Empathy as Dialogue in Theatre and Performance

Empathy as Dialogue in Theatre and Performance PDF Author: Lindsay B. Cummings
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137593261
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Empathy has provoked equal measures of excitement and controversy in recent years. For some, empathy is crucial to understanding others, helping us bridge social and cultural differences. For others, empathy is nothing but a misguided assumption of access to the minds of others. In this book, Cummings argues that empathy comes in many forms, some helpful to understanding others and some detrimental. Tracing empathy’s genealogy through aesthetic theory, philosophy, psychology, and performance theory, Cummings illustrates how theatre artists and scholars have often overlooked the dynamic potential of empathy by focusing on its more “monologic” forms, in which spectators either project their point of view onto characters or passively identify with them. This book therefore explores how empathy is most effective when it functions as a dialogue, along with how theatre and performance can utilise the live, emergent exchange between bodies in space to encourage more dynamic, dialogic encounters between performers and audience.

Empathy as Dialogue in Theatre and Performance

Empathy as Dialogue in Theatre and Performance PDF Author: Lindsay B. Cummings
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137593261
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
Empathy has provoked equal measures of excitement and controversy in recent years. For some, empathy is crucial to understanding others, helping us bridge social and cultural differences. For others, empathy is nothing but a misguided assumption of access to the minds of others. In this book, Cummings argues that empathy comes in many forms, some helpful to understanding others and some detrimental. Tracing empathy’s genealogy through aesthetic theory, philosophy, psychology, and performance theory, Cummings illustrates how theatre artists and scholars have often overlooked the dynamic potential of empathy by focusing on its more “monologic” forms, in which spectators either project their point of view onto characters or passively identify with them. This book therefore explores how empathy is most effective when it functions as a dialogue, along with how theatre and performance can utilise the live, emergent exchange between bodies in space to encourage more dynamic, dialogic encounters between performers and audience.

Empathy, Estrangement, and Theatre for Social Change

Empathy, Estrangement, and Theatre for Social Change PDF Author: Lindsay Brooke Cummings
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
In this dissertation, I argue that we can look to particular aspects of theatre and performance to help us engage in empathy that is respectful and dialogic, that seeks not to consume another's experience, but rather to engage it. As a work of theatre scholarship, this dissertation seeks to reframe the debate over whether or not theatre is the ideal site of empathy, and whether such empathy can motivate social change. Rather than arguing for or against empathy, I suggest that we must ask what kind of empathy best promotes social change and how the theatre can help us encourage that empathy. I advocate a model of empathy based on a sense of parity, dialogue, and non-linearity. Empathy, I argue, is not a state or a feeling with a stable goal ("understanding"), but rather a process. As such, it entails an affective and critical labor that requires us to meet the other as our equal and to entertain, imaginatively, his or her perspective on the world. Because the empathy I advocate takes the form of an exchange, it can take us in unexpected directions. It consists not in a linear progression toward understanding, but rather takes the shape of a conversation, twisting, turning, doubling back, and emerging in the moment of encounter. It is contingent and always incomplete-a process without end. I identify a series of theatrical techniques that can help produce the kind of empathy described above: interruption, repetition, and rehearsal. These techniques are either compatible with or derived from Brechtian theory. Thus, the dissertation calls for a rethinking of the role of empathy in Brechtian dramaturgy. To make this argument, I analyze the history of empathy or Einfühlung, a term originating in German aesthetic theory and then adopted by psychology, psychoanalysis, and phenomenological philosophy, inspiring new definitions in each of these disciplines. I argue that Einfühlung in Brecht's work would be better understood as identification or emotional contagion and suggest that, despite Brecht's protests to the contrary, there is not necessarily any conflict between empathy and a theatre of estrangement.

Theatrical Reality

Theatrical Reality PDF Author: Campbell Edinborough
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781783205875
Category : Theater
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description


Of Human Kindness

Of Human Kindness PDF Author: Paula Marantz Cohen
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300258321
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
An award-winning scholar and teacher explores how Shakespeare's greatest characters were built on a learned sense of empathy While exploring Shakespeare's plays with her students, Paula Marantz Cohen discovered that teaching and discussing his plays unlocked a surprising sense of compassion in the classroom. In this short and illuminating book, she shows how Shakespeare's genius lay with his ability to arouse empathy, even when his characters exist in alien contexts and behave in reprehensible ways. Cohen takes her readers through a selection of Shakespeare's most famous plays, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Merchant of Venice, to demonstrate the ways in which Shakespeare thought deeply and clearly about how we treat "the other." Cohen argues that only through close reading of Shakespeare can we fully appreciate his empathetic response to race, class, gender, and age. Wise, eloquent, and thoughtful, this book is a forceful argument for literature's power to champion what is best in us.

