Mining the Gap: Physically Integrated Performance and Kinesthetic Empathy

Abstract

Spring 2011 89 Mining the Gap: Physically Integrated Performance and Kinesthetic Empathy Wanda Strukus At the core of the theatrical experience we find, always, the relationship between audience and performer. Historically, we have used varying approaches to interrogate this relationship, such as phenomenology, semiotics, and performance studies, and seized upon different terms to mark its existence, including intersubjectivity, identification, standing-in, projection, and empathy. Interdisciplinary studies in theatre and cognitive science provide yet another approach for delving into this issue. Due, in part, to a hypothesized link between empathy, the human mirror neuron system, and autism, the question of how we come to understand one another in the world has received a great deal of attention within the cognitive science community. The resulting studies and findings offer alternative tools for understanding kinds of empathies in performance. In reciprocal fashion, performance offers controlled circumstances through which to examine empathy, especially if we consider the performance event as a potential site for empathic practice. Empathy is a broad term, encompassing a wide range of the possible ways in which we understand one another. The narrow focus of this essay is kinesthetic empathy, conceptualized as an automatic, involuntary, kinesthetic response of one body to another.1 The concept of kinesthetic empathy is problematic because early applications seemed to promote universalist assumptions about response and experience while neglecting a host of cultural, historical, and contextual differences.2 Today, we acknowledge that the factors that shape our ability to understand or connect with one another are numerous and complex. In this essay, I propose that cultural and historic factors are shaped and reshaped by embodied experience, and that the unconscious, neural foundations of kinesthetic empathy exist in a dynamic and influential relationship to these other forces. Kinesthetic empathy is the feeling of sharing another person’s movement, or vicariously experiencing another person’s movement simply by watching, and it is the focus of much current interdisciplinary work in dance and cognitive science.3 The modern conceptualization of kinesthetic empathy is attributed to the philosopher Theodore Lipps and his 1908 essay “Einfühlung, innere Wanda Strukus holds a PhD from Tufts University and teaches dance history, theatre history, and acting at Northeastern University. She is a Boston-based director, choreographer, and producer of site-specific performance and a frequent participant in theASTR working group in Cognitive Science in Theatre and Performance. 90 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism Nachahmung und Organempfindung” (“Empathy, Inner Imitation, and Physical Sensation”). In this essay, Lipps examines the phenomenon of internally imitating the actions of another person simply by observing her, with a particular focus on kinesthetic feeling or muscular tension.4 “Einfühlung,” which David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese translate perhaps more accurately as “in-feeling” or “feeling into,” had been previously used by philosopher Robert Vischer in 1873 to describe the viewer’s physical and kinesthetic response when observing a painting.5 Both Vischer and Lipps identified the shared kinesthetic experience we now call kinesthetic empathy.6 This shared experience has influenced dance theory and criticism since the early twentieth century due to dance critic John Martin’s adoption and advancement of the concept.7 Kinesthetic empathy is now of particular interest to the primary investigators of The Watching Dance Project, including cognitive scientist Christian Keysers and dance theorist Dee Reynolds, who study the empathic connections between audience and performer. However, the underlying concepts of kinesthetic empathy appear regularly in the work of cognitive scientists such as Vittorio Gallese, who focus on wider applications of empathy, the mirror neuron system, and embodied cognition. Not all performance hinges on kinesthetic empathy or on an audience member’s ability to put herself in the place of the performer (or performer-ascharacter ). There are certainly some kinds of performances, however, in which the forging of this empathic connection is the primary goal. In this essay, I look at AXIS Dance Company, an Oakland, California-based, physically integrated dance company that was founded in 1987. As a physically integrated company, AXIS incorporates many differently-abled dancers, and the core company has always included wheelchair dancers. In this respect, AXIS is representative of many physically integrated dance and dance-theatre companies in the United...