Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices - Brossura

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1841504912 ISBN 13: 9781841504919

Casa editrice: Intellect L & D E F A E, 2012

Riassunto

A key interdisciplinary concept in our understanding of social interaction across creative and cultural practices, kinesthetic empathy describes the ability to experience empathy merely by observing the movements of another human being. Encouraging readers to sidestep the methodological and disciplinary boundaries associated with the arts and sciences, Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices offers innovative and critical perspectives on topics ranging from art to sport, film to physical therapy.

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Informazioni sull?autore

Matthew Reason is a senior lecturer in theater and the head of MA Studies in Creative Practice at York St John University in England. He is the author of, most recently, The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experience of Theatre. Dee Reynolds is professor of French at the University of Manchester and the author of, among other books, Rhythmic Subjects: Uses of Energy in the Dances of Mary Wigman, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham.

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Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices

By Dee Reynolds, Matthew Reason

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2012 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84150-491-9

Contents

Acknowledgements, 
Foreword Amelia Jones, 
Introduction Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason, 
PART I: Mirroring Movements: Empathy and Social Interactions, 
Introduction Dee Reynolds, 
Chapter 1: Knowing Me, Knowing You: Autism, Kinesthetic Empathy and Applied Performance Nicola Shaughnessy, 
Chapter 2: Kinesthetic Empathy and Movement Metaphor in Dance Movement Psychotherapy Bonnie Meekums, 
Chapter 3: Affective Responses to Everyday Actions Amy E. Hayes and Steven P. Tipper, 
PART II: Kinesthetic Engagement: Embodied Responses and Intersubjectivity, 
Introduction Dee Reynolds, 
Chapter 4: Cinematic Empathy: Spectator Involvement in the Film Experience Adriano D'Aloia, 
Chapter 5: Musical Group Interaction, Intersubjectivity and Merged Subjectivity Tal-Chen Rabinowitch, Ian Cross and Pamela Burnard, 
Chapter 6: Kinesthetic Empathy and the Dance's Body: From Emotion to Affect Dee Reynolds, 
PART III: Kinesthetic Impact: Performance and Embodied Engagement, 
Introduction Matthew Reason, 
Chapter 7: Kinesthetic Empathy in Charlie Chaplin's Silent Films Guillemette Bolens, 
Chapter 8: Effort and Empathy: Engaging with Film Performance Lucy Fife Donaldson, 
Chapter 9: Breaking the Distance: Empathy and Ethical Awareness in Performance Rose Parekh-Gaihede, 
PART IV: Artistic Enquiries: Kinesthetic Empathy and Practice-Based Research, 
Introduction Matthew Reason, 
Chapter 10: Re-Thinking Stillness: Empathetic Experiences of Stillness in Performance and Sculpture Victoria Gray, 
Chapter 11: Empathy and Exchange: Audience Experiences of Scenography Joslin McKinney, 
Chapter 12: Photography and the Representation of Kinesthetic Empathy Matthew Reason, with photographs by Chris Nash, 
PART V: Technological Practices: Kinesthetic Empathy in Virtual and Interactive Environments, 
Introduction Dee Reynolds, 
Chapter 13: The Poetics of Motion Capture and Visualisation Techniques: The Differences between Watching Real and Virtual Dancing Bodies Sarah Whatley, 
Chapter 14: Interactive Multimedia Performance and the Audience's Experience of Kinesthetic Empathy Brian Knoth, 
Chapter 15: Kinesthetic Empathy Interaction: Exploring the Concept of Psychomotor Abilities and Kinesthetic Empathy in Designing Interactive Sports Equipment Maiken Hillerup Fogtmann, 
Conclusion Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason, 
Notes on Contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Knowing Me, Knowing You: Autism, Kinesthetic Empathy and Applied Performance

Nicola Shaughnessy

Knowing refers to those embodied, sensuous experiences that create the conditions for understanding ... performed experiences are the sites where felt emotion, memory, desire and understanding come together.

(Denzin 2003: 13)

In his discussion of performance ethnography, from which the title of this chapter draws its inspiration, Denzin succinctly summarises what drama practitioners refer to variously as embodied knowledge, kinesthetic learning and empathetic understanding. Recent research in the fields of cognitive neuroscience, phenomenology, philosophy and psychology shows how embodied activities shape human cognition and perception. According to Raymond Gibbs:

Our bodies, and our felt experiences of our bodies in action, finally take center stage in the empirical study of perception, cognition and language and in cognitive science's theoretical accounts of human behaviour.

