Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the

Theatre: Phenomenology, Cognition,

Movement 1st ed. Edition Stanton B.
Garner
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/kinesthetic-spectatorship-in-the-theatre-phenomenolo
gy-cognition-movement-1st-ed-edition-stanton-b-garner/
 Kinesthetic Spectatorship in
the Theatre

Phenomenology, Cognition, Movement

Stanton B. Garner, Jr.

Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance

Series Editors
Bruce McConachie
University of Pittsburgh
Department of Theatre Arts
Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Blakey Vermeule
Department of English
Stanford University
Stanford, CA, USA
This series offers cognitive approaches to understanding perception, emo-
tions, imagination, meaning-making, and the many other activities that
constitute both the production and reception of literary texts and embod-
ied performances.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14903
 Stanton B. Garner, Jr.

Kinesthetic
Spectatorship in the
Theatre
Phenomenology, Cognition, Movement
Stanton B. Garner, Jr.
Department of English
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN, USA

Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance

ISBN 978-3-319-91793-1    ISBN 978-3-319-91794-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91794-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950067

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Emily von Fraunhofer / Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgments

Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre is a study of movement and move-

ment perception in theatrical performance. Aligning itself with scholarship
on kinesthetic empathy in dance studies, it explores the ways in which we
inhabit the movements of others inside and outside the theatre, and the
ways these movements inhabit us. Because this book is an extension of my
1994 book on theatre phenomenology, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology
and Performance in Contemporary Drama, it owes a debt to those who
have developed this field in the years since that book’s publication. Eirini
Nedelkopoulou contacted me in 2011 to ask if I was interested in contrib-
uting a chapter to an edited volume on performance phenomenology, and
while the project I embarked on expanded beyond the scope of what
became Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations
(2015), that volume and its contributors have done much to bring phe-
nomenological performance studies into the twenty-first century. George
Home-Cook and Jon Foley Sherman have written important recent books
in this field, and both were a resource to me as I wrote my own. Although
we have met only through email, let me also acknowledge Maxine Sheets-­
Johnstone, whose pioneering book on the phenomenology of dance pre-
ceded the emergence of theatre phenomenology and whose extensive
writings on movement over the last half-century have demonstrated the
centrality of this dimension of human and animal life.
Theoretically and methodologically, Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the
Theatre joins the burgeoning interdisciplinary dialogue between phenom-
enology and cognitive science in philosophy and the empirical sciences. In
so doing, it harks back to my first book, The Absent Voice: Narrative

v
vi Acknowledgments

Comprehension in the Theater, which described (not always convincingly, I

feel) the cognitive dynamics of memory and anticipation. My turn when I
completed this book to the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty was
motivated by my dissatisfaction with the cognitive models I had been
compelled to use, which treated cognition as an information-processing
system, and by my growing suspicion that the book I had just finished was
phenomenological at heart. In an irony I had no way of knowing at the
time, my turn to a phenomenology of embodiment in the late 1980s and
early 1990s paralleled a similar turn in cognitive studies by those propos-
ing an enactive, embodied way of understanding cognition. Many of the
figures in this movement were inspired by phenomenology, and they wel-
comed the exchange between empirical and experientially based method-
ologies. Excited by this dialogue, I am grateful to those scholars working
in cognitive theatre studies who welcomed, challenged, and supported a
phenomenologist fellow-traveler: Rhonda Blair, Amy Cook, Rick Kemp,
Jon Lutterbie, Bruce McConachie, and Lyn Tribble. I have benefited
from their interdisciplinary knowledge of fields not their own, their
patience with a sometimes novice, and their willingness to entertain a dif-
ferent but compatible perspective on areas of common interest.
Because this book foregrounds corporeal variation in its analysis of
movement and movement perception, I value the conversations and inter-
actions I have had with those who live with and have thought deeply
about disability: Carrie Sandahl, Leonard Davis, Janet Erkkinen, Randy
Isom, Rob Spirko, and Hannah Widdifield. I have benefitted considerably
from discussion on disability aesthetics with colleague and art historian
Timothy W. Hiles, whose interests intersect with mine across media.
Others who have encountered disability and deepened my intimacy with it
include my parents Katherine H. Young and Stanton B. Garner, my step-
mother Lydia M. Garner, and my parents-in-law Richard E. Maerker and
Sylvia L. Maerker. Disability transforms the world and one’s movements
through it, and I have been graced by resourceful, often cantankerous wit-
nesses to this formidable realm during the past fifteen years.
I thank Eric Bass, Marla Carlson, Rachel Ann Finney, Christina Schoux
Casey, Kerri Ann Considine, Amy J. Elias, Gabriel J. Escobar, Brad Krumholz,
Kirk Murphy, and Matthew Pilkington for conversations about this book, the
issues it addresses, and the productions I write about in it. Saul Jaffé and
Mary Swan provided extensive information on Proteus Theatre’s production
of Merrick, the Elephant Man and made a significant contribution to my
thinking about able-bodied actors portraying disabled characters. Dan Zahavi
 Acknowledgments 
   vii

responded to email questions on Edmund Husserl and the phenomenology

of disability with useful reading suggestions, and Christian Keysers shared his
thoughts on the neuroscience of attention and motor resonance, along with
scientific readings related to this subject. The following individuals provided
insightful written comments on material that appears herein: Nic Barilar,
Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish, Warren Kluber, Brandon Woolf, Peter
Zazzali, and the two anonymous readers who reviewed my manuscript for
Palgrave Macmillan. Earlier drafts of material in this book were presented at
the following working groups sponsored by the American Society for Theatre
Research (ASTR): Methods and Approaches: Cognitive Science in Theatre,
Dance, and Performance (Cognitive Science in Theatre, Dance and
Performance Research Group, Nashville, 2012); Postdramatic Theatre and
Form (Portland, OR, 2015); and Violent Bodies, Violent Acts (Atlanta,
2017). I am grateful to the organizers of these groups for facilitating schol-
arly exchange on topics important to my research and to the participants for
their stimulating discussion and feedback. A brief passage in my introduction
was previously published in a Theatre Survey book review, and material from
chapters “Movement, Attention, and Intentionality” and “Language,
Speech, and Movement” appeared in earlier form in Journal of Dramatic
Theory and Criticism. I thank the editors of these journals for permission to
reprint.
I want to acknowledge Phillip Zarrilli and Jed Diamond for their special
contributions to this book. Phillip, whose theatre scholarship and practice
also embrace the dialogue between phenomenology and enactive theory
and who is currently completing a book on phenomenology and acting,
has encouraged my project from its inception. Over the last several years
he and I have exchanged pieces of our works-in-progress, and I have val-
ued his responses and support. Jed, who heads the University of Tennessee
MFA Acting program and is an outstanding actor himself, has shared his
insights into theatre, acting, and the dynamics of embodiment over break-
fasts and at many other times since well before this book was conceived.
As someone who shares my fascination with King Lear, Jed organized an
informal acting workshop on the play’s blinding scene in which I was able
to deepen my understanding of this sequence’s phenomenological and
sensorimotor dynamics by acting the roles of Cornwall and Gloucester
and observing their traumatic encounter from all sides. I thank Luke
Atchley, Miguel Faña, Ben Pratt, Preston Raymer, Hannah Simpson, and
Lauren Winder for joining us in this workshop.
viii Acknowledgments

I wrote the majority of this book during a sabbatical after stepping

down from a five-year term as department head. I thank former Arts and
Sciences Dean Bruce Bursten for helping to arrange this sabbatical and my
colleagues in the English Department for making this a department I
could relish leading. Judith Welch heads an invaluable administrative staff,
and it is hard to imagine what life would be like without her and them.
Allen R. Dunn, who replaced me as head, has been unwavering in his sup-
port and eager to talk about my project, especially when the subject turns
to ethics. I value my drama colleagues Misty G. Anderson, Heather
Hirschfeld, and Robert E. Stillman, my current and recent graduate stu-
dents in drama, theatre, and performance, and the amazing faculty and
students in the Theatre Department, who keep me grounded in perfor-
mance. The resident Clarence Brown Theatre Company, led by Artistic
Director Calvin MacLean, is a continuing and invaluable source of excel-
lent theatre. Current Dean Teresa M. Lee and her team in the College of
Arts and Sciences were a pleasure to work with during and after my time
as department head and continue to support my work. I am considerably
indebted to the Interlibrary Services staff of the John C. Hodges Library
for securing research material that our collection does not have and the
Library Express staff for bringing me the library books I needed (and tak-
ing them back when I was done with them). Outside the university, I am
grateful to the staff of the Billy Rose Theatre Division Theatre on Film
and Tape Archive and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division Audio and
Moving Image Archive at the New York Public Library for their help dur-
ing two research trips. The performances I studied in these collections
were crucial to the writing of this book.
At Palgrave Macmillan, Tomas René was enthusiastic about this project
from the moment I contacted him, and I appreciate the care he took in
guiding my manuscript through the review and contract process. Vicky
Bates, Mahalakshmi Mariappan, and copy-editor Elizabeth Stone were
important participants before and during the production process. Special
thanks to the Palgrave design team, who turned an image I suggested into
a dynamic and electrifying cover for a book on movement. As theatre and
dance scholars know, performance photographs tend to freeze movement,
fixing the dynamism of action within static, sometimes posed images. This
fact explains why there are no theatrical images in my book, much as I
would have loved to have them there. In contrast, the cover image for this
book (from a long-exposure photograph of fire movement by Emily von
Fraunhofer) is electric and alive; it almost vibrates. The shadowy outline of
 Acknowledgments 
   ix

a figure in the background orients this dynamism to the human form,

which—motionless here—is animated in performance.
My final debts are the greatest of all. Alison Maerker Garner and Helen
Elizabeth Garner have been a part of this project from the start, and the
book that emerged is underwritten by their love and support. As a profes-
sional musician, music teacher, writer on music pedagogy, and trained
dancer, Alison is an intellectual companion as well as life partner. It has
been a joy sharing insights and perspectives on performance, movement,
skill acquisition, and art in the years since we first met. Helen, who came
into the world fifteen years before this book will, opened a world of move-
ment to me as she learned to crawl and walk, developed language and
skills, and deepened her cognitive mastery of her environment. She and
her mother are constant reminders that movement, movement percep-
tion, and intersubjectivity are situated, communal, and affectively reso-
nant. I gratefully dedicate this book to them.
 Contents

Introduction   1
Watching Movement   1
Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre   5
Empathy, Otherness, and Disability   8
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences  14
Spectatorship and Mimesis  24
Bibliography  32

Movement and Animation  37

Moving in the World  37
Qualities of Self-Movement  41
External Movement Perception  48
Animating Objects  55
“You perceive she stirs”  60
Bibliography  72

 ovement, Difference, and Ability  75

M
Moving Differently  75
Norming Movement  79
I can/I cannot  86
Spectatorship and Ability/Inability  93
Bibliography 106

xi
xii Contents

 ovement, Attention, and Intentionality 109

M
Moving in the Theatre 109
Attending to Movement 112
Intentionality and Movement Perception 119
Post-Intentionality 129
Bibliography 142

Kinesthetic Resonance 145
Kinesthetic Sympathy 145
“Mirroring” Movement 153
Resonance in the Theatre 161
Multi-Directional Resonance 171
Bibliography 180

 anguage, Speech, and Movement 185

L
Moving Words 185
Utterance and Articulation 187
Sounding Brando 195
Language and Kinesthesia 200
Acting with Words 207
Verbal/Kinesthetic Immersions 211
Bibliography 220

Empathy and Otherness 223

What Is Empathy? 223
Empathic Solicitation 228
Empathy and Alterity 234
Acting Disabled 242
Deep Mimesis 248
Bibliography 262