Perspectives in Performing Arts Medicine Practice

Perspectives in Performing Arts Medicine Practice PDF Author: Sang-Hie Lee
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030374807
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
Performing Arts Medicine (PAM) is a growing area of specialization within the performing arts field, which addresses the multi-faceted health and wellness of performing artists. This sub-discipline within performing arts is interdisciplinary in nature, involving the expertise of performing arts educators and researchers, physicians and other health professionals. This first of its kind text appeals to a very wide audience that includes performing arts clinical practitioners and health science researchers as well as performing arts pedagogues and performing arts students. The first part of the text gives the reader an overview of the field and discusses over-arching themes and issues in PAM. Part two presents an array of music and dance research involving primarily case studies that address significant issues of concern for performing artists and have implications for pedagogical practice. Part three provides research-based perspectives derived from professionals sharing their in-practice experiences. Finally, part four describes useful PAM models of implementation supporting the needs of performing artists in different settings. Written by experts in the field, Perspectives in Performing Arts Medicine Practice is a valuable resource for performing arts physicians, educators and researchers.

Theory for Theatre Studies: Emotion

Theory for Theatre Studies: Emotion PDF Author: Peta Tait
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350030872
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Theory for Theatre Studies: Emotion explores how emotion is communicated in drama, theatre, and contemporary performance and therefore in society. From Aristotle and Shakespeare to Stanislavski, Brecht and Caryl Churchill, theatre reveals and, informs but also warns about the emotions. The term 'emotion' encompasses the emotions, emotional feelings, affect and mood, and the book explores how these concepts are embodied and experienced within theatrical practice and explained in theory. Since emotion is artistically staged, its composition and impact can be described and analysed in relation to interdisciplinary approaches. Readers are encouraged to consider how emotion is dramatically, aurally, and visually developed to create innovative performance. Case studies include: Medea, Twelfth Night, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Ibsen's A Doll's House, and performances by Mabou Mines, Robert Lepage, Rimini Protokoll, Anna Deavere Smith, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Marina Abramovic, and The Wooster Group. By way of these detailed case studies, readers will appreciate new methodologies and approaches for their own exploration of 'emotion' as a performance component. Online resources to accompany this book are available at https://www.bloomsbury.com/theory-for-theatre-studies-emotion-9781350030848/.

Theater and Human Flourishing

Theater and Human Flourishing PDF Author: Harvey Young
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197622267
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
"This collection explores the link between theatre and human flourishing. It interrogates both the social good of theatre and the personally restorative work of a range of live embodied performances. It brings together the disciplines of theatre (and performance studies) and psychology, especially positive psychology, to explore the social benefits of theatre: creating community, encouraging interconnection, serving as a mean to reveal and share both healing and trauma"--

Theatrical Reality

Theatrical Reality PDF Author: Campbell Edinborough
Publisher: Intellect Books
ISBN: 1783205881
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Performance, dramaturgy and scenography are often explored in isolation, but in Theatrical Reality, Campbell Edinborough describes their connectedness in order to investigate how the experience of reality is constructed and understood during performance. Drawing on sociological theory, cognitive psychology and embodiment studies, Edinborough analyses our seemingly paradoxical understanding of theatrical reality, guided by the contexts shaping relationships between performer, spectator and performance space. Through a range of examples from theatre, dance, circus and film, Theatrical Reality examines how the liminal spaces of performance foster specific ways of conceptualising time, place and reality.

Actors and Audiences

Actors and Audiences PDF Author: Caroline Heim
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315456079
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Actors and Audiences explores the exchanges between those on and off the stage that fill the atmosphere with energy and vitality. Caroline Heim utilises the concept of "electric air" to describe this phenomenon and discuss the charge of emotional electricity that heightens the audience’s senses in the theatre. In order to understand this electric air, Heim draws from in-depth interviews with 79 professional audience members and 22 international stage and screen actors in the United Kingdom, United States, France and Germany. Tapping into the growing interest in empirical studies of the audience, this book documents experiences from three productions – The Encounter, Heisenberg and Hunger. Peer Gynt – to describe the nature of these conversations. The interviews disclose essential elements: transference, identification, projection, double consciousness, presence, stage fright and the suspension of disbelief. Ultimately Heim reveals that the heart of theatre is the relationship between those on- and off-stage, the way in which emotions and words create psychological conversations that pass through the fourth wall into an "in-between space," and the resulting electric air. A fascinating introduction to a unique subject, this book provides a close examination of actor and audience perspectives, which is essential reading for students and academics of Theatre, Performance and Audience Studies.

Creative Activism Research, Pedagogy and Practice

Creative Activism Research, Pedagogy and Practice PDF Author: Elspeth Tilley
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527581055
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description
This collection explores the growing global recognition of creativity and the arts as vital to social movements and change. Bringing together diverse perspectives from leading academics and practitioners who investigate how creative activism is deployed, taught, and critically analysed, it delineates the key parameters of this emerging field.