Modern embodied approaches to cognitive science overlap with ideas long explored in theater. Performance coaches such as Michael Chekhov have emphasized proprioceptive awareness of movement as a path to attaining psychological states relevant for embodying characters and inhabiting fictional spaces. Yet, the psychology of performance remains scientifically understudied. Experiments, presented in this paper, investigated the effects of three sets of exercises adapted from Chekhov’s influential techniques for actors’ training. Following a continuous physical demonstration and verbal prompts by the actress Bonnie Eckard, 29 participants enacted neutral, expanding, and contracting gestures and attitudes in space. After each set of exercises, the participants’ affect (pleasantness and arousal) and self-perceptions of height were measured. Within the limitations of the study, we measured a significant impact of the exercises on affect: pleasantness increased by 50% after 15 min of expanding exercises and arousal increased by 15% after 15 min of contracting exercises, each relative to the other exercise. Although the exercises produced statistically non-significant changes in the perceived height, there was a significant relation between perceived height and affect, in which perceived height increased with increases in either pleasantness, or arousal. These findings provide a preliminary support for Chekhov’s intuition that expanding and contracting physical actions exert opposite effects on the practitioners’ psychological experience. Further studies are needed to consider a wider range of factors at work in Chekhov’s method and the embodied experience of acting in general.
Chapter 1 analyzes Viktor Shklovskii’s reflections on Futurist poets, who presented their experiments as an inquiry into the biodynamics of verbal expressivity. Shklovskii suggested that Aleksei Kruchenykh’s trans-rational poetry (zaum’) uncovered deeply ingrained motor programs, which shape the verbalization of various ideas and states of consciousness. Shklovskii contended that identifying these motor programs, or “sound gestures,” and putting them to play was the Futurists’ method of palpating the “inner form” of words in the Russian language. In contextualizing Shklovskii’s conception, the chapter maps the spread of psychophysiological terms in Russian literary theory and linguistic scholarship in the 1910s, with a particular emphasis on the echoes of William James’s theory of the corporeal experience of emotion and Wilhelm Wundt’s ideas on the gestural origin of language.
In the 1920s Soviet avant-garde film was developing alongside modern dance, and the two arts often drew on each other’s stylistic and conceptual achievements. This chapter considers approaches to the cinematic mediation of dance and expressive movement, as they were articulated by the Choreological Laboratory of the Russian State Academy of Artistic Sciences (RAKhN) and two pioneers of montage, Lev Kuleshov and Dziga Vertov. In a historicization of the techniques and instruments used for staging and representing movement, Moscow’s Central Institute of Labor (CIT) promoted chronophotographic studies of labor efficiency and biomechanics. It then disseminated its methods in avant-garde circles; thus studies of movement inherited from science formed a conceptual amalgam with modern choreographic and theater discourses. Meanwhile, Russian thinkers theorized the capabilities of cinema to convey the character and duration of movement, and how film viewing differed from real-time observation in the theater, further enriching the future of dance’s potential on the screen.
Chapter 5 considers psychophysiological efforts to assess the emotional responses of filmgoers by photographing their facial reactions and registering changes in their vital signs. These studies were done in the USSR for the purpose of raising the effectiveness of film propaganda among proletarian, rural, and juvenile audiences, and in the United States, for identifying crowd-pleasing narrative formulae. The chapter juxtaposes spectator tests conducted by the inventor of the polygraph lie detector, William Moulton Marston, for Universal Studios in Hollywood with analogous initiatives launched by various agencies under the jurisdiction of the Narkompros (a Soviet ministry for education and propaganda). I further trace the roots of these empirical methods to late 19th-century trends in physiological psychology, when chronophotography served alongside the kymograph for obtaining indexical records of corporeal processes that were thought to reflect the workings of the psyche. Offering a critical reading of this legacy, the chapter shows how these spectator studies replicated the universalist fallacies of biologically oriented psychology, in addition to strengthening a patronizing attitude toward the subjects of research: women, children, and illiterate peasants.
Chapter 4 explores Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of the audience’s corporeal empathy, evoked by actors’ movements and graphical, nonhuman “gestures”—that is, “movements” implied by the structure of the shot composition, editing, and other formal devices. In scrutinizing Eisenstein’s theory that spectatorship is, fundamentally, an enactive experience, this chapter traces the roots of his ideas and evaluates the aesthetic and political implications of his position. First, I analyze the filmmaker’s engagement with psychological theories of William James, William Carpenter, Vladimir Bekhterev, Alexander Luria, and Lev Vygotsky, as well as the 19th-century German theorists of empathy (Einfühlung). Special attention is devoted to one of Eisenstein’s major sources: Vladimir Bekhterev’s Collective Reflexology (1921), a seminal work of early Soviet psychology, which discussed nonverbal communication in crowds and argued that the processing of visual sensations by the brain instantaneously impacts motor networks. I argue that although Eisenstein’s model of spectatorship appears manipulative, it is also potentially emancipatory. Embracing the utopian spirit of the avant-garde, he was willing to subject himself and his audience to radical experimentation aimed at testing the sensory properties of cinema and demystifying the mass production of emotions.
In the late 19th century, neurophysiology introduced techniques for detecting somatic signs of psychological processes. Scientific modes of recording, representing, and interpreting body movement as “expressive” soon found use in multiple cultural domains. Based on archival materials, this study charts the avenues by which physiological psychology reached the arts and evaluates institutional practices and political trends that promoted interdisciplinary engagements in the first quarter of the 20th century. In mapping the emergence of a paradigm it calls “psychomotor aesthetics,” this book uncovers little-known sources of Russian Futurism, Formalist poetics, avant-garde film theories of Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein, and early Soviet programs for evaluating filmgoers’ reactions. Drawing attention to the intellectual exchange between Russian authors and their European and American counterparts, the book documents diverse cultural applications of laboratory methods for studying the psyche. Both a history and a critical project, the book attends to the ways in which artists and theorists dealt with the universalist fallacies inherited from biologically oriented psychology—at times, endorsing the positivist, deterministic outlook, and at times, resisting, reinterpreting, and defamiliarizing these scientific notions. In exposing the vastness of cross-disciplinary exchange at the juncture of neurophysiology and the arts at the turn of the 20th century, Psychomotor Aesthetics calls attention to the tremendous cultural resonance of theories foregrounding the somatic substrate of emotional and cognitive experience—theories, which anticipate the promises and limitations of today’s neuroaesthetics and neuromarketing.
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