swan and Jaffé, “Merrick,” 6. 84. Ibid., 2. 85. Those who are interested in the powerful empathic responses to Joseph Merrick by those who are disabled and severely disfigured can view David Hevey’s seventeen-minute film Behind the Shadow of Merrick, which was completed in 2008 as part of the “Rethinking Disability Representation in Museums and Galleries” project commissioned by the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries at the University of Leicester (Hevey, dir., Behind the Shadow of Merrick). For further information on the Merrick project, see Hevey, “Behind the Shadow of Merrick.” 86. Petra Kuppers, Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge, 12.

Bibliography Bennett, Jill. 2005. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bernhardt, Boris C., and Tania Singer. 2012. The Neural Basis of Empathy. Annual Review of Neuroscience 35: 1–23. Blair, R.J.R. 2005. Responding to the Emotions of Others: Dissociating Forms of Empathy through the Study of Typical and Psychiatric Populations. Consciousness and Cognition 14 (4): 698–718. Blair, Rhonda. 2009. Cognitive Neuroscience and Acting: Imagination, Conceptual Blending, and Empathy. TDR 53 (4): 93–103. Burggraeve, Roger. 1999. Violence and the Face of the Other: The Vision of Emmanuel Levinas on Moral Evil and Our Responsibility. Trans. Jeffrey Bloechl. Journal of Social Philosophy 30 (1): 29–45. Cook, Amy. 2011. For Hecuba or for Hamlet: Rethinking Emotion and Empathy in the Theatre. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 25 (2): 71–87. Coplan, Amy, and Peter Goldie. 2011. Introduction. In Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, ix–xlvii. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Depraz, Natalie. 2001. The Husserlian Theory of Intersubjectivity as Alterology: Emergent Theories and Wisdom Traditions in the Light of Genetic Phenomenology. In Between Ourselves: Second-Person Issues in the Study of Consciousness, ed. Evan Thompson, 169–178. Thorverton: Imprint Academic. Fox, Ann M. 2016. Reclaiming the Ordinary Extraordinary Body; or, the Importance of The Glass Menagerie for Literary Disability Studies. In Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism, written and ed. Kirsty Johnston, 129–151. London: Bloomsbury Methuen. Freud, Sigmund. 2003. The Uncanny. Trans. David McLintock. New  York: Penguin.

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

263

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2009. Staring: How We Look. New York: Oxford University Press. Garner, Stanton B., Jr. 1987. Theatricality in Mankind and Everyman. Studies in Philology 84 (3): 272–285. Goldman, Alvin I. 2011. Two Routes to Empathy: Insights from Cognitive Neuroscience. In Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, 31–44. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldstein, David. 2015. Facing King Lear. In Shakespeare and the Power of the Face, ed. James A. Knapp, 75–91. Farnham: Ashgate. Grandin, Temple. 2006. Q&A: Temple Grandin on Language, interview with Ira Flatow. NPR, July 9. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=548884415. Accessed 26 Aug 2017. Hein, Grit, and Tania Singer. 2008. I Feel How You Feel but Not Always: The Empathic Brain and Its Modulation. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 18 (2): 153–158. Hein, Grit, Giorgia Silani, Kerstin Preuschoff, C. Daniel Batson, and Tania Singer. 2010. Neural Responses to Ingroup and Outgroup Members’ Suffering Predict Individual Differences in Costly Helping. Neuron 68 (1): 149–160. Hevey, David, dir. Behind the Shadow of Merrick (film 2008), viewable at “Rethinking Disability Representation in Museums and Galleries,” School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/ museumstudies/rcmg/projects/rethinking-disability-representation-1. Accessed 18 July 2017. ———. 2010. Behind the Shadow of Merrick. In Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum, ed. Richard Sandell, Jocelyn Dodd, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, 79–91. London/New York: Routledge. Johnson, Samuel. 1968. Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, 2 vols, Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. New Haven: Yale University Press. Johnson, Kirsty. 2016. Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. London: Bloomsbury. Keysers, Christian. 2011. The Empathic Brain: How the Discovery of Mirror Neurons Changes our Understanding of Human Nature. Lexington: Social Brain Press. Kimel, David Vincent. 2017. Glittering Translucence. Review of The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, directed by Sam Gold, Belasco Theatre, New  York. OnStage Blog, March 9. http://www.onstageblog.com/ reviews/2017/3/9/broadway-review-glittering-translucence-the-glassmenagerie-at-the-belasco-theatre. Accessed 1 May 2017. Kondo, Dorinne K. 2000. (Re)Visions of Race: Contemporary Race Theory and the Cultural Politics of Racial Crossover in Documentary. Theatre Journal 52 (1): 81–107. Krasner, David. 2006. Empathy and Theatre. In Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theatre, Performance, and Philosophy, ed. David Krasner and David Z.  Saltz, 255–277. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

