Routledge Theatre, Performance, and Embodied Cognition Series

This Series applies the latest research in cognitive science to a broad cultural and intercultural spectrum of Theatre and Performance. Cognitive science investigates species-wide human phenomena such as communication, creativity, emotion and imagination and how they are expressed in, and affected by, different cultures. This innovative exploration of human behaviour provides startling new analyses of practice and illuminates both the continuities and the differences between and among multiple forms, styles and periods of Theatre and Performance. Embodied Cognition is a holistic understanding of human behavior based on empirically derived knowledge from the broad inter-disciplinary field of cognitive science. Its core tenets are that body and mind are integrated, that language and conceptual thought are rooted in physical and perceptual experience, and that humans are ‘situated’ – intricately enmeshed in reciprocal interactions with their physical, social and cultural environments. These principles support practitioners and researchers alike in updating their knowledge and understanding of their subject ma er and the means that they use to create, analyze and teach its various forms. Embodied Cognition provides a conceptual framework that is perfectly suited for an art form that is embodied, collaborative, dynamical, multi-modal and integrative. The Series will include monographs and edited collections by world-leading scholars as well as contributions from emerging and mid-career practioners and researchers. It is designed to integrate with Routledge’s digital platorm, the Routledge Performance Archive (RPA). This allows authors of printed texts to incorporate linked videos of training, rehearsal and performance practices which readers can view alongside written text. The Series will also present work that is digital in origin and dissemination. The digital integra on facilitates publications in multiple formats, ranging from printed texts to video capture of performances and teaching, Practice as Research (PaR) projects, and formats such as podcasts, webinars and blogs. Each project will be accompanied by a short introductory video interview with the author/s, personalizing the content and making it accessible to a wide range of readers. Following publica on, this accessibility will be furthered by webinars and discussion forums. Over me, the digital resources will combine to create a knowledge bank that includes a glossary of terms and concepts in Embodied Cognition, and brief descriptions of topics, practitioners, researchers and authors in the field.

SERIES EDITOR

Richard J. Kemp MA (Oxon.) MFA, PhD has over thirty-five years of experience as an actor and director in the UK, Europe and the USA, receiving France’s Institut Francais Award, the British Telecom/EMA Innovations Award and The Heinz Endowments Creative Heights Award (USA). He is Professor Emeritus of Theatre and Distinguished Faculty in the Arts at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA, Editorial Board member of the Theatre, Dance and Performance Training Journal and a Fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar on Neuroscience and the Arts. Publications include Embodied Acting: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Performance (2012), The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq (2016) and The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science (2019).

ADVISORY BOARD
Dr. Steven Brown is the director of the NeuroArts Lab in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour at McMaster University, Canada. The lab's work is devoted to developing a unified view of the arts in their collectivity. He has published numerous journal articles and is the co-editor of two books: The Origins of Music (MIT Press) and Music and Manipulation (Berghahn Books) and the author of The Unification of the Arts (Oxford University Press).

Quinn Bauriedel is a co-founder and co-artistic director of the OBIE Award–winning Pig Iron Theatre Company based in Philadelphia, USA. Since 1995, he has been one of the leading artists with the company, co-creating many of the company’s 30-plus original works of theater and touring them internationally. He is the Program Director of Pig Iron School, a physical theatre school rooted in Lecoq pedagogy and ensemble theatre practice that offers MFA and certificate programs in Devised Performance through a partnership with the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Dr. Marta Calbi is a Post-Doctoral researcher at the University of Milan, Italy. Her research focuses on the investigation of emotions from an embodied perspective. This research deals with the way the sensory-motor system processes emotional information, in particular emotions conveyed by body postures (i.e., emotional body language - EBL), by means of behavioural and electrophysiological methods in humans. She is also dedicated to the scientific investigation of the bodily relationship between actors/actresses  and spectators, thus integrating evidence from basic understanding of EBL with theatre and performance studies. She is co-founder of the theatre company Tavolo.02 and the research and dissemination project Teatro&Scienza.