(Gibbs 2006: 13)

This chapter explores the dialogue between cognitive neuroscience and 'applied theatre', a term used to refer to participatory theatre activities in educational, social or community contexts. In particular it discusses a pilot project involving autistic children in participatory performance, where drama, performance and digital media are used as interventions for autistic spectrum conditions. The project was directed and designed by myself and Melissa Trimingham in collaboration with four drama practitioners and a psychologist specialising in autism and learning disability. The work is part of ongoing research at Kent University's Research Centre for Cognition, Kinesthetics and Performance.

My account is informed by recent research in cognitive neuroscience, particularly mirror neuron theory as this has significant implications for both applied theatre and autism. Mirror neurons are brain cells that are activated not only in the individual performing an action, but also in the brain of the observer witnessing the action and are thought to be the neural mechanism underpinning our ability to perceive emotions, intentions and gestures. Discussion of mirror neurons is now pervasive as a cross-disciplinary dialogue between the arts, humanities and sciences, proposing a physiological basis for empathy, language, culture and morality.

The mirror neuron system is also discussed in the context of autism, a condition in which language, communication, social interaction, imagination and empathy with others are problematised:

How is it possible to imagine that children can coherently evaluate the people they see if they cannot evaluate relationships between their own bodies and the environment? ... How can beings whose brains are the center of multiple incongruities have even the slightest desire to communicate with a world with which they cannot identify?

(Berthoz 2002: 96)

This account examines how drama can be used as a means of engaging with autism through interactive encounters in sensory environments, promoting empathic responses between performers and participants. The methods used, drawing upon contemporary performance strategies, facilitate embodied understanding and the felt emotion, desire, pleasure and memory to which Denzin refers. In this liminal space, we were able to engage imaginatively in the experience of autism and a mutual process of 'knowing' was begun. As our work developed, we became increasingly aware of the differences involved in the autistic individual's engagement with and perception of their environment. Writing on autism increasingly explores 'difference' and suggests that the autistic brain processes the world in a particular way (Mills 2008; Baron-Cohen 2009).

With the increased incidence of autism and the insights arising from autists' self-reporting and artistic work ... we might begin to re-think past paradigms that oppose typical/ normal with atypical/abnormal creative processes. In the continuum that marks the different cognitive processes that produce 'art', we might begin to refine an understanding of the imagination in relation to autism.

(Mills 2008: 118)

I begin with an exercise in empathy to offer an account of the experience of autism.

The neuro diversion

Imagine a situation in which parents are told that their two-year-old son has autism. The child (let us call him Finn) had very little language: 'He knows his alphabet and can count to 100' his mother explained to a health visitor, 'but he doesn't speak in sentences and he doesn't respond to his name'. He could identify colours, animals, objects on picture cards, but did not initiate communication. His mother felt he was becoming increasingly withdrawn and isolated. She had noticed him tracking and stroking lines in a fence when she took him to an animal park; she was concerned that he did not point like other toddlers and did not appear to be interested in playing with his siblings. The diagnosis was swift and bleak; he was autistic and was unlikely to talk, would never achieve independence and would need constant support.

Finn's parents embarked on the journey described by Emily Perl Kingsley (1987) in her oft-cited account of the experience of parenting a disabled child. There is frustration and disappointment that you are denied the pleasures and experiences you had anticipated, but there are alternative surprises, challenges and fulfillment. Finn's parents became aware of their son's alternative reality through his pictures and writing depicting a visual, sensual world. While 'typically' developing children learn through imitation and role play, Finn copied only in a literal sense, struggling to conceptualise and engage with the confusing social world he inhabited. He copied his siblings dressing up but had no idea how to interact 'in role' and his idiosyncratic combination of costume items appeared to be chosen on the basis of colour and texture rather than through any understanding of representation.

