Abstract
This chapter (“Kinesthetic Resonance”) focuses on the perceiving subject’s vicarious engagement (or resonance) with the movements of others. It traces the concept of kinesthetic sympathy in dance theory and the parallel work on human mirroring in neuroscience and suggests how these parallel 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 its accounts of specific encounters inside and outside the theatre, it argues that resonance responses in the theatre are situational, multi-directional, and variable. Performances analyzed in this chapter includes Peter Hall’s film adaptation of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming and Deaf West’s revival of the musical Spring Awakening, which included deaf, hearing, and hard-of-hearing performers.
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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).
- 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.
- 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 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.
- 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.”
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Garner, S.B. (2018). Kinesthetic Resonance. In: Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91794-8_5
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