ABSTRACT
How can cognitive science assist makers of devised theatre? While this form has become a familiar feature of Western performance, little has been written about principles that underlie its many disparate expressions. Indeed, publications on the topic describe widely differing approaches to making theatre (e.g. Williams 1988, 1999; Oddey 1994; Callery 2001; Bicât and Baldwin 2002; Govan, Nicholson and Normington 2007; Graham and Hoggett 2009; Mermikides and Smart 2010; Swale 2012; Syssoyeva and Proudfit 2013, 2016; Robinson 2015). A prolific diversity of processes and styles is evidence of the exuberant health of the form, but students, practitioners and researchers could be assisted by concepts and terms that identify both commonalities and differences among and between different practitioners. Theatre people have long had components (evolving mainly from Aristotle and Stanislavski) with which to analyse, describe and prepare scripted theatre, but in written drama these derive from the linear temporal structure of a fixed narrative – the script. Devised theatre, however, is authored through action, with meaning arising dynamically from the simultaneous interaction of multiple people, objects and phenomena. Consequently, we need different concepts and terms to describe both the processes and products of devised theatre. In this chapter I’m going to describe some ideas from cognitive science that identify underlying principles that may be applied across varied devising processes. In doing so, I hope to provide practitioners, researchers and students with some concepts that can assist in describing features of devising that might otherwise be difficult to define or even recognise. I also hope that researchers from disciplines other than theatre may find these conceptualisations useful in examining how devised theatre can be a useful forum for the exploration of intersubjective creativity. This possibility arises through the application of concepts and terms from cognitive science to performance processes, thus creating a degree of ‘consilience’ (see Bruce McConachie’s Chapter 26 in this book).
