Practice, Research, and Cognition in Devised Performance

This interdisciplinary study explores devised performance and practice research at the intersection of the cognitive sciences and 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 Murphy’s international movement-based devising collective, Autopoetics. Autopoetics’ work is contextualized in reference to major international devising companies, dance companies, and interdisciplinary research projects including Complicité, Frantic Assembly, Forced Entertainment, Tectonic Theater Project, The Necessary Stage, Company Wayne McGregor, Australian Dance Theatre, Choreography and Cognition, Motion Bank and Watching Dance: Kinesthetic Empathy. 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.