Finn communicated through a script of 'learned' phrases, mostly requests for food, in appropriate contexts. One day, his mother observed a therapist telling Finn to 'copy me' and sadly noted the accuracy and emptiness of his imitation; like an automaton he learned his social scripts, reciting his name, address and set responses to questions about days of the week, the weather, his family etc. The drills were repeated and delivered in a voice devoid of emotional expression or spontaneous engagement. Finn the robot, his mother sadly reflected. Until one day she observed him acting out his therapy sessions with a puppet: 'What is your name?' Finn was saying to the puppet and the puppet answered 'my name is Finn'. Although Finn was 'generalising' by transferring the dialogue he had learned with his therapist to a play situation, so it could be argued that Finn was 'pretending to pretend'; this was the first indication of a potential to play spontaneously and imaginatively. Joining him on the floor, Finn's mother began her first conversation with her son via the puppet; looking at her in some surprise, and engaging in unprompted eye contact, Finn started to play.

Puppetry and the performance of pretence

The usefulness of puppets in autism has been documented anecdotally; there is a general consensus that puppets can be an effective tool as a means of mediating between the child, the carer and the external world (Trimingham 2010). However, there is very little research, either qualitative or quantitative, in this area. Likewise, there is a lack of research into many interventions that claim to be effective in autism, including drama, which has a long history as a therapeutic medium (Trimingham 2010: 251). The fictional world in which participants can perform roles as 'other' offers a safe space to explore, rehearse and to play with identities and experiences. Difficulty in understanding the concept of otherness is one of the defining characteristics of autism (Baron-Cohen 1995). The puppet's role, as evident in Trimingham's account, is to facilitate engagement with a material and object other. She suggests that puppets may work in similar ways to Winnicott's 'transitional objects', operating in a 'transitional space'.

Uniquely, because they are objects, the child can focus upon them as solid and real, but imbue them with 'mind'. They act as a safe bridge to the less predictable world of other objects and people, helping them to deal with that 'otherness' and learn (and embody crucial aspects of it).

(Trimingham 2010: 262)

This bridge, in between realities, is the space in which our practice-based research was situated and we began to engage with the experience of autism. Puppets were used in conjunction with other media as part of a series of immersive, multisensory environments (e.g. under the sea, space, winter etc.) in which autistic children could participate in imaginative play. The fictional environments, however, through their use of self-reflexive contemporary performance strategies (live feed, interaction between performers and participants, involvement of participants in creating the staging, operating puppets, etc) enabled the participants to remain conscious of themselves pretending. In this form of participatory theatre, which can be allied to the work of companies such as Oily Cart and Horse and Bamboo, pretending to pretend is fundamental to its ethics and methodology:

[T]he collaboration between the performer/animateur and the spect/actor or client is negotiated in a space between the 'real' and the 'not real' so that the participants are conscious that the situations played out, although 'live' are both real and not real while the performers are more explicit about their roles than in more conventional theatre frameworks. This space between performance and ordinary life ... is a space for intervention and change.

(Shaughnessy 2005: 201)

Rehabilitating empathy

Kinesthetic knowledge and understanding are at the heart of applied theatre practice where participatory performance is used to 'effect' change (defined variously as 'transformation' or 'transportation') through 'affecting' participants (Nicholson 2005; Thompson 2009). Drama activities in educational, social and community contexts are generally designed to involve practitioners and participants as 'active producers', rather than passive consumers, who 'are enabled to move ... through creative activity, towards a valuable goal of applied theatre praxis: social transformation' (Sutton 2007: 32–33).

Our initial aim was to explore how far drama activities could 'compensate' for the 'triad of impairments', which are the diagnostic criteria for autism,by facilitating social communication, imagination and interaction. We were not proposing to 'cure' autism but our objective was to try to effect change through what we defined as an 'intervention' – a term used in autism and in applied theatre to refer to practices designed to benefit participants. This had ethical and ideological implications. Although we used the terms 'neuro typical' and'neuro divergent' as our work developed to refer to our awareness of 'difference' in autistic consciousness and perception, we were aware of some difficulties posed by this terminology. Emerging from opposition to the 'deficit' model of disability, new approaches are predicated on a 'social' model, advocating that autism should be respected and acknowledged as 'divergence' rather than medicalised as treatable through normalising interventions. The fact remains, however, that autism can be a distressing condition, particularly for those at the lower end of the spectrum where it presents considerable challenges.

As our work progressed we became increasingly aware of each individual as a spectrum of difficulties and abilities and this understanding informed the development of our practices. What was demanded from us as researchers and practitioners was an empathic engagement with the group we worked with. We needed to be fully aware of the experience of autism and the lived experience of the researchers who had family members with autism was extremely important to the body of knowledge the research team drew upon.