Index 267
 Introduction

Watching Movement
This is a book about movement and movement perception: about the
centrality of movement to human life and the embeddedness of theatre in
this sensorimotor reality. Because theatre—like all performance—is a
domain of spectatorship and embodiment, this book addresses the ques-
tions of how we perceive the movements of others in this environment and
outside of it, how we enact movement as part of our sensorimotor engage-
ment with the world, and how the perception and execution of movement
are entwined. Phenomenological in a collaborative and eclectic sense, it
considers these issues through the lens of experience and through the
accounts of movement, embodiment, and movement perception in phe-
nomenology, cognitive science, neuroscience, acting theory, dance theory,
philosophy of mind, and linguistics. In specific, this book pursues an
insight that has developed within and between these disciplines in recent
years: that one of the ways we apprehend the movements of others is by
vicariously enacting these movements at pre-conscious and conscious lev-
els. Inevitably, then, this book is about empathy and other responses to
the actions of others: what these responses are and what they are not, what
they do and what they do not do.
Contemporary interest in these connections was encouraged by the dis-
covery of what have come to be known as “mirror neurons” by neurosci-
entists in the early 1990s. These neurons, which fire in the same way when

© The Author(s) 2018 1

S. B. Garner, Jr., Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre,
Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91794-8_1
2 S. B. GARNER, JR.

goal-directed movement is observed and when it is executed, were discov-

ered in the pre-motor cortex of macaque monkey brains, and equivalent
neural networks were later identified in humans. In the rush of excitement
that followed their popularization in the early 2000s, mirror neurons were
hailed as universal keys to action understanding, imitation, language
acquisition, and empathy. In the years since their discovery, researchers
have provided fuller insights into how these cells work, and some of this
research has challenged or qualified the initial claims made on their behalf.
But despite the controversies that continue over its relationship to other
cognitive mechanisms and its role in action understanding, the discovery
of a neural mechanism that links motor execution with motor perception
continues to focus attention on the cognitive processes linking one’s
movements to those of others.
The idea that human beings take on, are inhabited by, or resonate with
the movements of others is not a new one, nor is it restricted to neurosci-
entific accounts of cognitive resonance. In his Principles of Psychology
(1890), William James wrote: “We may then lay it down for certain that
every representation of a movement awakens in some degree the actual move-
ment which is its object; and awakens it in a maximum degree whenever it is
not kept from so doing by an antagonistic representation present simultane-
ously to the mind.”1 Developmental psychologists study imitative behavior
in neonates, marine biologists look at movement synchronization in fish
schools, and anthropologists study mimetic enactment in states of spirit
possession. In the performing arts, the term kinesthetic empathy has served
as a focal point for practitioners and scholars interested in the empirical
and experiential connections between observing and enacting movement.
Kinesthesia (from the Greek words meaning “to move” and “sensation”)
denotes the experience one has of one’s movements as a result of the sen-
sations generated by one’s muscles, joints, tendons, and the vestibular and
other systems involved in balance and orientation. Referring to this lived
movement sense, it differs from the term kinetic, which refers to move-
ment, or motion, as an objectively describable phenomenon. The concept
of kinesthetic empathy, which originated in scientific studies of involun-
tary motor mimicry in the nineteenth century and philosophical treatises
on the kinesthetic aspect of aesthetic experience, was taken up in the twen-
tieth century by dance studies, where it has continued to be analyzed and
refined in studies such as Susan Leigh Foster’s Choreographing Empathy:
Kinesthesia in Performance (2011) and the research of Dee Reynolds,
Matthew Reason, and others associated with the 2008–2011 “Watching
 INTRODUCTION 3

Dance: Kinesthetic Empathy” project in the United Kingdom.2 As

Reynolds and Reason’s 2012 edited collection Kinesthetic Empathy in
Creative and Cultural Practice demonstrates, the idea of kinesthetic
empathy is now being applied to fields outside of dance studies. Reynolds
and Reason write: “We feel comfortable … in stating that kinesthetic
empathy is a key interdisciplinary concept in our understanding of social
interaction and communication in creative and cultural practices ranging
from entertainment and sport to physical therapies.”3 Much of this recent
interest in kinetic embodiment has been informed by the mirror-neuron
research mentioned above.
More than twenty-five years have passed since the initial discovery of
mirror neurons, and it is more than eighty years since New York Times
dance critic John Martin, building on work of late nineteenth and early
twentieth century aesthetician Theodor Lipps, introduced the terms inner
mimicry and kinesthetic sympathy to describe the audience’s response to
modern dance. The intensified interest in these two areas since the early
2000s has established an unprecedented convergence between science,
philosophy, and the arts. It has also deepened and complicated our under-
standing of the operations identified by these terms. Alongside the critical
responses of scientists and philosophers to what one might call “mirror-­
neuron overreach,” Foster and others have challenged Martin’s claims
that kinesthetic empathy provides universal access to the embodied experi-
ence of others. The result is an understanding of mimetic embodiment
more in tune with historical, cultural, and individual difference.
With their shared interest in embodiment, observation, action, and
intercorporeality, the convergence of neural mirroring research and a reju-
venated interest in kinesthetic empathy has proved validating and theoreti-
cally productive to performing arts scholars and practitioners. In the
opening lines of Mirrors in the Brain—How Our Minds Share Actions and
Emotions, Giacomo Rizzolatti (one of the scientists who discovered mirror
neurons in macaque monkeys) and Corrado Sinigaglia cite the director
Peter Brook:

In an interview some time ago, the great theatrical director, Peter Brook,
commented that with the discovery of mirror neurons, neuroscience had
finally started to understand what has long been common knowledge in the
theatre: the actor’s efforts would be in vain if he were not able to surmount
all cultural and linguistic barriers and share his bodily sounds and ­movements
with the spectators, who thus actively contribute to the event and become
one with the players on stage.4
4 S. B. GARNER, JR.

Although not all who embraced the discovery of mirror neurons would
subscribe to the universalism of Brook’s comment, his response to this
discovery was shared by many involved in the arts of movement and imita-
tion, particularly those who have embraced the cognitive turn in theatre
studies. Bruce McConachie’s Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach
to Spectating in the Theatre (2008) discusses mirror mechanisms along
with emotional contagion, facial recognition, and other imitative/
empathic components of social cognition in the theatre. Rhonda Blair’s
The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience (2008)
includes mirror-neuron research in its analysis of cognitive neuroscience’s
contribution to actor training. And in Embodied Acting: What Neuroscience
Teaches Us about Performance (2012), Rick Kemp applies mirror-neuron
research to the actor’s process of identifying with characters. All three of
these studies are appropriately cautious when it comes to applying neuro-
logical claims that are subject to disagreement among scientists.
Because the concept of kinesthetic empathy pre-dated the discovery of
neural mirroring mechanisms, dance theorists have tended to consider
neurological findings, when doing so, within this framework. They have
also integrated this research within a broader range of methodological
approaches—physiological, philosophical, historical, and cultural—for
thinking about movement observation and enactment. Of particular
interest to my work here, many of their accounts have a strong phenom-
enological emphasis, one based on experiential, historically situated
accounts of dancers, choreographers, and spectators.5 Ann Cooper
Albright writes: “Over the course of the last thirty years, phenomenology
has replaced aesthetics as the philosophical discourse of choice for dance
studies, prodding scholars to think about a broad continuum of moving
bodies within the cultures they inhabit.”6 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s
landmark study The Phenomenology of Dance (1966) claimed philosophy
for dance and dance for philosophy, and her subsequent work and that of
others has deepened the phenomenological understanding of expressive
movement. The Winter 2011 issue of Dance Research Journal was
devoted to the topic “Dance and Phenomenology: Critical Reappraisals.”
Several of the essays in this issue explore the limits of phenomenology as
a theoretical point of view, but it is remarkable (as editor Mark Franko
notes) that “phenomenology rarely if ever absents itself from the terms of
dance analysis, despite the attempt to subtract it.” Franko also observes
that “The upsurge of interest in the topic of kinesthetic empathy is
reframing perspectives on phenomenological inquiry.”7
 INTRODUCTION 5

Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre

Inspired, in part, by Foster’s work and the “Watching Dance: Kinesthetic
Empathy” project, the last ten years have seen an emergence of kines-
thetic research in performance studies, particularly in the United
Kingdom. Since 2010, for example, the Research Centre for Cognition,
Kinesthetics and Performance at the University of Kent has brought
together scholars and practitioners who are interested in a range of issues
connected to kinesthetic performance. For the most part, however, the-
atre has held an uneasy position in this important area of research. The
relative scarcity of kinesthetically oriented theatrical studies, I suggest,
reflects our underdeveloped understanding of theatre, particularly dra-
matic theatre, as a kinetic and kinesthetic form. While it is easy to recog-
nize the movement dimension in highly physicalized theatre forms such
as Kabuki, commedia dell’arte, and the acrobatic performances of Cirque
du Soleil—in the Biomechanical theatre of Vsevolod Meyerhold and the
immersive productions of Punchdrunk or Sound&Fury—the movement
dynamics of less physically overt theatre styles and traditions are less
immediately apparent. Indeed, one of the most pervasive modern tradi-
tions—theatrical realism—may seem predicated on suppressing a kines-
thetic sensibility. Realist stage settings often inhibit movement as much
as they enable it, and the actor/characters who inhabit these environ-
ments are restricted by historically and socially specific movement con-
ventions. When Nora Helmer breaks into a frenetic tarantella in Act 3 of
Ibsen’s A Doll House, she violates not only the propriety governing
female movement but the kinetic circumscriptions of the realist mode as
well, which has restrained her up to this point like the corset she wears.
In a sequence such as this, Bert States’s observation that realism repre-
sents an “imprisonment of the eye” could be generalized to include the
moving body as well.8
When Nora’s tarantella erupts in the midst of the measured movement
practices that surrounds it, dance emerges, momentarily, in the context of
theatre. In fact, though, Ibsen’s play has been “moving” from its opening
moments, and it continues to move to its end. Navigating their circum-
scribed but concentrated action fields, Ibsen’s actor/characters move
within, at the edges of, and beyond the kinetic conventions of their social
world. They express themselves, consciously and unconsciously, in
­mannerisms and gestures. Their bodies move deliberately and in response
to their physical environment and those who share it. They are sometimes
6 S. B. GARNER, JR.

still, though this stillness can be tense with movements intended, sup-
pressed, released through speech.
And speak they do. Another impediment to theatrical applications of
kinesthetic empathy is the centrality of spoken language to most forms of
theatre. The prevailing model of kinesthetic empathy—and neurological
models of motor perception, which the concept sometimes incorporates—
is directed toward physical movements, and it provides less insight into
how speech and language might function in a broader account of senso-
rimotor experience. Here, too, dramatic theatre is particularly disadvan-
taged. In practice, the more theatre art forms accentuate the physical
aspects of performance (mime is a good example), the more they reward
the existing study of kinesthetic empathy. Conversely, the more these
forms incorporate spoken language alongside physical movement, the
more obviously they require an expanded and refined kinesthetic
vocabulary.
Addressing this need, Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre offers a
theoretical account of the sensorimotor and kinesthetic processes joining
theatre spectators and performers in a dynamic of shared enactment. It
takes up the existing work on kinesthetic empathy in dance studies, discus-
sions of movement and movement perception in theatre studies, and the
extensive insights on these subjects provided by phenomenology, cogni-
tive science, neuroscience, and linguistics. In doing so, it insists that our
response to others’ movements forms part of our broader sensorimotor
attunement with our environment. Experience is fundamentally dynamic,
and movement is the medium through which humans perceive and
encounter their world. Underlying this fact is the phenomenon of ani-
mateness. The word animate, when used as an adjective, means “endowed
with life, living, alive; (esp. in later use) alive and having the power of
movement, like an animal.”9 The etymological linking of these meanings
underscores the phenomenological inseparability of aliveness and move-
ment. When we speak of someone or something (a statue, abstract paint-
ing, piece of music) as “animated,” the liveliness to which we refer
manifests itself as movement, actual or potential—hence the technique of
cinematic and other forms of animation, which brings still images to life
by making them move. The fact that animate in this sense functions as a
transitive verb (“to give life to, make alive or active”) supports the idea
that humans have an active role to play in the animateness surrounding
them.10
 INTRODUCTION 7