264  

S. B. GARNER, JR.

Kuppers, Petra. 2003. Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge. London: Routledge. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Lott, Eric. 1995. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malik, Om. 2016. Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum. New Yorker, November 28. Martin, Carol, and Anna Deavere Smith. 1993. Anna Deavere Smith: The Word Becomes You. An Interview with Carol Martin. TDR 37 (4): 45–62. McConachie, Bruce. 2008. Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Miyashiro, Marie R. 2011. The Empathy Factor: Your Competitive Advantage for Personal, Team, and Business Success. Encinitas: PuddleDancer Press. Morton, Adam. 2011. Empathy for the Devil. In Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, 318–330. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mozgala, Gregg. 2014. The Elephant in the Room. The Apothetae, November 6. http://www.theapothetae.org/news/the-elephant-in-the-room. Accessed 14 July 2017. Muse, John H. 2012. Performance and the Pace of Empathy. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 26 (2): 173–188. Obama, Barack. 2006. Obama to Graduates: Cultivate Empathy. Transcript of Commencement Address, Northwestern University, June 19. http://www. northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2006/06/barack.html. Accessed 6 June 2017. Peitzman, Louis. 2017. Meet the Actor with a Disability Who Is Helping to Transform a Classic Play. BuzzFeed, April 17. https://www.buzzfeed.com/ louispeitzman/how-an-actor-with-a-disability-is-helping-to-transform-a?utm_ term=.ejgJMbdvP#.tie5RqDzn. Accessed 1 May 2017. Pomerance, Bernard. 1979. The Elephant Man. New York: Grove. Price, Janet, and Margrit Shildrick. 2002. Bodies Together: Touch, Ethics and Disability. In Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory, ed. Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare, 62–75. London: Continuum. Ramachandran, Vilayanur. 2009. The Neurons that Shaped Civilization. TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, November. https://www.ted.com/talks/vs_ramachandran_the_neurons_that_shaped_civilization. Accessed 23 June 2017. Ratcliffe, Matthew. 2015. Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reed, Rex. 2017. Sam Gold Goes Gross with ‘The Glass Menagerie.’ Review of The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, directed by Sam Gold, Belasco Theatre, New York. Observer, March 16.

  EMPATHY AND OTHERNESS   

265

Richman, David. 2006. Smelling their Way to Dover: A Blind Director’s Take on Blind Gloucester. In Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage, ed. Paul Menzer, 156–161. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press. Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press. Schechner, Richard. 1993. Anna Deavere Smith: Acting as Incorporation. TDR 37 (4): 63–64. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin, 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Shaughnessy, Nicola. 2012. Knowing Me, Knowing You: Autism, Kinesthetic Empathy and Applied Performance. In Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, ed. Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason, 33–50. Bristol: Intellect. Shildrick, Margrit. 2009. Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sidney, Sir Philip. 1987. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Siebers, Tobin. 2010. Disability Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Stein, Edith. 1989. On the Problem of Empathy. 1917. 3rd revised ed. Trans. Waltraut Stein. Vol. 3, The Collected Works of Edith Stein. Washington, DC: ICS. Strukus, Wanda. 2011. Mining the Gap: Physically Integrated Performance and Kinesthetic Empathy. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 25 (2): 89–105. Swan, Mary, and Saul Jaffé. Merrick, The Elephant Man (final draft). (Unpublished typescript dated 2008). Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weiss, Sasha. 2017. The Experimentalist on Broadway. New York Times Magazine, March 1. Williams, Tennessee. 1945. The Glass Menagerie. New York: New Directions. Zahavi, Dan. 2001. Beyond Empathy: Phenomenological Approaches to Intersubjectivity. In Between Ourselves: Second-Person Issues in the Study of Consciousness, ed. Evan Thompson, 151–167. Thorverton: Imprint Academic. ———. 2014. Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zaki, Jamil. 2014. Empathy: A Motivated Account. Psychological Bulletin 140 (6): 1608–1647.

