Seminar by Fabrizio Deriu (Teramo University)
31 gennaio 2024, ore 14:30, Aula A, Ex Vetrerie Sciarra
At the dawn of 21 Century, digital technologies – alongside with the spread of a globalized
corporate empire – have brought about radical changes not only in the material aspects of
communications but also at an epistemic level, affecting the very ways in which human knowledge
is produced, expressed, distributed, shared, archived and transmitted. Within this post-modern age
– or post-human, as many scholars put it – theater and the performing arts – as artistic practices
as well as academic disciplines – will probably play a crucial role, even though in uncommon ways
as compared to how they have been understood and employed in the modern era. This role is
connected to what I call the performatic dimension.
A pathway to explain this term can be usefully found in the neuroscientist Merlin Donald’s theory of the evolution of the human mind. The essential feature is the assumption that human cognitive evolution moved from the “episodic” life of apes to a “mimetic” culture; and that this stage flourished and lasted for hundreds of years before language and conceptual thinking (“mythic” and “theoretic” cultures) evolved. According to Donald mimesis – the power to represent emotions, external events, and stories usign only gestures, posture, movement and sound, but not language – is still the bedrock of human culture today: «modern minds are thus hybridizations, highly plastic combinations of all the previous elements in human cognitive evolution […]. Now we are mythic, now we are theoretic, and now we harken back to the [primitive] roots of experience» (Donald 1991). Theater and performing arts constitute the most important Spielraum (or “play space”) for these “leaps” in our cognitive past.
Donald’s theory also perfectly fits with the new points of contact between theatre and anthropology discussed by Richard Schechner in a recent essay (2015) which update his original thinking as presented in a 1982 essay: 1. Embodiment; 2. The Sources of Human Culture are Performative; 3. The Brain as a Performance Site.