Practice, Research, and Cognition in Devised Performance

(Hardback)

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This interdisciplinary study of devised theatre explores devising as research practice through the intersection of cognitive sciences and the arts.

It interrogates relationships between epistemology and cognition, action and aesthetics, and first-person experience and third-person investigation. Pairing practice research methodologies from theatre and performance with cognitive and neuroscientific approaches both theoretical and empirical it reveals new insights into the practices of collective creation in theatre.

To foreground the insider knowledge inherent to practice research, the main case studies are works created and performed by Maiya Murphys international movement-based devising collective, Autopoetics. Autopoetics work is contextualized in reference to major international devising companies including Complicit, Tectonic Theater Project, SITI Company, Frantic Assembly, and Gecko Theatre, and empirical and practice-based research on embodied performance including major dance projects such as The Watching Dance Project and Motion Bank. Practice, Research, and Cognition in Devised Performance proposes a model for breaking down disciplinary silos to freshly access the processes of collaborative practice and invigorate research in the humanities and arts.

Reviews

Through its focus on cognitive approaches to devising this book offers an original, interdisciplinary and contemporary contribution to theatre and performance studies with a wealth of practical and theoretical strategies for readers to apply to their own work. * Nicola Shaughnessy, University of Kent, UK *

Author Bio

Maiya Murphy is a practitioner-researcher and Associate Professor in the Theatre and Performance Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. She is the author of Enacting Lecoq: Movement in Theatre, Cognition, and Life (2019). Her work has also appeared in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews; Practice as Research in the Arts (and Beyond): Principles, Processes, Context, Achievements; Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences; Constructivist Foundations; Theatre, Dance and Performance Training; New Theatre Quarterly; Theatre Survey; The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq; The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater; and Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance.