Theatre can transform your life.
How creative, entrepreneurial processes enable you to complete important projects.
Beginning a story of social importance
Studies of the human mind have fascinated many scientists, theologians, philosophers, and artists. Yet, it is was seen to be a secondary concern to link the work of theatre practitioners such as Stanislavski, Brecht, Heathcote, and Boal with growing our understanding of human cognition.
It wasn’t until the turn of the 21st century, as Elliot Eisner claims in The Arts and the Creation of Mind, that the arts were seen as making “a distinctive contribution to the development of thinking skills” and giving rise to “distinctive forms of meaning, meaning that only artistically crafted forms can convey “. As a visual artist and art educator, Eisner was a student of Benjamin Bloom at the University of Chicago and participated in Bloom’s far-reaching collection of evidence in the research of taxonomies of thinking.
However, Eisner’s participation in research in psychology was to change entirely in the direct partnerships between neuroscientists, musicologists, and dance and theatre historians. I became interested in the work of theatre historian Professor Bruce McConachie while completing my doctoral research in Australian theatre history in the mid-1990s. From this vantage point, I viewed what became known as the ‘cognitive turn’ in writing cultural histories in Literature, Philosophy and the Performing Arts.
What theatre historians now tell us about the origins of theatre
In Theatre& Mind (2013), McConachie presents playing, acting and spectating within an evolutionary development of the human brain when he describes the relative complexities and capabilities of each of the brain's three parts: the reptilic, the limbic and the neocortex part, each one evolving of time to develop human memory, language and the uniquely human capacity of consciousness.
McConachie emphasises that only human play gives rise to an infinite combination of playful patterns, crucially connected with passing down learnings from one generation to the next.
In short, play helped our ancestors to survive and flourish. Scientists have found that the amount and range of play in higher mammals correlate with their general flexibility when faced with a problem of survival ... Drawing on scientific conclusions from biology, archaeology, and evolutionary psychology, evolutionary literary critic Brian Boyd emphasises the importance of pattern making and perceiving in human evolution ... For Boyd, art is a kind of cognitive play, the set of activities designed to engage human attention through their appeal to our preference for inferentially rich and therefore patterned information (McConachie, 2013, pp 12-13)
Join me in understanding how theatre is crucial for human development.
The human capacity to be empathetic, however, is not enough to turn playful behaviour into dramatic play. Instead, in evolutionary terms, what is required is the development of conceptual integration or conceptual blending, which enables humans to blend the concept of self with the idea of the character to be played. Its key contribution to a species-wide ability is role-play, a subjunctive form of play in which a hypothetical action gives rise to better memory, mimicking and reading the salient features of a situation. McConachie underlines the research that shows how conceptual blending is in the same cognitive class of human ability as grammar, language, understanding of analogies, and the cause-and-effect process.
Improvisation, for instance, using Stanislavski’s ‘magic if’, signals the human “ability to combine different perceptual categorisations related to a scene or an object and to construct a ‘universal’ reflecting the abstraction of some common feature across a variety of precepts, giving rise to seeds of foundational concepts for later enculturation.
Accordingly, ...The great evolutionary change that produced cognitively modern human beings was a matter of evolving an organism that could run off-line cognitive simulations so that evolution did not undertake the tedious process of natural selection every time a choice had to be made [this] allowed our species to elaborate human cultures upon a common biological foundation. (McConachie, 2012, p.20)
In detailing the role of the mind and body in acting as body schema, which employs psycho-physical ways of working with intentional physicality and emotional communication, McConachie details the actor’s conceptual understanding of the body in time and space:
As a reflex action controlled by the subconscious,
In locomotive action, which shows an intentional movement from here to there;
An instrumental action which concerns itself with performing a task and
An expressive action is more conscious of body image, perceptual experience, and emotional/ conceptual understanding of bodies through tension, shape, amplitude, and projection.
Then, seeing the concept of improvisation from a cognitive perspective, McConachie highlights how “imitation might begin in the imagination”. He refers to cognitive studies like that of John Lutterbie’s A General Theory Of Acting to explain how it is through the executive function of the human brain that the actor can create a performance score, the chunking together of concepts that meaningfully makes the portrayal of a complex character on stage.
So, how could this help you live a creative life and/or work in a creative industry?
Remarkably, the rehearsal processes McConachie describes are uncannily similar to the methods outlined in Barbara Oakley’s A Mind For Numbers: How To Excel At Maths & Science - Even If You Flunked Algebra (2014), an undergraduate text for Oakley’s Coursera MOOC “Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects.“
While critics disagree with the need for those working in the Arts to validate themselves ‘scientifically’, my interest as a theatre historian and educator remains in enabling students to live creative lives. Furthermore, I believe I have viewed through theatre history interesting models of successful entrepreneurship that have sustain many artists to sustain their careers over a lifetime. I bring those models to you in accessible courses through which you can practice successful processes and techniques of entrepreneurial creativity.