If kinesthesia is the lived experience of one’s movements, then such

experience, I argue, forms part of our fundamental attunement to the
movements of our world. This phenomenological claim is supported by
research in the cognitive sciences and the practice-related insights of dance
and acting theorists. Shifting the focus on kinesthetic spectatorship to the
experiential dynamic in which it arises allows us to reframe issues such as
the role of mirroring activities in motor apprehension, intersubjectivity,
and empathy. As long as this conversation is conducted only in neurosci-
entific terms, the correlations between functional magnetic resonance
imaging and phenomenal experience remain indeterminable. Descriptions
of empathy and motor resonance that rely exclusively or largely on mirror-­
neuron research must rise and fall with scientific claims and challenges.
Understanding that one’s engagement with one’s own movements and
the movement of others has its own experiential structures, on the other
hand, allows us to orient our investigation toward the givenness of kines-
thetic encounters. A phenomenological turn may not resolve what phi-
losophers call the “hard problem” of consciousness—how do cognitive
operations generate lived experience?—but it does provide a necessary
other perspective for thinking about this question.11 I will have more to
say about this shortly.
One of this study’s contributions to the discussion of movement and
movement observation in the theatre is that it explores the role of lan-
guage as kinesthetic phenomenon. It does so based on two recognitions.
For one thing, embodied utterance is gestural: it mobilizes the body’s
musculature in intentionally directed, meaning-bearing acts. Our atten-
tion to the content of what is said in particular language encounters may
eclipse the dynamics of its production, but this does not change the fact
that utterance is a sensorimotor activity. With its traditional reliance on
vocal training and its projective modes of address, theatrical speech fore-
grounds its corporeal delivery in ways that underscore its kinetic and
kinesthetic foundations. For another thing, language is saturated with
virtual movement. Language embodies actions and agents in its words
and linguistic structures, and as an experience-conveying medium it gen-
erates its own sensorimotor realities. With their rival form of perceptual
address, the movement/gestures embodied in language form part of the
broader movement field that theatrical audiences inhabit and engage
with. In theatre, the movements manifested by language counterpoint,
reinforce, and interact with the physical movements; at times—the
Messenger’s narrative of Oedipus’ self-blinding in Sophocles’ Oedipus
8 S. B. GARNER, JR.

Rex, for instance—recounted movement eclipses onstage movement.

Given that our kinesthetic responses to recounted movements bear simi-
larities to the way we respond to physically observed movements, any
notion of kinesthetic empathy in the theatre must take into account the
stage’s multiple modes of presencing and enactment. By including lan-
guage, I also introduce narrative and imagination to the investigation of
movement perception.

Empathy, Otherness, and Disability

If Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre examines the kinesthesia half of
“kinesthetic empathy” by situating the concept in our broader sensorimo-
tor attunement to the world and expanding it to include the movement
fields of utterance and language, it also joins the longstanding theoretical
discussions concerning empathy in performance. “Empathy” is a widely
applied concept these days, but it is also a contested one. Much of this
results from the term itself, which means different things to different peo-
ple and has proved difficult to define with consistency or precision. In
addition to resonance mechanisms, “empathy” is regularly used to signify
sympathy, compassion, identification, engulfment, perspective-taking, and
mindreading. Underlying most conceptions of empathy is the idea that
individuals recognize and vicariously share the experience and point of
view of others. In his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith
described this using the term sympathy: “As we have no immediate experi-
ence of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which
they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the
like situation.”12 For Smith, this apprehension relies heavily on imagina-
tion, which allows us to place ourselves in another’s situation and conceive
what it would be like to undergo the other’s experiences. His descriptions
of actual sympathetic encounters, however, have a corporeal force that
sidesteps mentalization:

When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of
another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own
arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as
well as the sufferer. The mob [sic], when they are gazing at a dancer on the
slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they
see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in his
situation.13
 INTRODUCTION 9

Over a century later, Theodor Lipps used the giddying spectacle of an

acrobat balancing on a high wire to argue for an organic connection
between the visual and the kinesthetic. The term from philosophical aes-
thetics that Lipps used to describe this connection—Einfühlung, or “feel-
ing into”—was translated into English as “empathy” by Edward Titchener
in 1909.
Scientists and philosophers disagree about the operations involved in
empathy, and they disagree about the priority that these operations assume
in empathic encounters. Given the further muddying introduced by the
term’s psychological, therapeutic, ethical, and popular uses, there were
moments in the writing of this book when I entertained the thought of
sidestepping the term empathy entirely as an experiential and analytic cat-
egory for the study of theatrical spectatorship and restricting myself to less
loaded descriptive/analytic terms. But “empathy” cannot be dispensed
with so easily. The concept is deeply embedded in theatre, dance, and
performance theory; aesthetics; philosophy; cognitive science; and psy-
chology, and it has occasioned a rich tradition of phenomenological
inquiry, where it is frequently described under the broader rubric of inter-
subjectivity. Moreover, the literature on kinesthetic empathy has played a
crucial role in my research, and I want the book that results from it to
contribute to this important interdisciplinary area. So, while Kinesthetic
Spectatorship focuses on the broader subject of sensorimotor experience,
perception, and motor resonance in the theatre—with the word “empa-
thy” not in its title—I address the phenomenon of empathy in the book’s
final chapter. Readers who expect a global or integrative theory of empa-
thy at that point will be disappointed. What this book offers, instead, is a
perspective on theatrical empathy from a sensorimotor point of view atten-
tive to the phenomenological and cognitive complexities of actual theatri-
cal encounters.
In offering this perspective, I do not mean to imply that all empathy is
sensorimotor in origin or kinesthetic in the way it manifests itself. From
the point of view of neuroscience, motor resonance has been shown to be
one neural route to empathy among others. Cognitive scientists and phi-
losophers of mind distinguish between “motor empathy,” “emotional
empathy,” and “cognitive empathy,” and the experiments designed to
study these phenomena often reinforce the distinctiveness of these
­categories. Outside the laboratory, however, our relations with others are
multi-­channeled and holistic; they mobilize all our capacities and engage-
ments. These engagements are animated: they take place within an inter-
10 S. B. GARNER, JR.

subjective field constituted in terms of actual and latent movement. When

we see anger in someone, we see it in the way she tightens her facial mus-
cles, holds her body, directs her voice, walks or does not walk. This is
especially true in theatre, where kinetic acts are foregrounded within the
dynamic of display. The fact that we typically engage such acts while seated
does not negate the kinesthetic nature of this encounter; as I will argue,
sitting and not-moving exists on the movement continuum. While motor
engagement in its many facets may not be the only way to think about
empathy, in other words, it allows us to access a dynamic dimension of the
self–other interaction, which includes (but does not subsume) other
dimensions of empathy, including emotion. This last point is worth under-
scoring, since the notion of sharing another’s feelings has tended to domi-
nate discussions of empathy. Considering the sensorimotor grounding of
theatrical and other forms of spectatorship returns movement to the
empathic equation, and it highlights the role of movement in seemingly
different cognitive operations. What we think of as “empathy” is a
dynamic, interactive process rather than a state of mind or feeling that one
accomplishes then resides in atemporally.
A different obstacle to the study of empathy is the specter of universal-
ism. This specter can be found in the unexamined assumption that empa-
thy provides unproblematic access to the minds and experiences of others.
After centuries in which this assumption prevailed, we know that it is not
true, that our ability to apprehend and empathize with others is condi-
tioned by variables of culture, history, gender, race, and embodiment. The
differences opened up by these variables raise difficult questions about
accessibility, knowability, and identification, and they challenge any notion
that empathy and kinesthetic engagement are automatic, total, or unmedi-
ated. When we claim to empathize with someone else, we run the risk of
universalizing what we feel and mistaking our projections for actual, inter-
subjective apprehension. Others are hard to know, and the history of I–
you (and we–you) encounters is littered with examples of appropriative
empathy.
The present study endorses and builds on the work of Foster and oth-
ers who have challenged universalizing notions of empathy in dance stud-
ies and the work of neurologists who have demonstrated the variability
and situatedness of neurological mirroring mechanisms. An important
task of anyone writing about empathy and the mechanisms underlying it,
this work indicates, is to delimit its achievements and qualify excessive
claims made on its behalf. Crucial to doing so, I believe, is rigorous
 INTRODUCTION 11

engagement with the issue of difference. Phenomenologically and cogni-

tively, we come to know others by navigating a perceptual field of com-
monalities and differences. Denying a solipsism that would leave us
imprisoned in our own worlds and a boundarylessness that would have us
merge with those we encounter, we negotiate what we know, what we do
not know but can, and what we cannot know and never will. The limita-
tions and possibilities attendant on this situation complicate the phenom-
ena of movement perception and kinesthetic resonance. What does it
mean to say that we resonate with the movements of others? Do we actu-
ally inhabit their movements in an experiential sense, or do we vicariously
activate our own motor repertoires and experiences? How do we engage
with sensorimotor performances that are radically different from ours? If
my sensorimotor capabilities and practices differ markedly from another’s,
what happens when my sensorimotor orientation to the world encounters
hers?
As a vehicle for understanding the role of difference in sensorimotor
encounters, Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre foregrounds the phe-
nomenon of disability in its analysis. The variability of embodied subjectiv-
ity that disability highlights puts many of the assumptions concerning
movement perception, kinesthetic resonance, and empathy to the test. As
we will see in the chapter “Kinesthetic Resonance”, Martin’s writings on
kinesthetic empathy in the 1930s assume a normative body; when disabil-
ity appears in his discussion it is marked as a deficit or threat. A related form
of ableism can be found in medico-scientific, psychological, and even phe-
nomenology studies of movement that describe perceptual and motor dys-
function using the language of pathology. Most accounts of movement
experience and movement perception, of course—including many of the
ones referred to in this book—ignore disability entirely by taking able-
bodiedness as an epistemological, cognitive, and experiential norm with-
out considering alternative forms of embodiment and motility.
Marginalizing or eliding disability in these ways impoverishes our under-
standing of those who fall into this category, but it also impoverishes our
understanding of those who do not. Impairment and physical limitation
are not restricted to the “disabled,” nor is the ability to execute movement
the sole property of those we consider “able-bodied.” Incorporating dis-
ability by examining its role in movement and movement perception opens
important insights into the ways we move through the world. It also gives
us a sensorimotor perspective on the difficult question of how, and how
much, we can know those who are different from us. While I reject the
12 S. B. GARNER, JR.

