Performing arts and neuroscience: body and mirrors in theatrical expressivity

Abstract

Neuroscience, pedagogy and theatre: different epistemologies which, through dialogue, reflect each other from different perspectives, generating openings and multiplying meanings. They create links, networks, relationships of meaning and offer people creative and resilient strategies capable of generating beauty through the creation of shared spaces of action. In the pedagogical relationship between actor and spectator, theatre is an ephemeral but lasting experience, which leads to the transformation of the parties involved in a harmonic dance step in which attention, empathy, intention, affordances and ambiguity are involved. In the potential theatrical space, through the mechanisms of embodied simulation and liberated simulation, the subjects mirror each other, in a common resonance. The knowledge of the activation processes of the cortico-spinal pathway that induces movement allows to illuminate the dialogue and offers important contributions in the educational and didactic field.