Abstract
This chapter (“Movement, Attention, and Intentionality”) explores two important elements of kinesthetic spectatorship: attention and intentionality. Looking at key ways in which theatre engages movement differently than it is engaged in non-performance situations, it considers the interaction of focal and marginal attention, the centrality of intentionality to action recognition, and the role of affect in the execution and perception of movement. After expanding the intentional model to include micro-intentions and what developmental psychologist Daniel Stern calls “interintentionality,” the chapter concludes with a discussion of contemporary performance attempts to establish a “post-intentional” theatre. Performances analyzed in this chapter include director Ivo van Hove’s production of A View from the Bridge, Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, and the performative experiments of Stelarc and Cathy Weis.
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Notes
- 1.
Bruce Wilshire, Role-Playing and Identity, ix–xiv.
- 2.
Robert Whitman, “Light Touch” 80.
- 3.
Wilshire, Role-Playing and Identity, xi. There is no mention of policemen in Whitman’s script.
- 4.
Peter Brook, The Empty Space, 9.
- 5.
Martin Welton, Feeling Theatre, 121.
- 6.
Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, 84.
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
Ibid., 37.
- 9.
Constantin Stanislavski, A Life in Letters, 288.
- 10.
Ralph Richardson, Interview, 71–72; cited in Evelyn B. Tribble, “Distributed Cognition, Mindful Bodies and the Arts of Acting,” 138–39.
- 11.
P. Sven Arvidson, The Sphere of Attention: Context and Margin, 1 (emphasis in original).
- 12.
See Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, 83.
- 13.
Ibid., 89.
- 14.
Translated and quoted in Simo Pulkkinen, “Husserl on the Factical and Historical Grounds of the Transcendental Subject,” 112 (emphasis in original).
- 15.
Gabriele Sofia, “Achieved Spontaneity and the Spectator’s Performative Experience,” 73.
- 16.
Welton, Feeling Theatre, 105.
- 17.
In a parenthesis to his discussion of kinesthesis in The Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl adds I hold still to the experiential modality I move (161). This observation suggests that the act of refraining from movement can be seen as existing within a kinesthetic field. Husserl also mentions “I refrain from moving my body” in Thing and Space (335). Choreographer-performer Victoria Gray writes: “In its apparent absence, movement becomes more present and we acknowledge that binary oppositions between stillness and movement do not and cannot sensibly exist; stillness is within movement and movement is within stillness” (“Re-Thinking Stillness,” 201). Gray cites performance theorist SanSan Kwan’s observation on the phenomenological complexities of not moving: “When the body is at rest our powers of introspective proprioception experience a world of microscopic tremors, vibrations and pulsations happening within the body” (ibid., 206; Kwan, “Hong Kong In-corporated: Falun Gong and the Choreography of Stillness,” 17–18).
- 18.
Patrice Pavis, Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis, 244.
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
Daniel L. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, 129–30.
- 21.
David Rooney, review of A View from the Bridge.
- 22.
In this production Alfieri begins his monologue when the scene is over and Eddie and Joey have left the stage.
- 23.
Riverside Shakespeare, 1661 (stage direction).
- 24.
My use of the term intention in the present context differs from the phenomenological use of “intention” to describe perception’s inherence in its objects (i.e., all perception is perception of something). This strictly phenomenological meaning, which originates in Husserl’s writing is, of course, deeply related to the motile and perceptual experiences I discuss, as Merleau-Ponty’s notion of motor intentionality [intentionnalité motrice] indicates (Phenomenology of Perception, 112–14). See David Morris, “Body,” 114–18.
- 25.
John Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, 91.
- 26.
Searle, “Response: The Background of Intentionality and Action,” 293.
- 27.
Ibid.
- 28.
Dorothée Legrand, “Bodily Intention and the Unreasonable Intentional Agent,” 161.
- 29.
Ibid., 166.
- 30.
By including expressive movement under the broader rubric of intention, I am going against the practice of many neuroscientists, who restrict the latter term to externally goal-directed movement. While experiments on the brain’s mirror system suggest difference between the neural processing of goal-directed and non-goal-directed movement, the experience of movement and movement perception do not reflect this clear-cut distinction.
- 31.
Jerome Wakefield and Hubert Dreyfus, “Intentionality and the Phenomenology of Action,” 263.
- 32.
Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, 51. French phenomenologist Renaud Barbaras underscores the inseparability of affect, perception, and movement: “Beings capable of moving are the very ones that are capable of feeling; feeling and movement are the two aspects of a same mode of living, because movement assumes the desire for a goal, which itself requires the capacity for perceiving it” (Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception, 87).
- 33.
Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio, 185–86; cited in Young, “‘Throwing Like a Girl’: Twenty Years Later,” 289.
- 34.
Olsen, Quoted in Mara Faulkner, Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen, 47.
- 35.
Alexander Iliev, Towards a Theory of Mime, 188.
- 36.
Expanding Daniel N. Stern’s use of this term in The Interpersonal World of the Infant, Ingar Brinck defines interintentionality in the context of infant development: “Interintentionality is the sharing of information with another agent about the intention and beliefs of the self and others, first by ostensive, bodily based means, such as gaze, gesture, and vocalization, later in development by symbolic means, for instance, verbally” (“The Role of Intersubjectivity and Intentional Communication,” 132, italics in original).
- 37.
Roberta Carreri, On Training and Performance, 68; cited, in different translation, in Sofia, “Achieved Spontaneity,” 76.
- 38.
Sofia, “Achieved Spontaneity,” 76.
- 39.
Carreri, 68.
- 40.
Edward Gordon Craig, On the Art of the Theatre, 56.
- 41.
Ibid., 81.
- 42.
Ibid., 67 (emphasis in original).
- 43.
F. T. Marinetti, “Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine,” 86.
- 44.
Ibid.
- 45.
F. T. Marinetti, “The Variety Theatre,” 190.
- 46.
Nicolás Salazar Sutil provides a valuable discussion of technology and movement representation in Motion and Representation: The Language of Human Movement.
- 47.
A segment of this performance can be viewed at Stelarc, “Circulating Flesh.” Fractal Flesh was one of a number of Stelarc performances that experimented with remote skeletomuscular activation and prosthetic technologies; others include Split Body: Voltage in/Voltage Out (1995), Ping Body (1995), Movatar/Avatar (1997) and Extended Arm (2000). Brian Massumi provides an account of these and other performances in his analysis of Stelarc’s work (Parables for the Virtual, 116–26).
- 48.
Stelarc, “Earlier Statements.”
- 49.
My observations refer to the 1984 production of Einstein on the Beach at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. A documentary about this production entitled Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera includes extended sequences of the opera.
- 50.
Uwe Proske and Simon C. Gandevia, “The Kinaesthetic Senses,” 4141.
- 51.
Robert Wilson, in Jan Linders, “Time Has No Concept: An Interview with Robert Wilson,” 87.
- 52.
Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 164.
- 53.
Ibid (emphasis in original).
- 54.
Susan Kozel, Closer, xvii.
- 55.
Cathy Weis, quoted in Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre, 68. I am indebted to Parker-Starbuck’s fine discussion of Weis’s work in Cyborg Theatre and several essays/reviews that preceded it (see “The Body Electric: Cathy Weis at Dance Theatre Workshop” and “Shifting Strengths: The Cyborg Theatre of Cathy Weis”). Of Dummy she observes, “The piece forms a narrative of bodily disappearance and cyborgean rebirth” (Cyborg Theatre, 68).
- 56.
Cathy Weis, Quoted in Dulcie Leimbach, “On Line, Choreographer Pushes Back Boundaries.”
- 57.
A segment of Vidyaykina’s performance can be viewed on Weis’s website “Cathy Weis Projects,” http://www.cathyweis.org/works/works/electric-haiku/. Video recordings of most of the other performances discussed here are available in the Moving Image Archive of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
- 58.
Stelarc, “Earlier Statements.”
- 59.
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 120.
- 60.
Challenging Stelarc’s pronouncement that the human body is “obsolete” in the late capitalist era, Amelia Jones describes her empathic response to his work Extended Arm, which continues his exploration of prosthetic and remote-activation technologies: “I imagined (even empathically experienced) my own body trapped, controlled, directed by this technological apparatus. Far from experiencing Stelarc’s (or my own) body as ‘obsolete’ or otherwise irrelevant or transcended, I felt more aware of my own bodily attachment to his artistic practice—more and not less cathected to his technologized form” (“Stelarc’s Technological ‘Transcendence’/Stelarc’s Wet Body,” 87).
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Garner, S.B. (2018). Movement, Attention, and Intentionality. In: Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91794-8_4
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