Kinesthetic Empathy Research Articles

Theatre, Body and Pleasure (review)

Reviewed by: Theatre, Body and Pleasure Jeffrey Scott Theatre, Body and Pleasure. By Simon Shepherd . New York: Routledge, 2006; pp. 198. $31.95 paper. A group of bodies watching other bodies is the core of theatrical performance. The body of the performer is the object of physical manipulation and display, which speaks to and manipulates the body of the spectator in varying degrees. Simon Shepherd begins with the proposition that "theatre is, and has always been, a place which exhibits what a human body is, what it does, what it is capable of" (1). Through the pleasure generated and manipulated within the body, the theatre engages personal and cultural values. These values can include the social, moral, and political and attach themselves to the physical characteristics of the body, as well as to the distinctions between the body and nonbody. In his introduction, Shepherd explores several developments that have influenced contemporary thinking about the body. He begins with feminist body art of the 1960s, which challenged dominant assumptions about gender roles through performance and made the body into a key theoretical and political topic, a site of contestation in a variety of ongoing struggles. He also notes George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's interest in the interconnection of mind and body, Erving Goffman's understanding of human behaviors as social roles, and the anthropological work on performance by scholars such as Mary Douglas and Victor Turner, which in turn came to influence the development of performance studies, particularly through Richard Schechner. Shepherd especially utilizes a phenomenological approach, arguing that since seeing, hearing, and speaking are mediated and affected by physical mechanisms, they are embodied experiences. Two groups of bodies participate in the theatrical event: the performers, and the spectators. Seeing, hearing, and speaking affect both groups. Shepherd's focus is the study of "the interplay of bodily values, the art of bodies and physical responses to that art" (9). He selects as his principal material the canonical scripted drama of Western Europe, in particular English drama. The works encompass a wide historical range, selected to provide the best examples for discussion. Throughout, Shepherd emphasizes the function of theatre as a mechanism of the civilizing process whereby societies learn and naturalize particular behaviors. Part 1 of the book explores the relationship between body and script. The theatre constructs a certain body that promotes particular values; the written script, then, is yet another agent in shaping the body. The script may serve to distinguish bodies in one play from bodies in another, in that the performer bases choices regarding movement on textual interpretation. The script then becomes a third element alongside acting technique and contemporary notions of physiology that produce the body onstage. Essentially, the text carries with it suggestions on how the body behaves. Theatre functions as a mechanism of society in allocating bodily values through the laughter and admiration that it encourages for particular bodies. Rather than being a continual evolutionary process, Shepherd argues that each period in history presents its own negotiations with bodily value and decorum. He examines a Restoration comedy, The Country Wife, as an example of the ideological work of the body, arguing that instead of being condemned as bawdy in the context of Whig ascetics, Restoration comedy "can be seen to produce a helpful aestheticising of that ascetic body" (31). Shepherd compares the clowning of Trinculo in The Tempest to the acting style of the commedia dell'arte. The performer operates as a full-body mask, adapting the physical musculature of another persona. The physical display of the performer accomplishes the ideological work of the body through a kinesthetic empathy between spectators' musculature and that of the performers. In watching the clowning of Trinculo, the audience has a sense of what is "low," just as in watching the dancing of a courtly masque, the audience has a sense of what is "high." In part 2, Shepherd analyzes the rhythmic organization and spatial arrangements of performance and the bodily impact on the audience, an example of which is the comic timing in Alan Ayckbourn's farce, Absurd Person Singular. Just as the script suggests a particular body for the performer to adopt, it also suggests certain...

A Physical Experience While Watching Dance

Cognitive neuroscience is an area that helps us to enlarge our knowledge of how movement is perceived and how we can understand the process of kinesthetic empathy. In this article I will analyze the connections between the visual input while watching a dance performance, the motor memory, the awareness of movement sensation, and emotional experiences. Experiments done on monkeys by Rizzolatti et al. gave insight in the working of the brain while watching dance. He discovered activity of neurons, which he called mirror neurons. Many experiments followed by neuroscientists and psychologists like Keysers, Bekkering, and Calvo–Merino. In this article I will use research results from neuroscience, as well as results from my own empirical studies. Those results give us more insight in the mechanisms active in the process of kinesthetic empathy, which can be helpful for choreographers interested in involvement strategies on a movement level.