Dr. Thalia R. Goldstein is Associate Professor of Applied Developmental Psychology at George Mason University, USA. Her work focuses on children's developing social and emotional skills, particularly theory of mind, empathy, and emotional control and regulation, and how such skills intersect with children's engagement in pretend play, theatre, drama, and other imaginative activities. She directs the PLAY Lab (Play, Learning, Arts, and Youth Lab), which conducts research that looks both at the effects of engaging in pretend play and theatre on children's social-emotional skills, and how children understand and learn social information in fictional worlds. She is also the co-director of the National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab, the Mason Arts Research Center (MasonARC). She has published numerous journal articles and the book Why Theatre Education Matters (2024).

Annemarie Hagenaars (New York, NY) is a film, TV and stage actress who holds degrees in Astronomy and Physics. She works in the arts, education and business with experience in both the USA and Europe. A member of SAG-AFTRA, films include Lucky Jack, The Artist’s Wife, Destiny’s Smile, Honeypot and Karma. She is a Board member of the League of Professional Theatre Women, and member of the Advisory Committee to the Board of the Netherland America Foundation.

Professor Tomasz Kubikowski Deputy artistic director and literary director of Poland’s National Theatre and a Professor of the Theatre Academy Aleksandra Zelwerowicz in Warsaw. Publications include An Actor Survives: Remarks on Stanislavsky (2023), Zjadanie psów (Eating Dogs) (2019), Przeżyć na scenie (Experiencing on Stage) (2015), Reguła Nibelunga: teatr w świetle nowych badań świadomości (The Rule of the Nibelung: Theatre in the Light of New Studies of Consciousness), 2004.

Bruce McConachie Emeritus Professor of Theatre Arts, University of Pittsburgh, former President of the American Society of Theatre Researchers (ASTR) and recipient of ASTR’s Barnard Hewitt Award and Distinguished Scholar Award. Publications include Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn (with F. Elizabeth Hart), Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (2008), Theatre & Mind (2013), Evolution, Cognition, and Performance (2015) and (with Richard J. Kemp) The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science.(2019)

Vladimir Mirodan PhD, FRSA, Emeritus Professor of Theatre, University of the Arts, London. He was the Director of the School of Performance at Rose Bruford College and Vice-Principal and Director of Drama at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland), Principal of Drama Centre London (2001-2011), Director of Development at Central Saint Martins (2010-2013), Research Leader, Drama and Performance, Central Saint Martins (2013-2015). He has served as Vice Chair of the Directors Guild of Great Britain, Chairman of the Conference of Drama Schools and Deputy Chair of the National Council for Drama Training. He has published numerous articles on acting psychology, especially in its relation to neuropsychology and the psychology of gesture and posture, and the book The Actor and the Character: Explorations in the Psychology of Transformative Acting (2018).

Dr. Maiya Murphy (National University of Singapore, Singapore) is a practitioner-researcher focused on the intersections between cognitive science and actor training, movement, devising, and performance. She is the author of Enacting Lecoq: Movement in Theatre, Cognition, and Life (2019), and the forthcoming Practice, Research, and Cognition in Devised Performance (2024). Her work has also appeared in multiple journals and edited collections. She is an Assistant Professor in the Theatre Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore and makes theatre with her collective, Autopoetics.

Ellie Nixon PhD is Director of Film and Performing Arts at Norwich University of the Arts, UK, and an actor, director and co-founder of La Mancha Theatre Company and La Mancha International Theatre School of Image and Gesture in Chile. She is a theatre director, actor and teacher with over thirty years extensive international experience in the performing arts. Her research explores embodied approaches to contemporary performance practice and performer training. Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, material engagement theory and environmental humanities, she articulates the projective interplay between the sensate imagining body and the material world as a dynamic force for creative practice. Her book Imagining Bodies and Performer Training (2023) is a practical and theoretical exploration of the embodied imagining processes of devised performance.

