SEE SITI's Extended Ensemble

Human action is the basic grammar and trope of the theater. Driven by the tensile force of forward momentum, action delivers the message; action is the message. Action activates the audience via synaptic stimulus and applied imagination, delivers the ideas physically and connects audience and actors across the footlights via the shared jumpy, stimulated nervous systems in the room.

The American philosopher Paul Woodruff proposed the best definition of theater that I have ever encountered in his excellent book The Necessity of Theater :  “Theater is the art wherein human beings make human action worth watching.” 

During the past decade, the remarkable discoveries of neuroscientists in the area of mirror neurons have thrown a gauntlet down to those of us in the theater to think seriously about the effect of an actor’s action upon the nervous system of each audience member.

A group of Italian neuroscientists noticed that identical nerve cells discharged both when a monkey performs a specific action and when it observes another monkey performing that action. The researchers dubbed these newly discovered neurons mirror neurons because of the way they apparently mirrored an observed action in the monkey’s brain.  A monkey grabs a peanut and the monkey watching activates the same synaptic pathways.  But actually, both monkeys are doing . One monkey is visibly making an action; the other monkey is restraining from making the exact same action.

It turns out that humans have mirror neurons too.   The observation of a goal-oriented action triggers the identical synaptic activity in the observer as in the person who is generating the action.  The act of watching is not psychological interpretation or conjecture; rather the act of watching is physical and energetic.  Attentive watching charges our bodies with electric currents.  The mirror neuron activity creates a simulation of the activity being observed in the observer’s brain and in this way the observer seems to gain a deeper understanding of a particular movement through actual physical simulation and stimulation. One of the leading neuroscientists in the study, Giacomo Rizzolatti, observed:

If we want to survive, we must understand the actions of others. Furthermore, without action understanding, social organization is impossible. In the case of humans, there is another faculty that depends on the observation of others’ actions: imitation learning. Unlike most species, we are able to learn by imitation, and this faculty is at the basis of human culture.

Mirror neurons are the cells that relate to empathy. Via action, mirror neurons create a meaningful link between the self and the other by dissolving the boundary between the two.  When mirror neurons are activated, people feel empathy. And empathy is the baseline of the theater experience and the unspoken contract between actor and audience. When Hedda Gabler lifts her pistol, I feel myself inside of her. 

Recently the research got even more interesting.  In 2004 a team of British neuroscientists conducted an experiment with two separate groups: dancers from London’s Royal Ballet and experts in capoeira, a Brazilian martial arts form known for its physical rigor and acrobatic feats.  Both groups watched videos of ballet or capoeira while hooked up to MRI scanners.  It turns out that the mirror neuron system showed far more activity in individuals watching the discipline in which he or she was trained. The mirror neurons for capoeira experts watching capoeira were more activated than when watching ballet.  The mirror neurons of the ballet dancers fired more when they watched ballet than when they watched capoeira.  This demonstrates how a familiarity with the observed action stimulates more empathetic response than the less familiar action.

And this has everything to do with the theater. For your mirror neurons to fire, you have to know something about the action you are observing. Theater is the art form that most resembles daily life.  Actors walk, sit, speak, pick up a teacup, throw a book, kiss another person, shake hands or jump over a puddle. An audience member’s own motor control cortex is more excited when seeing other people doing moves that they can do than what they cannot do. Unlike watching virtuosic dance or looking at an abstract expressionist painting, the mirror neurons of a theater audience respond wildly to the action found in a play because of its familiarity. And all of this happens in the unmediated live space between actors and audience in a theater.

Seeing is a process of projecting what you expect out into the world and constantly matching your experience, your prejudice and your expectations, with what is out there.  Matching observation with action is an active process.  The system of mirror neurons embodies this principle.  Celebrated neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes mirror neurons as “puppet masters, pulling the strings of various memories.”

In the theater when fully engaged, the audience is not passively watching what is happening, rather is active, neurons firing. There is a group of people doing (manifesting action) and a group of people watching (restraining from that same action).  The audience is learning the action but ultimately is also restraining from actually doing the observed action.  But this restraint is also a kind of action.  The practice of restraint is what can ultimately prevent violence in the world.

The activation of the mirror circuits on both sides of the footlights provides the observer with a real experiential comprehension of the observed action. Physiologically the observed action is literally being mapped onto the motor system of the observer. The audience’s capability for empathy, imitation, action understanding and intention understanding are all linked to this action-in-restraint. The mirror neuron system is helping us to translate what we see so that we can relate to the world.  All of this is via focused action in the body of the actor transmitted to the neuronal system of the audience.

Scientists have found that the mirror areas, in addition to action understanding, also mediate the discernment of others’ intentions. In our daily lives, we are constantly exposed to the actions of others.  We are not only able to describe these actions, understand what they mean and predict their consequences, but we can also attribute intentions to the doer.  In the theater we exercise these skills within the combined fiction of the play and the reality of the actors’ actions.  We see Hedda Gabler pick up a pistol.  We recognize that she is picking up a pistol and we can infer why she is doing so.  Is she is going to put it away safely, is she just toying with it, or she is going to shoot herself? 

If action is the central trope of the theater and it delivers the experience, it follows that our task in the theater is to make sure that the actions executed onstage are clear, precise and focused.  Clear, focused action is more powerful and effective than fuzzy, imprecise action. The audience is a musical instrument being played upon by the actors.  Clear actions are literally more invigorating to the nervous system of the audience than inexactitude, which saps the audience’s energy.