The Problem of Symbolic Interaction and of Constructing Self

In the article we make an analysis of a thesis that verbal symbolic interaction is a necessary condition of constructing self. The main concepts used in the paper are: symbolic interaction, self and corporality. The aforementioned thesis and the concept of symbolic interaction originate from G.H Mead, who set the trend of thinking about interaction in human society in sociology and social psychology. This influence is noticeable up to this day. Symbolic interaction as a tool of understanding others actions and informing partners about our intensions is clearly visible in “languagecentred” and anthropocentrically oriented analyses of interactions as well as in the concentration on linguistic conditions of creating a self. Self is understood as an interpreted concept of a person but mainly in a process of social perception of a human by others occurring in interactions based on verbal language. In the article we want to develop a thesis about “nonlinguistic” possibilities of constructing interactions and self. The aforementioned thesis has been many times elaborated so far together with critical analyses of G. H. Mead (Irvin, 2004, Sanders, 1993, 1999, 2003; Myers, 1999, 2003). We want to integrate these elaborations, including our empirical experiences from a research on “The Social World of Pet’s Owners’ (research done in 2001-2005) on theoretical level and concentrate more on corporality and emotions issues and their relations to symbolic interaction and self. G.H. Mead’s views on this topic are analysed with regard to their methodological consistency and adequacy. In the article there is another thesis proposed, that interactions between animals also have meanings and, sometimes, symbolic nature, or sometimes, non symbolic one, and not necessarily related to use of a verbal language. The creation of self is connected with issues of corporality that includes: 1. nonverbal communication, 2. a relation of bodies in physical space, 3. the so called “kinesthetic empathy”, 4. emotions connected with body, mind and self processes. These elements of corporality may be the basis for taking the role of other. Researches and analyses of many sociologists (beginning from Ch. H. Cooley) show that self is often pre-verbal and that exclusion of an individual from her/his surroundings takes place also with the aid of the body and emotions tightly connected with functioning of self. The analysis of interactions between humans and animals provides us with much methodological and theoretical inspiration. Those researches and analyses obviously face a problem of “anthropomorphization of human behaviour”, which is of frequent occurrence both among researchers and ordinary people. New sociological sub-discipline called the sociology of human - non-human animals relationships adds a lot of new threads to the abovementioned deliberations on conditions of constructing self.

Variability in Spoken French: A Sociolinguistic Study of Interrogation and Negation

A key interdisciplinary concept in our understanding of social interaction across creative and cultural practices, kinesthetic empathy describes the ability

Understanding Dogs through Kinesthetic Empathy, Social Construction, and History

(1990). Understanding Dogs through Kinesthetic Empathy, Social Construction, and History. Anthrozoos: Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 184-195.

I-Reflexes: The Affective Implications of Bodies in Dance Improvisation Performance

In this article, I present—from the perspective of the dance improviser—an analysis of my practice-as-research project, entitled I-Reflexes. In this piece I explore factors influencing decision-making in dance improvisation performance. I-Reflexes captures the improvisational interaction of three performers: a solo dancer, a musician, and a sonic artist; the audience also participates through the mediation of their mobile phones. In this performance project, ringtones trigger unplanned, reflex-like movements in the body, suggesting alternate terms of decision-making within dance improvisation practice. A significant reflection that emerged from this study was that the act of perceiving brings the world into the body of the improviser, while the felt experience of affect places the body in relation to other bodies in the world. Therefore, I will suggest that to advance understandings of dance improvisation practice and theory, perception and affect should be explored together. Moreover, I will suggest the idea that interactive participation creates a closer affective space between performers and audience, connecting them in a meaningful and stimulating way. In addition, through the medium of ringtones, kinesthetic empathy was amplified. This had the effect of heightening the audience’s perceptual awareness of the relation between performers’ movements and sounds. This relational dynamic between the dance improviser and audience is explored within a psychosocial approach to the study of affect. I draw upon the embodied meaning-making model of affect developed by social psychologist Margaret Wetherell, to investigate this meaningful affective encounter.