Index1

A Ability and inability, 86–92 Able-bodiedness, 11, 13, 93, 95, 97, 100, 101 Ableism, 13 Access to the experience of others, 10, 149–152, 159–161, 165–166, 173–176, 247 physical, 238, 241, 243 Acrobat, 5, 9, 26, 129, 148, 226, 253 Acting, 4, 65, 114, 115, 219n47, 245 as incorporation, 247 method, 208 as possession, 246, 247, 251 Acting theory, 1, 22 Actor, 4, 25, 26, 68, 112–114, 192, 214–215, 237–240 and cross-ability performance, 242–257 and cross-racial performance, 245–248

training, 26, 243 and vocal performance, 195–200, 208–211 Aesthetics, 2–4, 9, 14, 27, 147–148, 179n64 disability, 100, 101, 239–241 Affordances, 19, 21, 43–46, 82–83 Agency, kinetic, 67, 135, 138 Ahmed, Sara, 13, 87 Akinetopsia, 70n34 Albright, Ann Cooper, 4 Allen, Viola, 63 American Sign Language (ASL), 171–176, 188, 191 Animacy/animation, 6, 24, 41, 51–57 agency kinetic, 123–124 and aliveness/non-aliveness, 61–67 and de-animation, 58–61 and imagination, 53–54 Aphasia, 192–193 Appia, Adolph, 72n66 Aristotle, 27

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2018 S. B. Garner, Jr., Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre, Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91794-8

267

268  

INDEX

Artaud, Antonin, 196 Arvidson, P. Sven, 114–115, 162 Asmus, Walter, 67 Attention, 15, 24, 111, 119, 161–164, 179n60, 225 actor’s, 113–116 circle of, 114 competing claims on, 120, 230, 237 dilated, 115 focus and margin of, 114, 118, 119, 162–163 performance strategies for directing, 166–167, 252 relationship to intention, 123 as selective mechanism, 229–230 Auditorium, theater, 113 Automaton, 56 AXIS Dance Company, 13, 94–96, 101, 153, 237 Divide, 95, 97, 240 Dix minutes plus tard, 95–97 B Barbaras, Renaud, 140n32, 179n60 Barbour, Karen, 29n5 Bass, Eric, 56–58 Bastian, Henry Charlton, 145–146 Basting, Anne, 56 Beckett, Samuel, 65, 66, 68 Footfalls, 66–68, 132 Not I, 65, 192, 212 Piece of Monologue, A, 65 Waiting for Godot, 59 Being-looked-at, 113, 119 Bell, John, 70n47 Benjamin, Walter, 32n51 Bennett, Jill, 240 Berthoz, Alain, 21 Binaural recording, 213–214, 220n59 Blackface, 245 Blair, Rhonda, 4

Bleeker, Maaike, 15 Blinding, 230–234 Blindness, 46, 82–85, 91, 103n29, 152, 231 mirror neuron research on, 153 Body, 37–38, 43, 47, 48, 98, 99, 119, 120, 122, 124, 125, 215–217 agitated, 131 hybrid, 135, 136 image, 90–93 kinesthetic, 47, 50 lived (Leib), 146, 176n3 and machine, 130, 136, 145 map, 104n54, 105n54 physical (Körper), 146, 176n3 schema, 88, 90–93 technologized, 131, 134–137, 145–147, 254 vulnerability of, 125 Boeck, Katie, 173–175 Bogart, Anne, 26 Bolens, Guillemette, 204 Bower, T. G. R., 49–50 Brain injury, 70n34, 81 Brando, Marlon, 195 Brecht, Bertolt Mother Courage and Her Children, 193 Brinck, Ingar, 140n36 Brook, Peter, 3, 4, 112, 161 Burggraeve, Roger, 234 C Calvo-Merino, B., 160–161 Canguilhem, Georges, 81, 85 Carreri, Roberta, 129 Casey, Edward S., 46 Casting able-bodied actors in disability roles, 242–244 disabled actors, 238–243

 INDEX    

Categorization, 79–81, 93 and identity, 234–236, 245 in-group/out-group, 225, 235 Catmur, Caroline, 159 Chaikin, Joseph Struck Dumb, 192 Chalmers, David J., 29n11 Cheek by Jowl, 71n60 Cinema, 131 Cirque du Soleil, 5 Cognitive science, 6, 16–22, 203 Committeri, Giorgia, 179n64 Commonality, 78, 85–86 Complicite Encounter, The, 26, 212–217 Consciousness, 7, 16, 17, 226 Contortionist, 99, 152–153 Cooper, Bradley, 243 Craig, Edward Gordon, 72n66, 130 Crippling up, 243, 245 Crossley, Nick, 104n46 Crothers, Julie, 95–97, 100 D Dance, 93, 94, 128, 129, 148–153, 160–161, 166, 172, 175 and cultural difference, 160, 178n57 modern, 148–149, 239 physically integrated, 94–102 Dance studies, 2, 3, 22, 25, 160–161 Davis, Lennard, 12, 105n55, 243–244 Day Lewis, Daniel, 243 Deafness, 152, 171–176, 193–194 Deaf West Theatre, 13, 171, 237 Spring Awakening, 13, 171–176, 187–189, 191 De Beauvoir, Simone, 76 Decency barrier, 232–233 Deixis, 212 Deleuze, Gilles, 84

