Presentation

Abstract

When I approached professor Gilberto Icle with the proposal to dedicate a thematic section on Theatre and Neuroscience in the Brazilian Journal on Presence Studies, he asked me not to contact scholars who had already been published by the journal. On the one hand, such a request prevented me from contacting some scholars who have always worked on such a theme, but, on the other hand, this allowed me to dedicate good part of the thematic section to a new generation of researchers who, in the last years, have sought to connect theatre studies with cognitive neuroscience. As it is known, the interest of theatre cultures towards brain science is nothing new. What is new, however, is the way in which neuroscience has begun to study the human being as a deeply relational, necessarily intersubjective system. The advent of new fields of interdisciplinary investigation, such as, for instance, the so-called social neurosciences, highlights the need to overcome experimental paradigms which isolate the subject from the environment in favour of a study of cognitive mechanisms in situations of interaction with other individuals. In such a panorama, theatre cultures have not only found certain neuroscientific approaches to be more appropriate to the study of the actor-spectator relationship, but they have also shown how theatre can be a special space for the study of the relational potentials of the human being. In selecting contributions for this section, we have, therefore, chosen to especially represent this new phase of interdisciplinary investigations between performing arts and neuroscience. Enrico Pitozzi's article opens the section with a reflection on how new technologies influence the perceptive processes of performers and spectators. Analysing the creative practices of some contemporary choreographers, Pitozzi shows us how certain devices enable the performer to have a different perception of the self and of the spectator, thus multiplying the creative potentials of such perceptions. Pitozzi's article is followed by an essay in the form of a letter written by the performer and researcher Victor Jacono. Ambitious in its scope, the letter starts from the basic idea that both cognitive scientists and theatre researchers explore the potential of the human being's cognitive functions in their investigations. Even so, an adequate circulation of learning between the two fields is as yet lacking. The letter highlights the issues which render such a circulation