This book explores how phenomenology - the study of how the world shows itself to conscious experience - can provide new insights into acting and theatre-making. It explores Being-in-the-world in everyday life with practical exercises for rehearsal and performance. 7 b/w illus.

What it means to 'be' goes to the heart of drama. But in order to engage with theatre's Being-in-the-world, we need to attend to the meaning of being both in everyday life and in the creative process. This book provides a clear and accessible introduction to key concepts of phenomenology in relation to theatre, showing how they shed light on the works of influential theatre-makers such as Brecht, Artaud, and Stanislavski. By placing these concepts in dialogue with theatre-makers, Johnston is able to demonstrate how philosophical ideas can be put to work in a theatrical context and how we can approach difficult theory from a practical perspective.

This book is about the centrality of movement, movement perception, and kinesthetic experience to theatrical spectatorship. Drawing upon phenomenological accounts of movement experience and the insights of cognitive science, neuroscience, acting theory, dance theory, philosophy of mind, and linguistics, it considers how we inhabit the movements of others and how these movements inhabit us. Individual chapters explore the dynamics of movement and animation, action and intentionality, kinesthetic resonance (or mirroring), language, speech, and empathy. In one of its most important contributions to the study of theatre, performance, and spectatorship, this book foregrounds otherness, divergence, and disability in its account of movement perception. The discussions of this and other issues are accompanied by detailed analysis of theatre, puppetry, and dance performances.

This core textbook provides a clear and accessible introduction to the key concepts of phenomenology in relation to theatre, showing how they shed light on the works of influential theatre-makers such as Brecht, Artaud, and Stanislavski. By placing these concepts in dialogue with theatre-makers, Johnston is able to demonstrate how philosophical ideas can be put to work in a theatrical context and how we can approach difficult theory from a practical perspective. Each chapter features exercises and topics for discussion to encourage readers to explore the ideas presented in more depth. This is an excellent resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of theatre, performance studies, and philosophy.

This is a book about the theater phenomenon. It is an extension of notes on the theater and theatergoing that have been accumulating for some time. It does not have an argument, or set out to prove a thesis, and it will not be one of those useful books one reads for the fruits of its research. Rather, it is a form of critical description that is phenomenological in the sense that it focuses on the activity of theater making itself out of its essential materials: speech, sound, movement, scenery, text, etc. Like most phenomenological description, it will succeed to the extent that it awakens the reader's memory of his own perceptual encounters with theater. If the book fails in this it will be about as interesting to read as an anthology of someone else's dreams. In any case, this book is less concerned with the scientific purity of my perspective and method than with retrieving something from the theater experience that seems to me worthy of our critical admiration.

This book offers a timely discussion about the interventions and tensions between two contested and contentious fields, performance and phenomenology, with international case studies that map an emerging twenty-first century terrain of critical and performance practice. Building on the foundational texts of both fields that established the performativity of perception and cognition, Performance and Phenomenology continues a tradition that considers experience to be the foundation of being and meaning. Acknowledging the history and critical polemics against phenomenological methodology and against performance as a field of study and category of artistic production, the volume provides both an introduction to core thinkers and an expansion on their ideas in a wide range of case studies. Whether addressing the use of dead animals in performance, actor training, the legal implications of thinking phenomenologically about how we walk, or the intertwining of digital and analog perception, each chapter explores a world comprised of embodied action and thought. The established and emerging scholars contributing to the volume develop insights central to the phenomenological tradition while expanding on the work of contemporary theorists and performers. In asking why performance and phenomenology belong in conversation together, the book suggests how they can transform each other in the process and what is at stake in this transformation.

This collection of essays addresses emergent trends in the meeting of the disciplines of phenomenology and performance. It brings together major scholars in the field, dealing with phenomenological approaches to dance, theatre, performance, embodiment, audience, and everyday performance of self. It argues that despite the wide variety of philosophical, ontological, epistemological, historical and methodological differences across the field of phenomenology, certain tendencies and impulses are required for an investigation to stand as truly phenomenological. These include: description of experience; a move towards fundamental conditions or underlying essences; and an examination of taken-for-granted presuppositions. The book is aimed at scholars and practitioners of performance looking to deepen their understanding of phenomenological concepts and methods, and philosophers concerned with issues of embodiment, performativity and enaction.