269

Dementia, 56–60 Dench, Judi, 26, 209–211 Dennett, Daniel C., 17, 30n27 Depression, 236 Diedrich, Lisa, 103n30 Difference, 13–14, 23, 75–81, 84, 85, 96–97, 149–151 gender, 13 impersonation of, 243, 246–248, 256 kinesthetic, 102n16 Director, 64–66, 130, 243 Disability, 11–14, 77, 85, 151–153, 237–242, 248–257 as category, 93–94, 105n55 and kinesthetic intimacy, 239–242 phenomenological studies of, 103n30 as social construction, 12–13 as spectacle, 253–254 Disability studies, 12 Dreyfus, Hubert, 122 Duchamps, Marcel, 111 Dura, Marian T., 180n68 Dynamic systems theory, 19 Dys-appearance, 90, 99 E Einfühlung, 9 Embodied cognition, 18 Embodiment, 1, 3, 10, 11, 14, 23, 40, 133, 152, 186 language as form of, 186–187, 208 Emotion, 10, 21, 48, 124, 130, 149, 156, 217n2, 228 Emotional contagion, 4, 156 Empathy, 7–9, 149–150 appropriative, 10 barriers to, 232–233 cognitive perspectives on, 224, 228, 229

270  

INDEX

Empathy (cont.) and competing empathic claims, 228–235, 254 components/types of, 9, 224, 227, 240 definitions of, 8, 25, 223–224 disowning, 232–234, 236, 242, 255, 257 dynamic, exploratory nature of, 229–230 emotional, 224, 228 failure of, 244 limits of, 94–95, 101, 240–241, 244 as motivated phenomenon, 224, 230 origin of term, 9, 147 and otherness, 235–237 phenomenological perspectives on, 31n41, 225–228 reiterative, 227–228 as relationship, 242 sensorimotor, 224, 228–229 and temporality, 229 and violence, 230–234 Enactivism, 16, 18–21, 44, 84, 229 Epilepsy, 56 Ethics, 225, 228, 232–234, 257 and otherness, 234–236, 253 F Fadiga, Luciano, 190 Fanon, Frantz, 87–89, 92 Faulkner, Mara, 140n34 Ferris, Madison, 13, 237–243 Fini, Chiara, 179n64 Flow, 42–43, 58, 122, 132, 133, 193, 241 Foley Sherman, Jon, 15, 80, 84 Formalism, theatrical, 65, 136 Foster, Susan Leigh, 2, 3, 149–150, 161

Frank, Sandra Mae, 173–175 Franko, Mark, 4, 151 Freeberg, David, 159 Freud, Sigmund, 54 Futurism, 130 G Gallagher, Shaun, 16, 30n25, 90–93, 157, 203 Gallese, Vittorio, 155, 159 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, 242 Garner, Stanton B., Jr., 14, 30n21, 30n22, 32n47, 72n66, 186–187, 218n15 Gazzola, Valerie, 156 Gender, 10, 13, 75–78, 80, 89, 170 Gesture, 25, 166–170, 172–176, 220n47, 230, 246 articulatory, 188–191, 195 Gibson, James J., 19, 43–46, 48, 82–84 Gielgud, John, 65 Glass, Philip, 134, 135 Gold, Sam, 13, 237–239 Gowitzke, Barbara A., 41–43 Graham, Martha, 148, 150 Grant, Stuart, 30n20 Gray, Victoria, 139n17 Gross, Kenneth, 55, 58, 71n50 Grotowski, Jerzy, 26 Guattari, Félix, 84 Guillevic, Eugène, 185–187 H Habit, 23, 40, 87, 89–92, 163, 238–243 Habitus, 89, 104n46 Hall, Peter, 167, 237 Hanssell, Richard, 119 Harris, Erica, 104n40 Hart, F. Elizabeth, 22

