Using Performance Arts to explore the concept of Embodied Cognition

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Insights into perceptual ambiguity and inference in art- : a practice-based approach derived from the corporeal form

Publication . Meyler, Samuel Viana; Serra, José Pedro; Mainen, Zachary

The goal of this dissertation is to apply the phenomenon of perceptual ambiguity to the corporeal form, adopting examples from the work of acting instructor Jacques Lecoq (1921-1999). I submit that the sensitivity of our perceptual system, highly adapted to recognise human faces and bodies, both constrain, as well as aid, artistic attempts at embodied ambiguity. Furthermore, defamiliarisation will generally be favoured over indeterminacy because the former is an ambiguous stimuli that preserves the presence of the corporeal form. While these more innate biological components will govern form, theatre practices in the last century have taken an increasingly embodied epistemological approach which has encouraged the use of perceptual ambiguities on stage. Physical theatres reflect this transition, emphasising the body over language to communicate ideas and concepts. For example, the pedagogy of J. Lecoq involves recreating and embodying the external world using the human actor (e.g. materials, animals, colours, masks etc.). This process will naturally result in defamiliarisation because it transforms the human into an ambiguous stimuli, forcing a re-interpretation on the part of the observer. This transformation can be viewed as the result of an imitative or emulative operation whose reproduction, often only partially successful, contains a huge potential for artistic creation. This dissertation also includes artistic objects as well as two scientific experiments. The practice-based artistic object includes a documentary film entitled ‘Sculpting the Body; a theatre of physicality’. By merging both practical and theoretical work, this thesis demonstrates how physical theatre uses embodied perceptual ambiguities as part of its aesthetic construct, and furthermore, argues that this represents a particular manifestation of a wider phenomenon that remains ubiquitous to art in general but which will have different constraints contingent on the artistic medium used.

2018-07-04Tese de doutoramento

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Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia

Número da atribuição

SFRH/BD/94082/2013