universalist position that all experience is essentially the same, I am equally

skeptical of the relativist claim evident or implicit in certain currents of
identity studies that experience is hermetically sealed within individual or
group identities. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposed in The Visible and
the Invisible, we are attuned to one another, implicated in one another, as
part of an innate intercorporeality (intercorporéité); our experiences, how-
ever different, are grounded kinesthetically as they are in other ways (cog-
nitively and linguistically, for example).14 Social life—and its elaborated
manifestations, such as theatre—hinge on the fact that another’s experi-
ence is to some degree comprehensible to me. By directing attention to
our sensorimotor resonance with others, kinesthetic responsiveness pro-
vides an important tool for plumbing this apprehensibility and discerning
its limits. If we acknowledge that sensorimotor resonance and the higher-
order empathic projections it enables are never identical to the experiences
they respond to, we can investigate the far more interesting questions of
how we constitute a world that includes other people through our percep-
tual and kinesthetic engagements with it and how we come to know what
disability theorist Lennard Davis calls the “commonality of bodies within
the notion of difference.”15
Socially constructed categories of difference, such as disability, compli-
cate the self–other encounter and the terms we use to discuss it. As
Disability advocates and theorists have demonstrated, “disability” is an
ideological, political, medical, and institutional category as well as—or
more than—a physical condition. To quote Davis again: “The object of
disability studies is not the person using the wheelchair or the Deaf person
but the set of social, historical, economic, and cultural processes that regu-
late and control the way we think about and think through the body.”16
Disability is also, for those who embrace the term, a vehicle for solidarity,
activism, and self-expression. Anthropologist and Disability activist Robert
F. Murphy writes, “Disability is not simply a physical affair for us; it is our
ontology, a condition of our being in the world.”17 The stigmatizing and
empowering effects of this identification have consequences for those it
encompasses in terms of how people with disabilities experience them-
selves and their relationship with others. As a way of acknowledging this
influence, I will use the capitalized “Disability” to refer to the social cat-
egory and the identitarian movement that has emerged over recent
decades to contest its objectifications, while using the lower-case “disabil-
ity” (and other terms, such as “inability,” “impairment,” and “diver-
gence”) to designate sensorimotor and cognitive difference. I do this with
 INTRODUCTION 13

the understanding that these levels are not independent of each other:
that being viewed as Disabled by an ableist world is a form of sensorimo-
tor disablement in its own right. For people who are identified with their
impairments, disability is subjectively inseparable from Disability.
As a way of integrating disability into a theory of movement percep-
tion, I highlight the issue of sensorimotor difference in many of the per-
formances I discuss. Five productions involving disability are central to the
chapters that follow: Sandglass Theater’s puppet play about dementia,
D-Generation: An Exultation of Larks (2013); Deaf West Theatre’s revival
of the musical Spring Awakening (2014); an evening of performances by
Oakland’s AXIS Dance Company, a physically integrated company of per-
formers (attended in 2015); Sam Gold’s Broadway production of
Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (2007), with wheelchair-bound
actress Madison Ferris as Laura Wingfield; and Proteus Theatre Company’s
innovative one-man show Merrick, the Elephant Man (2007), which fea-
tured an able-bodied actor. With each of these productions—and other
theatrical moments I discuss throughout this study—I explore kinetic and
kinesthetic-based attempts to navigate the disabled–nondisabled divide.
One of my contributions to the discussion of knowability, kinesthetic reso-
nance, and empathy here and elsewhere in my book as these pertain to
sensorimotor difference is phenomenological. Working from the perspec-
tive of kinesthetic experience, I examine the claim, put forward by some,
that phenomenology erases difference, by considering this tradition’s atti-
tudes toward disability. Taking Merleau-Ponty’s famous statement that
“[c]onsciousness is originally not an ‘I think that,’ but rather an ‘I can’”
back to its original formulation by Edmund Husserl, I show that Husserl
conceived the phenomenon of I can in relationship to an equally funda-
mental I cannot.18 I propose that this counter-phenomenon be devel-
oped beyond Husserl’s limited application of it that I can and I cannot be
understood in dialectical relation to each other. Building on Sara Ahmed’s
critique of Merleau-Ponty’s I can in Queer Phenomenologies, I argue that
I cannot be broadened to include those inabilities and inhibitions that are
imposed from without—the gender-imposed inhibitions that Iris Marion
Young identified in her influential 1980 essay “Throwing Like a Girl,”
for instance, or the constraints that ableist society imposes on those who
are differently embodied. But the limits that I cannot ­represents are also,
I maintain, intrinsic to embodiment itself in a more fundamental way
than Husserl’s ableist perspective allowed him to acknowledge.
Recognizing that my own movements and my perception of others’ are
14 S. B. GARNER, JR.

constituted, in part, by what I cannot do, know, or share provides a foun-

dation for including difference within an understanding of sensorimotor
enactment, resonance, and empathy.
As I hope to demonstrate in the following chapters, a sensorimotor
analysis sensitive to difference challenges the absolutism of disability/able-­
bodiedness binaries without denying the ideological and sociopolitical
realities these categories point to. I understand how fraught this project is
given longstanding discussions of Disability and other identity-derived
categories of experience. I do not propose to speak for those who are
Disabled; when I present this experience, it is through the written accounts
of those who live it. The perspective I take in the performance encounters
I describe is that of a largely able-bodied-up-to-this-point male who has
had intimate contacts with disabled individuals over his lifetime, lived
through episodes of impairment, and become more deeply acquainted
with I cannot as he gets older. There are some things I know about being
disabled (small “d”), some I am almost certain to learn, and many more I
will never know. But the reality of living in a world populated by others
with variable embodiments and sensorimotor/cognitive capacities is
something everyone shares whether they acknowledge it or not. Embracing
this reality, I have written a book less about disability than about the pro-
ductive challenge disability presents to traditional models of phenomenal
experience, cognition, and aesthetic reception. As Carrie Sandahl writes,
“Disabilities are states of being that are in themselves generative and, once
de-stigmatized, allow us to envision an enormous range of human vari-
ety—in terms of bodily, spatial, and social configurations.”19 Given the fact
we are all “other” to everyone else in varying degrees, the issue of how we
encounter difference—what we have access to and what we do not—is as
important as the issue of difference itself. As I hope to show, theatre and
other forms of performance offer a space where such encounters are fore-
grounded, questioned, and enabled.

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences

As the earlier sections of this introduction have indicated, this book is a
continuation of my longstanding interest in the phenomenology of the-
atre; those who are familiar with my earlier book Bodied Spaces:
Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama will see many of
the same preoccupations revisited with the perspective of twenty four
additional years spent thinking and writing about theatre. As in that earlier
 INTRODUCTION 15

study, I approach the performing body as an experiential reference point

of the performance space it inhabits and bodies forth, and as a phenome-
nological component of the audience’s perceptual field. The notion of
kinesthetic spectatorship that I develop here allows me to explore this
twinness with a differently attuned phenomenological attention. Because
“kinesthetic empathy” and other models of motor resonance seek to
understand the mutual relation of movement perception and enactment—
the act of perceiving movement is accompanied by a virtual enactment of
it—a focus on sensorimotor perception opens up additional layers in the
actor–spectatorship relationship. Coming to terms with the phenomenol-
ogy of movement and movement perception has allowed me to under-
stand this relationship in more richly dynamic terms.
As even a cursory look at the field demonstrates, the last ten years have
seen a resurgent interest in phenomenological approaches to perfor-
mance.20 In addition to the dance scholarship alluded to earlier, scholars
and practitioners in theatre and performance studies have taken up phe-
nomenological questions and methodologies. This interest has proceeded
from, and in tandem with, the performative, corporeal, and experiential
“turns” in theory and practice of the arts, and it has been inspired by
experimental forms of technologically mediated, immersive, and participa-
tory performance. I cannot do justice to the range of new work in this
area, but I will single out a few exceptional books: Susan Kozel’s explora-
tion of human bodies and digital technologies, Closer: Performances,
Technologies, Phenomenology (2007); George Home-Cook’s study of the-
atrical listening, Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves (2015);
Jon Foley Sherman’s A Strange Proximity: Stage Presence, Failure, and the
Ethics of Attention (2016); and Maaike Bleeker, Sherman, and Eirini
Nedelkopoulou’s collection Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions
and Transformations (2015), which brings together some of the most
exciting performance-directed phenomenological work being done
today.21 Those doing this work draw upon classical tradition of phenom-
enology—Edmund Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, and
Erwin Straus—but they also interrogate this tradition and its conceptions
of subjectivity, perception, and embodiment in light of contemporary the-
ory, new performance practices, and our increasingly technologized, inter-
medial life-world. Scholars and performers have also explored the practical
question of how one does phenomenology, generating valuable insights
into the processual nature of phenomenological inquiry, the modes of
attention and inscription best suited to capturing the nuances of ­experience,
16 S. B. GARNER, JR.

and the differences between phenomenological descriptions and first-­

person impressions. One of the most important insights to emerge from
this “new-wave” research is that performance itself is an important way of
doing phenomenology.
I am indebted to all of this work for carrying the phenomenological
study of performance into a new millennium and for refining the terms
that earlier scholars developed. I am indebted, as well, to scholars in such
fields as anthropology, geography, and architecture for similarly important
insights and applications. The expanding interdisciplinarity of phenome-
nological analysis is one of its most significant developments. In the chap-
ters that follow I join a particularly influential interdisciplinary conversation:
the growing dialogue between phenomenology and what is broadly
defined as the cognitive sciences.22 This dialogue is both inevitable and
methodologically fraught. It is inevitable because phenomenology and the
cognitive sciences (in which I include cognitive psychology, philosophy of
mind, neuroscience, and cognitive linguistics) deal with similar and over-
lapping phenomena. It is methodologically fraught because the two tradi-
tions have historically defined themselves in opposition to each other.
Husserl grounded his phenomenological philosophy on a critique of natu-
ralism, the objectifying belief underlying positivist science that the world
exists as something distinct from the perceiving subject.23 Applying his
critique to all disciplines that treat phenomena, including consciousness,
as entities that can be measured, analyzed, and manipulated, Husserl pre-
sented phenomenology and what he considered naïve empiricism as anti-
thetical. For their part, scientists in the decades that followed usually
dismissed phenomenology as empirically unsound, dependent on intro-
spective rather than scientifically verifiable procedures and claims.
This apparent incompatibility has been reexamined in recent decades
by proponents on both sides of the phenomenology–cognitive science
divide. As Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi note, this rapprochement has
been supported by three developments in the cognitive sciences, all of
which undermined the computational and cognitivist models that domi-
nated studies of cognition to that point.24 One development was a revived
interest in phenomenal consciousness and the methodological question of
how one studies this scientifically.25 A second development was the emer-
gence of embodied and enactive approaches to cognition, which rejected
the mind–body dualism that continued to underwrite the cognitive disci-
plines. The third has to do with advances in neuroscience since the early
1990s. With the advent of technologies such as functional magnetic
 INTRODUCTION 17

r­ esonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET), sci-

entists have been able to generate highly detailed images of neural activity
within and across specific brain regions. Not only does this experimental
information suggest neurological correlates to the experiential processes
that phenomenology and the philosophy of mind examine, but the scien-
tists who design, conduct, and interpret brain-imaging experiments often
depend on the reported experiences of experimental subjects. Given these
parallel and intersecting developments, an approach such as phenomenol-
ogy, which derives descriptive models of experience from rigorous proce-
dures, has an important contribution to make to cognitive research.
A number of philosophers with backgrounds in phenomenology have
embraced this rapprochement from the other direction. Abandoning
“pure” phenomenology—which hinges, as Alva Noë describes it, on the
assumption “that phenomenology is free standing in the sense that phe-
nomenological facts are logically and conceptually independent of empiri-
cal or metaphysical facts”—these philosophers propose different ways of
accommodating phenomenology to the naturalized world that science
and other objectifying disciplines examine.26 Daniel C. Dennett’s notion
of “heterophenomenology,” which advocates a third-person approach to
consciousness instead of the autophenomenology that traditional phe-
nomenology is rooted in, is an early shift in this direction, as are the efforts
of Francisco J. Varela and others in the late 1990s to “naturalize”
Husserlian phenomenology under the rubric “neurophenomenology.”27
More recently, philosophers have used phenomenological accounts of
cognitive processes to confirm or challenge the models of science and
analytic philosophy; examined phenomenological assumptions in light of
these models; and opened new areas for dialogue. The robustness of the
conversation is evident in the growing number of books and articles that
explore these convergences.28
My own engagement with the cognitive sciences is methodological and
pragmatic. Having previously argued for the complementarity of phenom-
enology to other disciplines and approaches, I proceed with the conviction
that phenomenology and the cognitive sciences are natural collaborators in
the investigation of experience. In the Phenomenology of Perception,
Merleau-Ponty drew upon psychological and neurological case studies,
such as Kurt Goldstein and Adler Gelb’s 1920 study of Schneider, a
German man who sustained brain injuries during World War I. And Vittorio
Gallese, one of the scientists who identified monkey mirror neurons at the
University of Parma, contributed his understanding of Merleau-­Ponty to
18 S. B. GARNER, JR.

the team’s conceptualization of what they had discovered.29 As these

instances suggest, phenomenology and the cognitive sciences serve an
importantly heuristic function for each other: phenomenological accounts
of experience can guide empirical investigation, while empirical findings in
the cognitive sciences can suggest new angles and possibilities for phenom-
enological inquiry. The fact that neurological systems function in specific,
measurable ways during movement observation and enactment, for exam-
ple, attests to the pre-conscious correlates of perceptual and sensorimotor
experience. Understanding how these systems work can direct us to aspects
of lived experience that otherwise may not have been readily apparent. At
the same time, disciplined attention to the phenomenology of movement
and perception reveals experiential nuances that neuroscience is unable to
discern. Within the limits imposed by their different methodologies, in
other words, phenomenology and the cognitive sciences can productively
constrain each other by presenting evidence that the other would benefit
from considering. Orthodox practitioners in both disciplines will reject
such constraints, but the theoretical and methodological reciprocity
between these different approaches to the study of mind has demonstrated
its power to advance cognitive science, phenomenology, and the conversa-
tion between them.
In my efforts to integrate phenomenology with insights and models
drawn from the cognitive sciences, the work of scientists and philosophers
studying embodied cognition and enactive perception, which I referred to
earlier, has proven particularly congenial. The embodied approach to cog-
nition, which originated in the 1980s, rejected the prevailing model of
cognition as a largely disembodied set of operations based on the manipu-
lation of symbolic representations of the external world. Mind and world
in this model were understood to be separate from each other, and the
brain was approached as a largely autonomous organ, processing informa-
tion as a computer would. Rejecting this radically Cartesian model, the
theory of embodied cognition understands the mind as inseparable from
the body and its sensorimotor encounters with its environment. Cognitive
operations do not exist prior to or independent of embodiedness; rather,
they are dependent on the body’s situatedness in the world. Varela, Evan
Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch explain this connection between the body
and its environments: “By using the term embodied we mean to highlight
two points: first, that cognition depends upon the kinds of experiences
that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and
second, that these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves
 INTRODUCTION 19

embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural

context.”30 Humans have the cognitive structures they do, in other words,
because of the bodies they have and the world they inhabit. As the propo-
nents of embodied linguistics maintain, the sensorimotor base of human
cognition is similarly embedded in conceptual thought and language.31
The embodied model is often combined with an enactive approach to
perception. Enactivists reject the idea that perception consists of internal
representations of a pre-given external world, arguing instead that per-
ception arises in the dynamic, situated coupling of embodied subject and
environment.32 When I look at an object, I do not passively receive its
features as if I were a camera obscura with an inverted image projected
onto an inside surface; rather, I constitute—or disclose—it as an object of
perception through a process of skillful engagement. As Noë argues, per-
ceiving is a form of action. Sensorimotor capability and the knowledge
one acquires through its use are, according to this view, fundamental to
our perceptual interaction with the world around us. When I look out my
office window, I know that the buildings closest to me are built on the
same scale as the buildings off in the distance—even though the former
appear larger than the latter—because I know that if I walked toward one
of those far-off buildings the relative scale of the two would readjust itself
in predictable ways according to my movement and changing location.
Were I to take this walk as a way of demonstrating this phenomenon, my
excursion would entail countless information-eliciting movements: turn-
ing my head and upper body, scanning the scene and the buildings in
question with my eyes, navigating my way across a changing, familiar
landscape and through the obstacle-filled movement field of students on
their way to class. In this example, as in perception generally, the
­environment I perceive and navigate “affords” me opportunities for
sensorimotor engagement, to use environmental psychologist James
­
J. Gibson’s influential term. On a more intimate level, when I pick up a
book and look at it, I do not perceive it all at once; rather, I scan it with
my eyes as I hold it and turn it over. Noë, alluding to Merleau-Ponty’s
resonant phrase “palpation with the eyes,” characterizes vision as “touch-
like.”33 Perception in the enactivist model is fundamentally dynamic: it
takes place in time and manifests itself in an unfolding relationship
between perceiver and environment. Perception and action do not exist
prior to their enactment; on the contrary, they emerge in a temporal
process through their dynamic execution. To understand this process,
proponents of embodied enaction often employ dynamic s­ystems
20 S. B. GARNER, JR.

t­heory, which is highly compatible with phenomenological understand-

ings of experience, to explore the operations of the cognitive-perceptual
system.
Noë’s citation of Merleau-Ponty in the previous paragraph affirms the
deep compatibility between embodied enactivism and the phenomeno-
logical project. Both approaches see consciousness as embodied and
enworlded, and both understand perception as constituting a world in
which it is always already inherent. Phenomenology played an important
role in Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s initial formulation of enaction, and
the phenomenological description of experience remains essential to the
enactive model. As Thompson insists in his later book Mind in Life:
Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, “once science turns its
attention to subjectivity and consciousness, to experience as it is lived,
then it cannot do without phenomenology, which thus needs to be recog-
nized and cultivated as an indispensable partner to the experimental sci-
ences of mind and life.”34 A methodological eclecticism involving these
two approaches requires that one be sensitive to the different modes of
investigation each employs; as Thompson’s term “partner” suggests, we
should appreciate their integration as a dialogue rather than a synthesis.
What is groundbreaking here is the conversation itself and the relationality
it addresses. After years of parallel but mutually exclusive investigations,
the inclusion of phenomenology in enactive cognitive science represents
the first sustained attempt to take seriously Husserl’s claim that science is
“rooted, grounded in the life-world.”35
I have also benefitted greatly from the empirical and theoretical work of
cognitive scientists who would not necessarily place their work under the
enactive umbrella, particularly Marc Jeannerod and others working in the
area of motor cognition. To understand our perceptual predilection for
animated over non-animated movement, I cite Gunnar Johansson’s point-­
light display experiments from the 1970s, and I draw upon other empirical
studies of how humans experience and perceive movement. I also address
neuroscientific research on the human mirror system because of its focus
on the neural mechanisms linking action execution and observation. While
the disproportionate attention that mirror neurons attracted when they
were first publicized led one science journalist to refer to them as “the
most hyped concept in neuroscience,” the evolving understanding of how
and under what circumstances they function correlates in useful ways with
non-neurological insights into the importance of intention to perception
and kinesthetic mirroring, the personal and cultural variable that ­condition
 INTRODUCTION 21

these responses, and the relationship between movement and ­emotion.36

This latter association is particularly important. As I argue throughout
the following chapters, movement and affect are inseparably involved
with each other. Emotions manifest themselves in movement, while
movements themselves are affectively charged. In the words of Alain
Berthoz, “there is no perception of space or movement, no vertigo or
loss of balance, no caress given or received, no sound heard or uttered,
no gesture of capture or grasping that is not accompanied by emotion
or induced by it.”37 If a study of kinesthetic empathy is to be true to
experience and avoid the charge of “motor chauvinism,” in other words,
it must take the dynamic body’s multiple ways of experiencing itself
into account.38
As I hope to demonstrate in the remainder of this book, a dialogue
between phenomenology and cognitive science provides an opportunity
for phenomenology to refine and extend its descriptive models of percep-
tion and embodiment. In specific terms, enactivism challenges traditional
phenomenology to bring forward and develop its own dynamic account of
embodied experience. Some canonical phenomenological studies—such
as Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann’s The Structures of the Life-World
(1973)—omit movement entirely from their descriptions of lived experi-
ence. Reflecting a kind of movement blindness, phenomenological
accounts of perception such as this are often static in nature, positing an
immobile, largely passive perceiving subject that brings the world to con-
sciousness from a position of immobility. The following chapters draw
heavily on the work of Husserl, whose philosophy of world constitution
accords a primary place to kinesthesia, and Merleau-Ponty, who made
movement central to the phenomenon of perception. I am also indebted
to the writings of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, who sees movement as the
central feature of animate being. As Sheets-Johnstone writes in the intro-
duction to her book The Primacy of Movement, “movement offers us the
possibility not only of formulating an epistemology true to the truths of
experience, but of articulating a metaphysics true to the dynamic nature of
the world and to the foundationally animated nature of life.”39 Embodied
enactivism reinforces Sheets-Johnstone’s insight by insisting on percep-
tion’s sensorimotor engagement with its environment. The world, Noë
reminds us, makes itself available to perception through physical move-
ment and the interactions it affords.40 The enactive approach, in other
words, provides an additional incentive for phenomenology to leave the
study, get up and move.
22 S. B. GARNER, JR.

The chapters that follow attempt to understand and contribute to a

movement-oriented phenomenology. They do so by considering the stage
as a kinetic/kinesthetic medium, one defined in terms of movement,
movement perception, and the kinesthetic experience that integrates
these. Underlying this investigation is the assumption that theatre makes
use of sensorimotor and other phenomenological/cognitive processes
that are employed in non-theatrical situations but refracts them through
the aesthetic conditions imposed by spectatorial and representational con-
ventions. As I have stated, my study draws upon traditions that are not
overtly phenomenological, including the cognitive sciences, acting theory,
dance theory, philosophy of mind, and linguistics. In its dialogue with
cognitive sciences, it joins the work of F. Elizabeth Hart, John Lutterbie,
and Phillip B. Zarrilli, all three of whom have addressed this dialogue from
one methodological vantage point or another.41 This and the other dia-
logues I have referred to, however, are bound throughout this book to my
own phenomenological immersion in the issues I write about. Attending
plays and other performances, often more than once; viewing filmed the-
atrical productions when live ones were unavailable; working with actors;
examining my experience and perception of movement; watching kines-
thetic resonances come and go; observing at close hand and listening to
accounts of the movement experiences of others, including those with
disabilities; subjecting my certainties and assumptions to doubt—these are
the phenomenological underpinnings of this book. Along with my uses of
phenomenological models and non-­phenomenological research, in other
words, my account of movement and movement perception is grounded
in experience, observation, and the actuality of individual theatrical per-
formances. Reflecting my conviction that theatre and performance theory
benefit from the rigorous experiential descriptions that can complicate
their methodologies and models, these observations and self-examinations
are in many ways the heart of the book, and I employ the first-person
mode of reporting more radically than I have before in a formal study of
this nature. I am grateful to those who have shared their own experiences
of movement inside and outside the theatre, especially those who helped
me more deeply understand the theatre’s sensorimotor experience from
the actor’s point of view.
The I employed throughout this book’s discussion of movement and
movement perception has different referents depending on the context in
which it is used. This double-reference is strategic. Most of the time, as in
this introduction, the first person denotes a particular I: Stan Garner,
 INTRODUCTION 23

author of this book and subject of particular experiences, some of which

are recounted in the course of my argument. With its unique life trajecto-
ries, body history, habits of perception and thought, and social position-
ing, this personal I marks the personal dimension of experience inside and
outside the theatre. It also designated a position in the field of interper-
sonal encounter where differences in movement experience and perception
throw each other into relief. At other times, the first person designates a
hypothetical I, a point of view that subsumes the strictly personal within
shared structures of experience and can also be designated by the third-­
person one. The descriptions I offer under this I draw upon personal expe-
rience considered phenomenologically, but they are not limited to this. In
an effort to ground my general claims and minimize the risk of partiality, I
have sought corroborating forms of evidence: other experiential accounts,
established phenomenological and non-phenomenological models, and
critiques of these models. I trust that the context in which each I is
employed will make clear whether I am referring to the personal or the
hypothetical—whether I move refers to me or to a generalized subject of
commensurate abilities. At the same time, I welcome the occasional ambi-
guity that my bi-referential use of a single pronoun invites. My own experi-
ences are intricately involved in the generalized accounts I offer, and I
would occlude this relationship by insisting on too sharp a distinction
between these experiences and the common structures I identify. The
inherence of the perceiver in the phenomenon perceived is one of the
things that separates phenomenology from objectivist forms of psychology.
Inherence implies partiality, but when partiality becomes aware of itself it
opens consciousness to the possibility—and the challenges—of alterity.42
In all accounts of movement experience and perception, I recognize the
divergence of those who encounter the world through different percep-
tual/kinetic modalities, and I refer to their experience when appropriate.
Much of what I thought I knew about movement has been revised as
a result of my investigation of movement and movement perception.
This investigation has led me in unexpected directions and to unantici-
pated perceptual and kinesthetic phenomena—hence my decision to
replace the term kinesthetic empathy in the book’s title with the more
inclusive, and open-ended, kinesthetic spectatorship. But at the end of this
extended process my core beliefs about performance phenomenology
have only intensified. These beliefs include the following: (1) that perfor-
mance and spectatorship are deeply implicated in each other through the
intercorporeal dynamics of perception, enactment, and embodiment; (2)
24 S. B. GARNER, JR.

that theatrical experiences are generated through acts of “presencing”

rather than invariable presences; (3) that language is a mode of embodi-
ment in the theatre as well as outside of it; and (4) that theatre phenom-
enology and the study of theatrical cognition ground their most powerful
insights in the close examination of actual performance moments.43 It is
my hope that the following chapters justify these claims by deepening my
attention to what actor and mime artist Jean-Louis Barrault termed
“Presence in motion.”44

Spectatorship and Mimesis

As the preceding sections of this introduction make clear, my intention in
writing this book is to situate empirical models of sensorimotor cognition
within the phenomenological dynamics of movement and movement per-
ception. My procedure is accumulative, starting with the experiential
foundations of movement and movement cognition and building to
broader questions of resonance, language, empathy, and ethics that rest, in
part, on this base. The chapter “Movement and Animation” examines the
fundamental structures of self-movement and external movement percep-
tion. It considers the centrality of movement to animacy and the percep-
tion of animacy in living and non-living elements of one’s environment,
and it explores the perceptual predisposition of human beings to recog-
nize biological movement and involve themselves kinesthetically with
movements that fall within a repertoire of familiar sensorimotor experi-
ence. The chapter applies these insights to theatre by exploring the phe-
nomenology of animacy in performing objects and the kinesthetic
dynamics of stillness and movement in relation to actors onstage. The
chapter “Movement, Difference, and Ability” considers a number of theo-
retical and methodological questions concerning the phenomenological
study of movement and proposes strategies for negotiating the categories
of normality and difference. Advocating a methodological practice that
embraces divergence, it offers a phenomenological foundation for engag-
ing what we know and fall short of knowing in the kinesthetic experiences
of others.
The chapter “Movement, Attention, and Intentionality” explores two
important elements of kinesthetic spectatorship: attention and intention-
ality. Looking at key ways in which theatre engages movement differently
than it is engaged in non-performance situations, it considers the relation
of focal and marginal attention, the selectivity of theatrical attention, the
 INTRODUCTION 25

centrality of intentionality to action recognition, and the role of affect in

the execution and perception of movement. After expanding the inten-
tional model to include micro-intentions and what developmental psy-
chologist Daniel N. Stern calls “interintentionality,” the chapter concludes
with a discussion of contemporary performance attempts to establish a
“post-intentional” theatre. The chapter “Kinesthetic Resonance” focuses
on our vicarious engagement with the movements of others. It traces the
concept of kinesthetic empathy in dance studies and the parallel work on
human mirroring in neuroscience and suggests how these complementary
explorations can be understood in relation to each other. Adapting these
general phenomenological and cognitive models to the experiential field
of actual performance, and building on specific encounters inside and out-
side the theatre, it argues that kinesthetic activity in the theatre is situa-
tional, interactive, and variable.
The chapter “Language, Speech, and Movement” explores the func-
tion of language and verbal performance in the kinesthetic interchange
between actors and spectators. Drawing upon the work of cognitive scien-
tists and linguists, it considers the ways that language and verbal utterance
condition theatrical kinesthesis. In addition to examining the linguistic
embodiment of action (particularly through action verbs), the chapter
looks at the kinesthetically important relationships that can be established
between language, speech, and gesture. The chapter “Empathy and
Otherness”) examines the phenomenon of empathy from a sensorimotor
and kinesthetic point of view. It begins by considering the components of
empathy and looking at different definitions of empathy within the philo-
sophical, scientific, and phenomenological traditions. Drawing on
Emmanuel Levinas’s Infinity and Totality, it considers the place of alterity
in empathic interactions and what it means for spectators and actors to
navigate otherness and difference empathically. The chapter concludes by
addressing the issue of actors taking on, or performing, characters from
different identity communities. Employing Richard Schechner’s notion of
“deep mimesis,” it offers a kinesthetic perspective on the issues at stake in
the controversial practice of non-disabled actors taking on disabled roles.45
The theatrical and other performance terrain covered by these chapters
is rich and varied. In addition to the productions mentioned earlier and
other productions attended and remembered, my exploration of move-
ment and movement perception in the theatre led me to theatre, puppet,
dance, and mime performance, the 2016 Stella and Stanley Shouting
Contest in New Orleans, and a variety of traditional and experimental
26 S. B. GARNER, JR.

productions ranging from the 1976 Royal Shakespeare Company Macbeth

with Judi Dench in the role of Lady Macbeth to Complicite’s immersive
2015 production The Encounter.46 With few exceptions, all of the plays,
theatre/dance/performance works, and productions I write about are
ones that I have seen live or digitally. Although I am aware that watching
a theatrical or dance performance on DVD or on the internet is not the
same as watching it live, my experience working with recorded versions of
performances I have seen live convinces me that the former can convey
many of the latter’s kinesthetic dynamics.
The movement-based approach that these chapters develop will reso-
nate, I hope, with actors and those who train them. Whether an actor is
trained in a Stanislavski-derived tradition or more explicitly physical tradi-
tions such as those developed by Meyerhold, Jerzy Grotowski, Jacques
Lecoq, Anne Bogart, and Tadashi Suzuki, he or she understands in a pro-
foundly physical way that performance is inseparable from movement.
Dancers, musicians, singers, acrobats, mime artists, jugglers, preachers,
shamans, and athletes understand this as well, of course. Until recently,
however, those who theorize dramatic theatre have tended to neglect this
theatre’s sensorimotor grounding. The neglect of movement experience
has been particularly pronounced when it comes to audiences and our
understanding of dramatic spectatorship. One reason for this is that our
phenomenological understanding of spectatorship is still relatively young:
much remains to be understood about the audience’s modes of attending
theatrical performance, and until recently spectator and reception studies
tended to focus on disembodied mental operations. Another likely reason
is that most—though by no means all—dramatic theatre is conducted with
audience members seated in relation to the onstage action. Yet while spec-
tators may suspend certain motor engagements with the outside world
when they take their seats—are, in fact, socialized to do so in many theatre
cultures—they continue to move and to perceive movement around them
and on stage. Sitting and the act of “not moving” are kinesthetic phenom-
ena, in other words, and spectators (seated or not) are an essential part of
the theatre’s sensorimotor field. The audience absorption that conven-
tional dramatic theatre often aspires to should not disguise this fact.
In order to address the frequent neglect of movement and motility in
accounts of theatrical spectatorship, I focus on the spectator’s experience
in the chapters that follow. The spectator, I contend, is the missing piece
in our understanding of theatrical movement, the element that allows us
to recognize movement as a dynamic circuit rather than a unidirectional
 INTRODUCTION 27

display. By insisting on the spectator’s participation in this circuit, my anal-

ysis parallels the work of other recent scholars who have studied spectator-
ship through audience-based research. Janelle Reinelt describes this work
as “the kind of research that tells us what spectators experience, how they
make meaning or feel in relation to theatre, and how they come to value
‘assisting at performance.’”47 Kinetic Spectatorship complements this
research by suggesting the movement-oriented phenomenological under-
pinning of the experiences such participants identify. Employing a cogni-
tively informed phenomenological approach, it develops two seemingly
incompatible insights: (1) that these experiences have common structures
and features and (2) that they are highly individual, to the point that no
two experiences are identical. This—as I have posited elsewhere—is both
the task and the promise of phenomenology: to identify the shared vari-
ables that render difference and individuality conceivable.48
Some final reflections before turning to the main body of this study. By
making the spectator–actor interaction central to my discussion of theatri-
cal experience and grounding this interaction in the field of movement
observation and enactment, I propose a more kinesthetically oriented,
enactive way of understanding theatrical mimesis. Traditionally, the term
mimesis has been used to describe two things: the act of imitation and a
representational correspondence between a work of art and the world it
depicts (typically a relationship of fidelity or exactitude). The two mean-
ings are intimately related, of course, in that imitation aspires to resem-
blance as this concept is dictated by cultural, aesthetic, and other
conventions. Since Plato, Aristotle, and Aristotle’s neoclassical successors,
traditional discussions of theatrical mimesis have centered on representa-
tion—in other words, on the relationality between imitation and the imi-
tated, copy and original. When agency is considered in mimetic
representation, the emphasis in conventional mimetic theory shifts, as
Bruce McConachie has pointed out, to those who “do the imitating”:
playwrights and actors.49 The spectator-directed approach that I employ
here undermines the representational bias by including the audience as
co-enactors of dramatic and theatrical mimesis. Recognizing, resonating
with, and vicariously enacting the actions we observe or hear about on
stage, we join the actor in constituting the mimetic field.50 Like the actor’s,
our mindful bodies play the performance’s unfolding sensorimotor score.
While this phenomenological/cognitive dynamic does not sidestep
representation, it undermines the assumptions that have historically
­
underwritten mimetic theory. When an infant sticks out its tongue in
28 S. B. GARNER, JR.

response to its mother doing the same, is this representation? It may be,
but only in a sensorimotor, enactive, and richly intersubjective sense.
Shifting the focus from representation to imitation and from playwright
and actor to spectator reclaims a more performative, perception-oriented
notion of mimesis. This understanding—that mimesis is a sensorimotor
act grounded in perceptual contact with the world—is evident in many of
the term’s non-aesthetic uses. Biologists use mimesis to refer to species
imitating or mimicking other species; Renaissance rhetoricians to refer to
speakers imitating the words, gestures, and mannerisms of another; and
anthropologists such as Michael Taussig refer to cultural groups taking on
the embodied signatures and practices of other cultural groups. This latter
usage informs the performance anthropology of scholars such as Joseph
Roach, whose study Cities of the Dead examines the circum-­ Atlantic
mimetic exchanges evident in New Orleans Mardi Gras and other cultural
performances. A more robustly enactive, intersubjective understanding of
mimesis brings out the spectatorial component in Aristotle’s discussion of
the term in chapter four of The Poetics: “For the process of imitation is
natural to mankind from childhood on: Man is differentiated from other
animals because he is the most imitative of them, and he learns his first
lessons through imitation, and we observe that all men find pleasure in
imitations.”51 This chapter—which comes after a more formal discussion
of the means, objects, and manner of imitation and is followed by the ele-
ments and genres of imitation—describes mimesis as a meaning-invested
activity of observation and enactment, an innately human disposition to
take the world in, make it one’s own, and perform it back. While Aristotle’s
attention is on the poet as ultimate maker of the mimetic artifact, his rec-
ognition that mimesis is originally the property of a perceiving, cognitively
attuned subject opens the space for a mimetic understanding of theatrical
spectatorship.
This opening takes us into the actual world of performance—bodies
moving in proximity to each other, gestures, sounds, and objects—that
The Poetics goes to great lengths to hold at bay. It returns theatre—and
dramatic theatre as its popular incarnation—to dance and other movement-­
intensive performance forms. As Hans-Thies Lehmann notes, the word
mimeisthai, from which “mimesis” was derived, meant “to represent
through dance.”52 From the perspective outlined in this book, a kines-
thetic account of theatrical spectatorship unifies mimetic and ostensibly
non-mimetic performance in the dynamic world of movement, percep-
tion, and others.
 INTRODUCTION 29

Notes
1. William James, Principles of Psychology, 2: 1134 (emphasis in original).
2. Tiffany Watt Smith surveys nineteenth-century research on involuntary
mimicry in “Theatre and the Sciences of Mind.”
3. Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason, Introduction to Kinesthetic Empathy
in Creative and Cultural Practices, 17–18.
4. Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain—How
Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, ix.
5. For an overview of some of the major scholarship in this area, see Karen
Barbour, “Beyond Somatophobia: Phenomenology and Movement
Research in Dance.”
6. Ann Cooper Albright, “Situated Dancing: Notes from Three Decades in
Contact with Phenomenology,” 8.
7. Mark Franko, “Editor’s Note,” 3.
8. Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of
Theatre, 69.
9. Oxford English Dictionary.
10. Ibid.
11. Philosopher and cognitive scientist David J. Chalmers writes: “It is undeni-
able that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of
how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is
it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory
information-­processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality
of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is
something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emo-
tion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we
have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical
processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreason-
able that it should, and yet it does” (“Facing Up to the Problem of
Consciousness,” 201).
12. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 11.
13. Ibid., 12.
14. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 141.
15. Lennard Davis, Bending over Backward: Disability, Dismodermism, and
Other Difficult Positions, 31.
16. Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, 2.
17. Robert F. Murphy, The Body Silent, 90.
18. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 139.
19. Carrie Sandahl, “Considering Disability: Disability Phenomenology’s Role
in Revolutionizing Theatrical Space,” 19.
30 S. B. GARNER, JR.

20. In his 2012 overview of phenomenological work in theatre and perfor-

mance studies, Stuart Grant calls this recent interest a “renaissance”
(“Genealogies and Methodologies of Phenomenology in Theatre and
Performance Studies,” 11).
21. For an overview of twentieth-century theatre phenomenology, see Stanton
B. Garner Jr., “Theatre and Phenomenology.”
22. I address this dialogue more fully in Stanton B. Garner Jr., “Watching
Movement: Phenomenology, Cognition, Performance.”
23. For a discussion of this, see Dermot Moran, “Husserl’s Transcendental
Philosophy and the Critique of Naturalism.” Husserl, it is important to
note, did not reject the natural attitude; rather, he proposed grounding
this attitude in a phenomenological account of consciousness and world.
24. Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind, 4–6.
25. Shaun Gallagher and Francisco J. Varela point out: “It is nothing short of
ironic that just when many phenomenologists were trading in their vol-
umes of Husserl and Sartre for the texts of poststructural analysis, and thus
abandoning the very notion of consciousness, philosophers of mind, who
had started their work on ground circumscribed by Ryle’s behavouristic
denial of consciousness, were beginning to explore the territory left behind
by the phenomenologists” (“Redrawing the Map and Resetting the Time:
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,” 95).
26. Alva Noë, “Critique of Pure Phenomenology,” 231.
27. See Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 66–98; Francisco J.
Varela, “Neurophenomenology”; and Jean Petitot et al., Naturalizing
Phenomenology: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Neurophe­
nomenology, which was introduced by Varela in the mid-1990s, integrates
phenomenological descriptions of experience, dynamic systems theory, and
experimental brain science. Subjects in neurophenomenological studies are
trained to provide reliable and consistent descriptions of their experience,
and these descriptions are used to identify phenomena for further experi-
mentation and to facilitate the interpretation of neurobiological data. In its
collaborative use of first- and third-person perspectives, neurophenome-
nology represents a more genuine rapprochement between science and
phenomenology than Dennett’s heterophenomenology, which insists on
the priority of neutral, third-person analysis. For a critique of Dennett’s
project see Gallagher and Zahavi, Phenomenological Mind, 19–21.
28. See, for example, the essays in Shaun Gallagher and Daniel Schmicking,
eds. Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. The journal
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, which fosters dialogue between
phenomenology, empirical science, and analytic philosophy of mind, was
established in 2002.
 INTRODUCTION 31

29. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 105–40, 157–60; Marco

Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect
with Others, 16–17.
30. Francisco J. Varela et al., The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Sciences and
Human Experience, 172–73.
31. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; Johnson, The
Body in the Mind; and Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh.
32. For a discussion of the enactive approach, see Francisco J. Varela et al.,
Embodied Mind: Cognitive Sciencers and Human Experience, esp. 147–84;
Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of
Mind, 13–15, 204; and John Stewart et al., eds., Enaction: Toward a New
Paradigm for Cognitive Science.
33. Alva Noë, Action in Perception, 73.
34. Thompson, Mind in Life, 14.
35. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 129–30.
36. Christian Jarrett, “Mirror Neurons: The Most Hyped Concept in
Neuroscience?”
37. Alain Berthoz, The Brain’s Sense of Movement, 7.
38. Daniel M. Wolpert et al., “Perspectives and Problems in Motor Learning,”
487.
39. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement, xix.
40. Noë, Action in Perception, 1.
41. Hart addresses the compatibility between phenomenology and cognitive
sciences in “Performance, Phenomenology, and the Cognitive Turn.”
Lutterbie, who has a background in phenomenology, alludes to this
approach in Toward a General Theory of Acting, which proposes a theory
of acting based on dynamic-systems theory. Zarrilli has incorporated enac-
tive theory with a long-standing interest in phenomenology. See, for exam-
ple, Psychophysical Acting: An Intercultural Approach after Stanislavski,
“An Enactive Approach to Understanding Acting,” and “The Actor’s
Work on Attention, Awareness, and Active Imagination.”
42. In an important article entitled “Phenomenology as a Form of Empathy”
Matthew Ratcliffe argues that the phenomenological stance enables a dis-
tinctive form of empathic engagement with experiences such of those of
psychiatric illness. By suspending, or calling into question, the shared
world that we habitually accept as a basis for understanding another’s expe-
rience, the phenomenological attitude “allows us to contemplate the pos-
sibility of structurally different ways of ‘finding oneself in the world’” such
as psychiatric illness (473). Ratcliffe refers to this apprehension as “radical
empathy.”
43. On the notion of theatrical presencing, see Garner, Bodies Spaces 43, 230.
Cormac Power develops this idea in Presence in Play: A Critique of Theories
of Presence in the Theatre, 176–91.
32 S. B. GARNER, JR.

44. Jean-Louis Barrault, Reflections on the Theatre, 61.

45. Richard Schechner, “Anna Deveare Smith, Acting as Incorporation,” 63.
46. When the performance segments I discuss are available digitally, I provide
information so that those reading this book can access them.
47. Janelle Reinelt, “What UK Spectators Know: Understanding How We
Come to Value Theatre,” 337.
48. See Garner, Bodied Spaces, 12–13.
49. Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to
Spectating in the Theatre, 72.
50. My work on spectatorial mimesis throughout this book owes a debt to
Bruce Wilshire’s phenomenological study Role Playing and Identity: The
Limits of Theatre as Metaphor, which explores the audience’s mimetic
investment in the actor’s performance. As his phrase “mimetic engulf-
ment” indicates, however, Wilshire’s spectatorship is passive rather than
dynamic, involving the “quasi-hypnotic” fusion of self and other (xv). The
spectatorship I describe in the present study, by contrast, is active and
interactive.
51. Aristotle, Aristotle’s Poetics, 7.
52. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 69. Walter Benjamin wrote
of the “mimetic genius” of dance and “other cultic occasions” (“On the
Mimetic Faculty,” 334).

Bibliography
Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Albright, Ann Cooper. 2011. Situated Dancing: Notes from Three Decades in
Contact with Phenomenology. Dance Research Journal 43 (2): 7–18.
Aristotle. 1968. Aristotle’s Poetics: A Translation and Commentary for Students of
Literature. Trans. Leon Golden, commentary by O. B. Hardison, Jr. Englewood
Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Barbour, Karen. 2005. Beyond Somatophobia: Phenomenology and Movement
Research in Dance. Junctures 4: 35–51.
Barrault, Jean-Louis. 1951. Reflections on the Theatre. Trans. Barbara Wall.
London: Salisbury Square.
Benjamin, Walter. 1978. On the Mimetic Faculty. In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott, 333–336. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Berthoz, Alain. 2000. The Brain’s Sense of Movement. Trans. Giselle Weiss.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bleeker, Maaike, Jon Foley Sherman, and Eirini Nedelkopoulou, eds. 2015.
Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations. New York:
Routledge.
 INTRODUCTION 33

Chalmers, David J. 1995. Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. Journal of

Consciousness Studies 2 (3): 200–219.
Davis, Lennard. 1995. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body.
London: Verso.
———. 2002. Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodermism, and Other
Difficult Positions. New York: New York University Press.
Dennett, Daniel C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown.
Foster, Susan Leigh. 2011. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance.
London: Routledge.
Franko, Mark. 2011. Editor’s Note: What Is Dead and What Is Alive in Dance
Phenomenology? Dance Research Journal 43 (2): 1–4.
Gallagher, Shaun, and Daniel Schmicking, eds. 2010. Handbook of Phenomenology
and Cognitive Science. Dordrecht: Springer.
Gallagher, Shaun, and Francisco J. Varela. 2003. Redrawing the Map and Resetting
the Time: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. Canadian Journal of
Philosophy 33 (supplement 1): 93–132.
Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. 2012. The Phenomenological Mind. 2nd ed.
London: Routledge.
Garner, Stanton B., Jr. 2001. Theatre and Phenomenology. Degrés: Revue de syn-
thèse à orientation sémiologiques, 107–108 (Autumn–Winter 2001): B1–B17.
———. forthcoming. Watching Movement: Phenomenology, Cognition,
Performance. In Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance, and Cognitive
Science, ed. Bruce McConachie and Rick Kemp. London/New York: Routledge.
———. 1994. Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary
Drama. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Grant, Stuart. 2012. Genealogies and Methodologies of Phenomenology in
Theatre and Performance Studies. Nordic Theatre Studies 24: 9–20.
Hart, F. Elizabeth. 2006. Performance, Phenomenology, and the Cognitive Turn.
In Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, ed.
Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart, 29–51. London: Routledge.
Home-Cook, George. 2015. Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. David
Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Iacoboni, Marco. 2009. Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We
Connect with Others. New York: Picador.
James, William. 1981. The Principles of Psychology. 1890. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Jarrett, Christian. 2012. Mirror Neurons: The Most Hyped Concept in
Neuroscience? Psychology Today Blog, December 10. https://www.psychology-
today.com/comment/269216. Accessed 30 Jan 2018.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Robinson
Crusoe, Jr
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Robinson Crusoe, Jr

A story for little folks

Author: Oliver Optic

Release date: November 11, 2023 [eBook #72094]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1862

Credits: Aaron Adrignola, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBINSON

CRUSOE, JR ***
Escape of Pussy.
RIVERDALE STORY BOOKS
ROBINSON CRUSOE Jr.
Boston, Lee & Shepard.
 The Riverdale Books.