 INDEX    

Heidegger, Martin, 15 Heterophenomenology, 17, 30n27 Hickok, Gregory, 177n36 Hill, Miriam Helen, 103n29 Hoffman, Dustin, 243 Holm, Ian, 167–170, 202 Home-Cook, George, 15, 163, 212 Hull, John M., 82–84 Hume, David, 224 Hurwicz, Angelika, 193 Husserl, Edmund, 13, 15, 16, 20, 21, 39–40, 43, 78, 86–90, 140n24, 146–147, 225, 237 I I (first-person pronoun), 22–23, 75 Iacoboni, Marco, 31n29, 177n31, 177n37 Ibsen, Henrik A Doll House, 5 I can/I cannot, 13, 14, 39–40, 78, 86–94, 99–102, 105n57, 125, 145, 151, 237 Ihde, Don, 172 Iliev, Alexander, 127 Imagination, 8, 54 Imitation, 4, 27–28, 91, 197 inner, 147–148 Immobility, 21, 61, 64–67, 71n60, 109, 139n17, 201 I move, 39, 40, 43 Infant, 43, 50, 159, 190 Instrumentality, 46, 77–78, 126 Intentional arc, 40–42, 46, 76, 111, 122, 126, 128, 198, 200 Intentionality, 24, 25, 41, 67, 75, 83, 111, 121–126, 135–138, 153 and anticipation, 129 distinguished from phenomenological intentionality, 139n24

271

improvisational, 126 interactive, 125, 126, 128 motor, 134, 140n24 multidirectional, 126–127 perceiving, 122–123 and “post-intentionality,” 129–138 and prior intentions, 121 Intention in action, 121, 122 Interintentionality, 25, 128, 140n36 Intermediality, 131, 136, 138 Intersubjectivity, 28, 78, 94, 104n46, 118, 186, 225–228, 234–236, 244 and normality, 104n46 J Jacobs, Hanne, 104n47 Jaffé, Saul, 248–257 James, William, 2 Järvinen, Hanna, 177n16 Jeannerod, Marc, 20, 52 Jentsch, Ernst, 55–56, 62 Johansson, Gunnar, 20, 51 Johnson, Mark, 31n31, 204 Johnson, Samuel, 231 Jola, Corinne, 166, 179n64 Jones, Amelia, 142n60 Jones, James, Earl, 192, 207 Jung, Carl, 68 K Kabuki theatre, 5 Kandinsky, Wassily, 72n66 Kazan, Elia, 195 Kemmerer, David, 203 Kemp, Rick, 4, 219n47 Keysers, Christian, 156, 164, 224 Kilner, J. M., 177n36 Kimel, David Vincent, 241 Kinesiology, 40–43

272  

INDEX

Kinesis/kinetic, 2, 37, 41 Kinesphere, 47, 96 Kinesthesia, 2, 7, 39–41, 45–47, 68n7, 146, 151, 152 history of term, 145–146 and proprioception, 146 and prosthesis, 46, 47, 53 Kinesthetic empathy, 2–3, 9, 11, 25, 94–95, 147–154 and theater, 5–8 Kinesthetic resonance, 11, 13, 49, 138, 145–176, 229 acoustic/motor, 190 and attentional selection, 161–164, 166–170 cultural determinations of, 160–161 disowning or inhibiting, 155, 233 and ensemble movement, 171–174 and expertise, 159–161, 165 limits to, 93–102, 159–161, 176, 238–241 multidirectional, 114, 126, 127, 171–176 and proximity, 165–166, 179n64 in the theater, 161–170 uncomfortable, 238–240 variability of, 155, 160–163, 165–166 See also Solicitation Kinesthetic spectatorship, 15 Kinesthetic sympathy, 146–150 Kinetic/kinesthetic archive, 249, 256 Kinetic melody, 43, 94 Kinetic we, 128 Kinney, Katherine, 218n22 Knowability, 10, 13, 78, 93–95, 99–101, 234, 236, 245, 257 Kolb, Rachel, 175 Kosonogov, Vladimir, 155–156 Kozel, Susan, 15, 105n61 Krasner, David, 229 Krulwich, Robert, 164

Kuppers, Petra, 94, 257 Kwan, SanSan, 139n17 L Laban, Rudolf, 42, 47, 150 Lakoff, George, 31n31, 204 Landgrebe, Ludwig, 68n7 Language, 6–8, 169, 186–187, 200–212 as bodily modality, 203 communities, 190 dissociated from speaking subject, 211–213 and empathy, 236 kinesthetic dimension of, 202–205, 228–229 and kinesthetic negotiation, 200–203 motor aspects of, 203 and physical action, 200–203, 206, 208–211, 216 theatrical, 200–203, 205–217 LeCoq, Jacques, 26, 37, 49, 185–187 Leder, Drew, 41, 45, 90, 99, 104n47 Legrand, Dorothée, 122 Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 28, 133 Lemon, R. N., 177n36 Levinas, Emmanuel, 25, 234–236, 240 Liberman, Alvin M., 189 Libet, Benjamin, 156–157 Linguistics, 1, 6, 22, 205 cognitive, 203–206 Linton, Simi, 103n30 Lipps, Theodor, 3, 147–149, 226, 253 Living statues, 61–64 Locomotion without the use of legs, 98–100, 238 See also Walking; Wheelchair, using a Luckmann, Thomas, 21 Luria, Aleksandr R., 43, 81 Lutterbie, John, 22, 219n47

 INDEX    

M Malik, Om, 223 Marey, Ė tienne-Jules, 131 Marinetti, F. T., 131 Martin, John, 3, 11, 148–153, 161, 239 on kinesthetic sympathy, 146–150 Martiny, Kristian Moltke, 103n30, 105n57 Massumi, Brian, 48, 137, 141n47 Mauss, Marcel, 104n46 McCarroll, Sarah E., 104n54, 105n54 McConachie, Bruce, 4, 27, 229 McIntyre, Loren, 212–217 McNeill, David, 189, 207–208 Merchant, Vivien, 167–170, 202, 203 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 12, 13, 15, 17, 21, 43, 46, 47, 76–86, 103n40, 140n24, 188–190 Merrick, Joseph, 243, 248–250 Metakinesis, 149 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 5, 26 Miller, Arthur View from the Bridge, A, 116, 119, 124, 125, 129, 165–166 Milner, Morris, 41–43 Mime, 42, 127 Mimesis, 28, 32n49 deep, 25, 247, 249–251 and otherness, 245 Mimetic affinities, 100 Mimicry, 2, 243–246 muscle, 147–153 Mimodynamics, 186 Mirror neurons, 1–4, 20, 25, 153–161, 219n34, 229, 234–235 and consciousness, 156–157 cultural influences on, 149–152, 159–161 debates concerning, 155–156, 177n35 and goal-directed action, 153, 154

273

and imagined or narrated action, 155 and inhibitory mechanisms, 155 and movement experience, 156–159 relation to other cognitive mechanisms, 155–156 and sensorimotor learning, 159 Modality, 77–79, 81, 85, 139n17, 203 Modernism, 65, 130, 151 Moran, Dermot, 30n23 Morris, David, 140n24 Morton, Adam, 232–233 Motion, 131 apparent, 50–51 biological, 51–52 in physics, 42 Motor cognition, 20 Motor theory of speech perception, 189 Movement, 1, 2, 28, 37, 39, 40, 48, 49 and blind spots, 77, 78, 80, 84, 94 continuous, 43 discontinuous, 43, 133 external obstacles to, 86–88 internalized obstacles to, 87–91 involuntary and reflexive, 41, 130–132 and one’s environment, 19, 44, 49, 82–84 and race, 87–89 in slow motion, 66, 133 threshold for perceiving, 67, 132 unconscious, 41 virtual, 7 Movement experience, 11, 37 neural corollaries of, 156–160 Movement perception, external, 1, 24 attunement to biological motion, 48–55, 118 as measured under laboratory conditions, 157–158

274  

INDEX

Movement perception, external (cont.) and multiple attentional objects, 169–176 relation to internal movement perception, 49 Movement, taxonomy, 41–42 Mozgala, Greg, 243 Mrázek, Jan, 56 Murphy, Kirk, 56–61 Murphy, Robert F., 12 Muscular dystrophy, 239, 241 Muse, John H., 229 Music, 180n67 Musician, 128, 160, 190 Muteness, 193 Muybridge, Eadweard, 131 N Narrative, 7, 8, 57, 66 Nedelkopoulou, Eirini, 15 Neurodivergence, 70n34, 80–82 Neurophenomenology, 17, 30n27 Neuroscience, 3, 4, 6, 9, 16, 140n30, 153–161, 203 and consciousness, 156–159 Noë, Alva, 19–20, 45, 48 Noetic and prenoetic, 91–93, 157, 178n44 Noland, Carrie, 84–86 Normality and normalization, 80–89, 92, 93, 104n46, 152–153, 244 See also Pathology and pathologization O Obama, Barack, 223 Objects, 61, 146, 147, 166–167, 237, 252 uncanny, 56 and vivification, 55, 57, 60 Olsen, Tillie Yonnondio, 77, 126

