Collaborative Embodied Performance: Ecologies of Skill

This book brings together scholarship in performance studies, cognitive science, sociology, literature, anthropology, psychology, architecture, philosophy and sport science to ask how tightly knit collaboration works. Innovative methodological approaches are applied to detailed case studies from martial arts, tango, social interaction, Body Weather, human-AI music composition, Front-of-House at the Globe Theatre, and failing at handstands. Each investigation exposes performance and theory as mutually revealing, informative and captivating.

Short chapters fall into thematic clusters exploring embodied collaboration, cognition, and coordination, followed by commentaries from leading scholars in performance studies and cognitive science. Each brings to light different facets of the performance ecology present in the collaborative moment(s), equipping performance makers, students and researchers with theoretical, methodological and practical inspiration to delve deeper into their own embodied practices and critical thinking.

Kath Bicknell is a postdoctoral researcher in cognitive science at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. She has taught in performance studies at the University of Sydney, Australia, and performance practices at Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), and is internationally recognized for her sports journalism.

John Sutton is a philosopher working in cognitive science. He is Director of Macquarie University’s Centre for Elite Performance, Expertise, and Training, and a member of the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts. He is author of Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism, and coeditor of Descartes’ Natural Philosophy; Embodied Cognition in Shakespeare’s Theatre; and Collaborative Remembering: Theories, Research, Applications.