For the applied theatre practitioner, empathy might be considered to be an important feature of practical and ethical engagement with the 'client group'. Empathy, however, has a somewhat mixed history with the term used pejoratively by some contemporary performance scholars and practitioners. This is due largely to the legacy of Bertolt Brecht, a seminal influence in the field of applied theatre, whose references to 'crude empathy' and mimesis have a tendency to be misunderstood and simplified in the critique of 'identification' (Brecht 1949). As Jill Bennett observes in Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art:

What is wrong with [crude empathy] is, of course, that another's experience ... is assimilated to the self in the most simplistic and sentimental way; anything beyond the audience's immediate experience remains beyond comprehension ... we fail to 'respect' the difference between their suffering and our own.

(Bennett 2005: 111)

Drawing upon Brecht's insights, Bennett suggests it is possible for the empathic connections provoked through, for example, representations of trauma, to combine affect with critical inquiry, so that the space between self and other is not eradicated but 'inhabited':

This conjunction of affect and critical awareness may be understood to constitute the basis of an empathy grounded not in affinity (feeling for another insofar as we can imagine being that other) but on a feeling for another that entails an encounter with something irreducible and different, often inaccessible.

(Bennett 2005: 10)

This notion of an empathetic 'encounter' with something enigmatic and generally regarded as 'inaccessible' is particularly appropriate to the exploratory nature of the autism project, as we sought to investigate autism and the imagination and we were engaging our imaginations and creativity in doing so. Our role as researchers involved us in an 'encounter'. Access to the world of autism was facilitated through the 'provocation of the senses' which, as Stephen Di Benedetto demonstrates, is the primary means through which contemporary performance functions. His central premise is that sensorial perception is fundamental to the transformational potential of theatre:

Recent neuroscientific discoveries have proved that the brain is plastic and all sensations it experiences continually modify how it perceives the world. Theatrical performance has the potential to change our experience of the world and therefore, the potential to change our ability to perceive the world in a new way.

(Di Benedetto 2010: X)

It was my research on autism that led to my first encounter with cognitive neuroscience and the realisation that an understanding of the scientific and physiological basis for empathy has important implications for the theory and practice of applied theatre and its discourse of intervention, transportation, affect and change.

Empathy, autism and contemporary performance

Enhanced awareness of the neural underpinnings of empathy have transformed our understanding of intersubjectivity; as Evan Thompson concludes in the final chapter of Mind in Life, this is now 'a central concern' for developmental, social and clinical psychology, as well as psychoanalysis and affective and cognitive neuroscience (Thompson 2007: 382). Difficulties in understanding the relations between self and other are generally acknowledged as being fundamental to autism and are discussed in relation to the concept of empathy. Edith Stein's phenomenological study underpins Thompson's explanation of the relations between perception and empathy and, by extension, the connections between empathy, memory and imagination. These have crucial implications both for understanding the processes involved in theatre and performance and the perceptual issues for the autistic individual whose memory and imagination function differently – a difference that is generally considered 'dysfunctional'.

Whilst cognitive neuroscientists refer to the colloquialism 'I feel your pain', there is an autistic irony in reading this too literally; the experience of pain is, of course, felt differently by the person suffering the injury than it is by the observer. As Stein puts it, 'I can consider the expression of pain, more accurately, the change of face I empathetically grasp as an expression of pain, from as many sides as I desire. Yet, in principle, I can never get an "orientation" where the pain itself is primordially given' (Stein 1989: 7). This has important implications for theatre and indeed any artistic representation of experience; empathy in theatre as in life involves a form of perceptual presence, which Thompson refers to as 'a perceptual presence-in-absence':

This 'nonprimordiality' of empathy – the fact that an experience cannot be disclosed in its original first-person subjectivity from the second-person perspective of empathy – means there is also a parallel or an analogy between empathy and memory and imagination. When one remembers a joy ... The joy is absent, but it is not simply absent, for it has a kind of presence-in-absence for the remembering experience. It is ... phenomenally absent.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices by Dee Reynolds, Matthew Reason. Copyright © 2012 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Intellect L & D E F A E
• Data di pubblicazione: 2012
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1841504912
• ISBN 13: 9781841504919
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 334
• Redattore: Reynolds Dee, Reason Matthew
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile