Researcher Teemu Paavolainen’s Academy Project “Textures of Thought: Dramaturgy, Performance, and Cognitive Ecology” was set in motion at the Centre for Practice as research in Theatre at the beginning of September. The project will last until 2015.
Investigating the “cognitive turn” in theatre and performance studies, the key objective of this project is to engage the very interface of performance and cognition, as varieties of “meaning-making”: dramaturgy, theatricality, and performativity, interwoven with emergent notions of mind as embodied, embedded, enactive, or extended.
A key hypothesis is that both discourses abound in metaphors of “containment” (cutting apart insides and outsides, content and form, reality and representation) and have much to gain, in theory and practice, from an articulated shift to those of “contexture” – interweaving strands of action and environment into fleeting textures of thought. Thus, three interweaving strands of research will address (1) dramaturgy as the organization of textures;
(2) theatricality and performativity as tactics thereof, interweaving action and perception; and
(3)the varying modalities of “cognitive ecology” these enable, according to context and the specific unit of analysis.
Teemu Paavolainen
teemu.paavolainen@uta.fi