ROBINSON CRUSOE, JR.

A STORY FOR LITTLE FOLKS.

BY
OLIVER OPTIC,
AUTHOR OF “THE BOAT CLUB,” “ALL ABOARD,” “NOW OR
NEVER,” “TRY
AGAIN,” “POOR AND PROUD,” “LITTLE BY LITTLE,” &c.

BOSTON:
LEE AND SHEPARD,
(SUCCESSORS TO PHILLIPS, SAMPSON & CO.)
1866.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1862, by
WILLIAM T. ADAMS,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.

ELECTROTYPED AT THE
BOSTON STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY.
 ROBINSON CRUSOE, Jr.

I.
Robert Gray was a Riverdale boy, and a very smart one too. Very
likely most of my readers will think he was altogether too smart for
his years, when they have read the story I have to tell about him.
Robert was generally a very good boy, but, like a great many
persons who are older and ought to be wiser than he was, he would
sometimes get very queer notions into his head, which made him act
very strangely.
He was born on the Fourth of July, which may be the reason why he
was so smart, though I do not think it was. He could make boxes and
carts, windmills and water-wheels, and ever so many other things.
Behind his father’s house there was a little brook, flowing into the
river. In this stream Robert had built a dam, and put up a water-
wheel, which kept turning day and night till a freshet came and swept
it into the river.
His father was a carpenter, and Robert spent a great part of his
leisure hours in the shop, inventing or constructing queer machines,
of which no one but himself knew the use; and I am not sure that he
always knew himself.
On his birthday, when Robert was eleven years old, his oldest
brother, who lived in Boston, sent him a copy of Robinson Crusoe as
a birthday present. Almost every child reads this book, and I
suppose there is not another book in the world which children like to
read so well as this.
It is the story of a man who was wrecked on an island, far away from
the main land, and on which no human being lived. The book tells
how Robinson Crusoe lived on the island, what he had to eat, and
how he obtained it; how he built a boat, and could not get it into the
water, and then built another, and did get it into the water; about his
dog and goats, his cat and his parrots, and his Man Friday.
The poor man lived alone for a long time, and most of us would think
he could not have been very happy, away from his country and
friends, with no one to speak to but his cat and goats, and his Man
Friday, and none of them could understand him.
Robert Gray didn’t think so. He read the book through in two or three
days after he received it, and thought Robinson Crusoe must have
had a nice time of it with his cat and his goats, and his Man Friday.
He was even silly enough to wish himself on a lonely island, away
from his father and mother. He thought he should be happy there in
building his house, and roaming over his island in search of food,
and in sailing on the sea, fishing, and hunting for shell fish.
Then he read the book through again, and the more he read the
more he thought Crusoe was a great man, and the more he wished
to be like him, and to live on an island far away from other people.
“Have you read Robinson Crusoe?” said Robert Gray to Frank Lee,
as they were walking home from school one day.
“Yes, three times,” replied Frank; and his eyes sparkled as he
thought of the pleasure which the book had afforded him.
“Well, I’ve read it twice, and I think it is a first-rate book.”
“So do I; and I mean to read it again some time.”
“How should you like to live like Robinson Crusoe, all alone on an
island by yourself?” asked Robert, very gravely.
“Well, I don’t know as I should like it overmuch. I should want some
of Jenny’s doughnuts and apple pies.”
“Pooh! who cares for them?” said Robert, with a sneer.
“I do, for one.”
“Well, I don’t. I would just as lief have oysters and cocoanuts, fish
and grapes, and such things.”
“Without any butter, or sugar, or molasses?”
“I could get along without them.”
“Then there would be great storms, and you would get wet and be
cold.”
“I wouldn’t mind that.”
“Suppose you should be sick—have the measles, the hooping-
cough, or the scarlet fever? Who would take care of you then?”
“I would take care of myself.”
“Perhaps you could; but I think you would wish your mother was on
the island with you in that case,” said Frank, with a laugh.
“I don’t believe I should; at any rate, I should like to try it.”
“It is all very pretty to read about, but I don’t believe I should like to
try it. What would you do, Robert, when the Indians came to the
island?”
“I would do just as Robinson Crusoe did. I would shoot as many of
them as I could. I would catch one of them, and make him be my
Man Friday.”
“Suppose they should happen to shoot you instead; and then broil
you for their supper? Don’t you think you would ‘make a dainty dish
to set before the king’?”
“I am certain that I could get along just as well as Robinson Crusoe
did.”
“Perhaps not; every one don’t get out of a scrape as easily as
Robinson Crusoe did. I know one thing—I shall not go on any
desolate island to live as long as I can help it.”
“I think I should have a first-rate time on one,” said Robert, as he
turned down the street which led to his father’s house.
The next week the long summer vacation began, and Robert read
Robinson Crusoe through again from beginning to end. He spent
almost all his time in thinking about the man alone on the island; and
I dare say he very often dreamed about the goats, the cat, the parrot,
and Man Friday.
He used to lie for hours together under the great elm tree behind the
house fancying what a famous Crusoe he would make; and wishing
he could be cast away upon a lonely island, and there live in a cave,
with a cat and a parrot.
It was certainly very silly of him to spend the greater part of his time
in dreaming about such things, when he ought to have been thankful
for his comfortable and pleasant home, and the company of his
parents, and his brothers and sisters, and for all the good things
which God had given him.
Off for the Island.
 II.
Robert Gray wanted to be a Robinson Crusoe, and he actually
went so far as to form a plan by which he could live on an island,
sleep in a cave, and have no companions but a dog and an old cat.
Of course he did not tell any body about this famous plan, for fear his
friends might find it out, and prevent him from becoming a Crusoe.
But he went to work, and got every thing ready as fast as he could.
He was a smart boy, as I have said before, and his plan was very
well laid for a child.
He meant to be Robinson Crusoe, Jr., but he was not quite willing to
go upon the island without any tools to work with, or any thing to eat,
after he arrived. I think, if he could, he would have made sure of
most of the comforts of life.
Mr. Gray’s shop was only a short distance from the river. The little
brook in which Robert placed his water-wheel, widened into a pretty
large stream near the shop. Here Mr. Crusoe, Jr., intended to build a
raft, which should bear him to the lonely island.
Near the middle of the great pond, which my young friends will find
described in The Young Voyagers, there was a small island, which
Robert had chosen for his future home, and where he was to be
“monarch of all he surveyed.”
After Frank Lee’s unfortunate cruise down the river, Robert had
some doubts about being able to reach the island. But these did not
prevent him from trying to carry out his plan. He might, perhaps, get
wrecked, as Joe Birch had been; but if he did, it would be so much
the more like Robinson Crusoe,—only a rock, with the water knee
deep upon it, was not a very good place to be “monarch of all he
surveyed.”
Robert’s father and mother had gone to visit his uncle in the State of
New York, and were to be absent two weeks. This seemed like a
good time for his great enterprise, as his oldest sister was the only
person at home besides himself, and she was too busy to watch him
very closely.
He worked away on his raft for two days before he finished it, for he
did not mean to go to sea, as he called it to himself, in such a
shabby craft as that in which Joe had been wrecked. He had tools
from the shop, a hammer, and plenty of nails, and he made the raft
very strong and safe.
It was raised above the water, so that the top was dry when he stood
upon it; and to make it more secure, he put a little fence all round it,
to prevent him from slipping off if the craft should strike upon a rock.
Then he made two oars with which he could move and steer the raft.
He also nailed a box upon the platform, upon which he could sit.
When this queer ark was done, he pushed it out into the stream, and
made a trial trip as far as the river, and rowed it back to the place
from which he started.
From the barn he took two horse-blankets, for his bed on the island,
and placed them on the raft. He got a tin cup and a kettle from the
house, as well as several other things which he thought he might
need. A small hatchet and some nails from the shop completed his
outfit. All these articles were secured on the raft, just before dark,
and the next morning he intended to start for the island.
Robert was so tired after the hard work he had done upon the raft,
that he slept like a rock all night, and did not wake up till his sister
called him to breakfast. He had intended to start very early in the
morning, but this part of his plan had failed.
After breakfast, he took twenty cents which he had saved towards
buying a book called The Swiss Family Robinson, which Frank Lee
told him was something like Robinson Crusoe, and went to the
grocery store to buy some provisions.
He bought a sheet of gingerbread, some crackers, and a piece of
cheese, and ran across the fields with them to the brook. He was
very careful to keep away from the house, so that his sister should
not see him. Having placed these things in the box on the raft, so
that they would be safe, he went back to the house once more.
“Puss, puss, puss,” said he; and presently the old black cat came
purring and mewing up to him, and rubbing her head against his
legs.
Poor pussy had not the least idea that she was destined to be the
companion of a Robinson Crusoe; so she let him take her up in his
arms. If she had only known what a scrape she was about to get
into, I am sure she would not have let Mr. Crusoe, Jr., put one of his
fingers upon her.
“Trip, Trip, Trip,—come here, Trip,” said he to the spaniel dog that
was sleeping on the door mat.
Trip had no more idea than pussy of the famous plan in which he
was to play a part; so he waked up and followed his young master. I
don’t believe Trip had any taste for Crusoe life; and he would have
liked to know where his beef and bones were to come from, for he
was not very fond of gingerbread and crackers.
If pussy didn’t “smell a rat” when they reached the raft, it was
because there was no rat for her to smell; but she showed a very
proper spirit, and, by her scratching and snarling, showed that she
did not like the idea of sailing down the river on a raft.
Robert did not heed her objections; and what do you think he did
with poor pussy? Why, he put her in the box with the crackers and
gingerbread and cheese! Trip, having a decided taste for the water,
did not object to going upon the raft. Yet, judging from the way he
looked up into his master’s face, he wondered what was “in the
wind,” and what big thing was going to be done.
“Now, Trip, we are all ready for a start,” said Robert, as he stepped
upon the raft. “You needn’t scratch and cry so, pussy. Nobody is
going to hurt you.”
Trip looked up in his face and wagged his tail, and pussy scratched
and howled, and refused to be comforted. But Trip had the
advantage of pussy very much in one respect, for, when he became
sick of the adventure, he could jump into the water and swim ashore.
Robert, however, gave little thought or heed at this moment to the
wishes or comfort of his two companions, for his mind was wholly
taken up with the preparations for the grand departure.
All was now ready; Robert pushed off the raft, and it floated slowly
down the stream.
The Water-Wheel.
 III.
The river was broad and deep, but Robert was not afraid. He had
been on the water a great deal for a little boy, and he was sure that
his raft was strong enough to bear a pretty hard knock upon the
rocks.
Poor pussy kept up a constant crying, in the box, and once in a while
she scratched, with all her might, against the sides; but she could not
get out.
Trip behaved himself much better, but he gazed up in his young
master’s face all the time, and did not know what to make of this very
singular voyage.
Robert was much pleased with his success thus far, and was
satisfied that he should make a very good Robinson Crusoe, Jr. The
raft worked quite well, and with the great oar at the stern, he could
steer it as easily as though it had been a real boat.
He had not yet reached the dangerous part of the river, which was
called the Rapids. This was the place where Joe Birch had been
wrecked. He had some doubts about being able to pass with safety
between the rocks, which here rose above the surface of the water.
But he was a bold, brave boy, and he was almost sure that, if any
thing happened, he could swim ashore.
As he thought of the raft being dashed to pieces against a rock, he
wondered what would become of poor pussy.
He did not want to drown her; so he decided to give her a fair chance
to save her life in case of any accident. He opened the box, and
pussy was glad enough to get out.
As she jumped from the box, Robert saw that she had made a sad
mess of the provisions he had obtained for use on the island. She
had scratched open the papers, and the gingerbread was broken