Steps towards the art of placing science in the acting practice. A performance-neuroscience perspective

This chapter describes the ‘Performer’s cognition’ workshop, a collaborative endeavour, thought and participated by artists, neuroscientists, and performing arts scholars. The main goal of the workshop was to stimulate actors’ reflection on their practice by means of linking a number of exercises to current understandings and methodologies of cognitive neuroscience. Here, we aim at presenting this novel way in which cognitive neuroscience can inspire reflections on the training of the performer, starting from the experience of the workshop in relation to one of the exercises practiced, the ’8 steps exercise’. We propose that the desired effects of continuous training may be achieved more efficiently when the underlying cognitive and neuronal processes have been explored. Also, we suggest that the relevance of continuous training will be more widely acknowledged through scientific explorations. This is of huge relevance, since actor training and in particular actors’ motivational forces (or the lack thereof) to engage in training particularly as a form of continuous professional development, is still poorly understood. The closer look at actors’ practice as discussed during the workshop and further examined here, will inevitably also impact on empirical research in the field of the actors’ profession.