Performance/Art: The Venetian Lectures

by Shaun Gallagher

Performance/Art explores the phenomenology of skilled performance, ranging from athletics to the performing arts, including music, dance and acting. Gallagher reviews a variety of studies concerning different degrees of mindful awareness operative in performance, and builds on the concept of a meshed architecture, suggesting ways to make it more complex and dynamic. He draws on ideas from enactivist embodied cognition about how different types of movement can be meaningful and intelligent and can scaffold learning and problem solving. He also explicates the notion of an empathic mindfulness in performance and develops the idea of a double attunement to explain aesthetic experience in performance, distinguishing the latter from aesthetic experience in the observer/audience perspective.

162 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2021

About the author

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Reviews

[Sarah Lugthart · Rating 4 out of 5]

My latest theoretical crush! I love how a lot of different elements and theories from f.i. Dewey come together in this enactive/embodied perspective on performance. I'm curious what Gallagher would think of interactive forms of performance art, like immersive theatre or extended reality performance, where the audience also becomes a performer.