Yanna B. Popova DPhil (Oxford). Director, Centre for Research on Culture, Language, and Mind, University of Warsaw, Poland. Dr. Popova has taught at the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham, UK, and was a founding member of the Department of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University USA, where she worked between 2006 and 2014. She has published numerous articles and chapters on the topics of cognitive poetics, cognitive linguistics, metaphor theory, narratology, temporality, and the applications of enactive cognitive science to understanding art and aesthetic reception, Her book Stories, Meaning, and Experience: Narrativity and Enaction (2015) was re-issued in paperback in 2018.

Inga Romantsova MA, MPhil is a highly experienced actress, educator, and academic researcher. Her career began at the esteemed State Institute of Theatrical Arts in St. Petersburg.  She gained her MA (Theatre and Film) and MPhil (Drama) in Australia and is presently employed at the prestigious Actor's Centre Australia, Torrens University, where her focus lies in teaching acting techniques from Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Evreinov, M. Chekhov and Grotowski. In addition, she conducts in-depth research on contemporary theatre practitioners, specifically exploring the concept that acting extends beyond the physical confines of a theatrical building.

Joelle Ré Arp-Dunham PhD, MFA is a director, actor, and educator in both theatre and film, teaching Directing, Acting, Voice and Consent and Intimacy, and Devising Theatre at Kansas State University USA. She was the Founder and Producing Artistic Director of Circle Ensemble Theatre Company in Athens, Georgia from 2010-2019. Her current scholarly research applies concepts from behavioral neuroscience to Stanislavsky’s methodology and theories. Joelle's edited book on the intersections of Stanislavsky’s theories and practices with intimacy protocols and choreography, Stanislavsky and Intimacy, was published in 2023. She is a proud member of the SDC (Stage Directors and Choreographers Society), the Directing Focus Group Representative for ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education), the Media Editor for the Stanislavski Studies Journal and on the editorial board of Journal of Consent-Based Performance.
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John Sutton is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia and Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Stirling in Scotland. He works in the philosophy of mind, cognition, and action, in cognitive psychology, and in the interdisciplinary cognitive humanities. His research topics are autobiographical and collaborative memory, embodied memory and skilled movement, distributed cognition, and cognitive history. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, his publications include the book Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to connectionism<https://johnsutton.net/philosophy-and-memory-traces/> (re-issued in paperback 2007) and the co-edited collections Collaborative Embodied Performance: ecologies of skill (2022), Collaborative Remembering: theories, research, applications (2018), Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind (2014), and Descartes’ Natural Philosophy (2000).

Evelyn Tribble [email protected] is a Professor of English and the Associate Dean for Humanities and Undergraduate Affairs, at the University of Connecticut USA. Her research interests center around Shakespeare, performance, memory, and skill. She explores theatrical history through the lens of Distributed Cognition, asking how Shakespeare’s company met the astonishing cognitive demands of their profession, particularly the performance of up to six different plays a week. She is the author of Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (1993), Writing Material: Readings from Plato to the Digital Age (with Anne Trubek, 2003), Cognitive Ecologies and the History of Remembering (with Nicholas Keene, 2011), Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (2011), Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body (2017), and The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Science (with Howard Marchitello, 2017).

Darren Tunstall [email protected]  PhD, MA Hons (Cantab), FHEA, associate Professor and Programme Leader, MA Acting, University of Surrey. He has been an actor, writer, director and dramaturg since 1988, and was a significant figure in the 'physical theatre' revolution of the 1990s, devising, performing and directing award-winning shows with companies like The Right Size, Told by an Idiot, Scarlet Theatre and Peepolykus. He was a company member, movement director and associate director for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and has worked for almost every major theatre production house in the UK, as well as for the BBC, ITV and Film Four. He has taught at the University of Central Lancashire, Central School of Speech and Drama, Arts Educational Schools and the British American Dramatic Academy. His main research areas are Shakespeare, actor training and cognitive psychology, especially in relation to embodiment.