O’Neill, Eugene, Emperor Jones Ostension, 118, 192 Otherness, 14, 235–242, 245–248, 257 and “as if” representation, 245, 250 reaching for, 247 P Pacino, Al, 243 Pafford, J. H. P., 63, 64 Pain, 226, 232–234 Pantomime, 129 Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer, 141n55 Passarello, Elena, 199 Pathology and pathologization, 80–83, 86 Patočka, Jan, 38 Pavis, Patrice, 118 Pavlova, Anna, 150, 153 Perception, 9, 15, 18–24 and action, 19, 158 Petit, Jean-Lu, 68n7 Phenomenology, 1, 4, 6, 13, 217n2 and cognitive science, 16–22, 30n25, 31n41 and dance, 4 and difference, 79–86 and empathic understanding, 31n42, 225–228 and kinesthesia, 145–147 and methodology, 15 as methodology, 75, 78, 105n57 of movement, 18, 22 of music, 172, 180n68 and performance studies, 15–16 of theater and performance, 14–16, 110, 186 Pinter, Harold, 167 Homecoming, The, 166–171, 202–203 No Man’s Land, 203 Party Time, 203 Pirandello, Luigi, 235 Plato, 27

 INDEX    

Point-light display, 20, 50–53 Pomerance, Bernard, 243 Elephant Man, The, 13, 243 Popescu, Petru, 212 Posture and comportment, 48, 75–77, 90–92, 137, 146, 206, 250, 252, 253 gendered, 75–79, 91, 102n10 Power, Cormac, 31n43 Presence in motion, 24 and presencing, 8, 24 Primus, Pearl, 150 Proprioception, 98, 103n30, 105n54, 146, 213, 214 Prosthesis, 46–47, 53, 137, 141n47, 249 Proteus syndrome, 243, 249–251 Proteus Syndrome Foundation, 249 Proteus Theatre Company, 248 Merrick, the Elephant Man, 13, 245, 248–257 Pulkkinen, Simo, 139n14 Pump jack, 53 Punchdrunk, 5 Puppets, 55–60 relation to human performers, 59 Puppet theater, 56–60 Javanese, 56 R Race, 10, 79, 87–88, 92, 149–150 Ramachandran, Vilayanur, 235 Ratcliffe, Matthew, 31n42, 236 Realism, theatrical, 5 Reason, Matthew, 3, 160, 161, 166 Redmayne, Eddie, 243 Reed, Rex, 238–239 Rehearsal, 245, 246, 249 and movement/voice research, 246, 249

275

Reynolds, Dee, 3, 160, 161 Richardson, Ralph, 113 Risk, physical, 164 Rizzolatti, Giacomo, 3, 161 Roach, Joseph, 28, 165 Rooney, David, 119 Rosch, Eleanor, 18, 20 Rothfield, Philipa, 102n16, 178n57 Rude Mechanicals, 165 S Sailing, 38–39, 47 Salamon, Gayle, 102n5 Sandahl, Carrie, 14 Sandglass Theatre, 13, 56–60, 64 D-Generation: An Exultation of Larks, 13, 56–61, 64 Schechner, Richard, 247 Schneider, Johann, 17, 80–82 Schuenemann, Dwayne, 95, 97–101, 240 Schutz, Alfred, 21 Searle, John, 121–122 Self-movement, 32n49, 37–38, 130 contrasted with involuntary movement, 41 Semantics, embodied, 203, 208 Sensation, 48, 119 Sensorimotor dependencies, 45, 48 Shakespeare, William, 192 King Lear, 205–206, 230–234 Macbeth, 25, 209–211 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 54, 71n64 Tempest, The, 121 Winter’s Tale, The, 61–64 Shaw, George Bernard Pygmalion, 192 Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, 4, 21, 38, 40, 41, 49, 50, 146, 159, 160, 178n47, 203, 218n2

276  

INDEX

Shildrick, Margrit, 105n55, 242 Sidney, Sir Philip Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (New Arcadia), The, 231 Siebers, Tobin, 239 Sinigaglia, Corrado, 3–4, 161 Slobin, Dan, 205 Smith, Adam, 8, 224 Smith, Anna Deveare, 246 Fires in the Mirror, 246 Notes from the Field, 246 Twilight: Los Angeles, 246 Sobchack, Vivian, 100–101 Sofia, Gabriele, 115 Solicitation attentional, 120, 124, 169, 207, 230 empathic, 228–234, 236, 237, 241, 256 kinetic/kinesthetic, 137, 158, 162, 168, 172, 173, 196, 201, 208, 217 Sophocles Oedipus Rex, 8, 205 Sound, 54, 57, 66, 82–83, 154, 175 technologically produced, 187, 195, 212–215 Sound & Fury, 5 Sounds technologically produced, 135 Soundscape, 112, 213, 216 Spectator, 64, 111–118, 149, 176, 201, 252, 257 disabled, 173, 175–176 Spectatorship, 26, 27, 32n49, 112 and disability, 93–102 Speech, 7, 186–197 and gesture, 188–191, 208 and kinesthetic resonance, 188–194 mimetic incorporation of, 191, 248 technologically produced or modified, 195, 212

theatrical, 191–196 vocal production of, 190–191, 197, 218n22 Stanislavski, Constantin, 26, 112–114 Staring, 242 States, Bert O., 5, 206 Stein, Edith, 63, 103n40, 124, 225–227 Stelarc, 162 Extended Arm, 137 Fractal Flesh, 132, 137 Ping Body, 137 Stella and Stanley Shouting Contest (New Orleans), 25, 195–199 Stern, Daniel N., 25, 140n36 Straus, Erwin, 15, 42–43, 75–81 Stroboscope, 51, 67, 70n34 Strong, Mark, 119–120, 125, 129 Strukus, Wanda, 94–95, 241 Subjectivity, 11, 15, 20, 77, 124, 161, 175, 231, 235, 236, 250, 255 Subtext, 203 Sutil, Nicolás Salazar, 141n46 Suzuki, Tadashi, 26 Swan, Mary, 248–250 Sympathy, 8, 146–150, 224, 228 T Tableaux vivants, 61 Taipale, Joona, 104n46 Taussig, Michael, 28, 242, 245 Theatre and dance, 55 immersive, 211–217 and language/speech, 207–211 and mirror neurons, 155 and movement, 110–112, 116–118 seating, 165–166 Theatricalization, 112 Thompson, Evan, 18, 20, 84, 227–228

 INDEX    

Thompson, John Douglas, 209 TimeSlips, 56 Titchener, Edward, 9, 147, 223 Toombs, S. Kay, 103n30 Touch, 247 Trapeze, 250, 251, 253 Tribble, Evelyn B., 139n10, 220n47 U Uncanny, the, 54–56 Universalism, 10, 75–78, 149–152, 161 V Van Hove, Ivo, 116, 119, 124, 126, 128, 165–166 Varela, Francisco J., 17, 18, 20, 30n25 Veltruský, Jiří, 55 Verbs, action, 204 Vertigo, 206, 214 Vestibular system, 146 Vidyaykina, Ksenia, 135 Vischer, Robert, 147 Vision, 19, 80–82, 84, 154, 231, 234 See also Blindness W Wailes, Alexandria, 194 Wakefield, Jerome, 122 Walking, 19, 49, 66–67, 109–113, 116, 164 gender-transgressive, 102n5 on stage, 112–113 Watt Smith, Tiffany, 29n2 Weis, Cathy, 162

277

Dummy, 134, 136 Painting and Stripping, 135 String of Lies, A, 134 With a Shadow of Turning, 135, 136 Welton, Martin, 112, 116 Wertheimer, Max, 50, 51 Whalen, Doug H., 189 Wheelchair, using a, 12, 13, 47, 95, 97–98, 171, 238–242, 244 Whitelaw, Billie, 67, 68 Whitman, Robert, 111 Light Touch, 110–112 Williams, Tennessee Glass Menagerie, The, 237–238 Streetcar Named Desire, A, 195 Streetcar Named Desire, A (1951 film), 195 Wilshire, Bruce, 32n49, 100, 110 Wilson, August Fences, 192 Wilson, Robert, 131, 132, 162 Einstein on the Beach, 132, 133, 135 Witkiewicz, Stanisław, 72n66 Wordsworth, William, 54 Y Young, Iris Marion, 13, 75–80, 92, 126, 127 Z Zahavi, Dan, 16 Zaki, Jamil, 224, 230 Zarrilli, Phillip B., 22 Zegen, Michael, 125 Zeller Bass, Ines, 56–58