Theatre/Ecology/Cognition—Theorizing Performer-Object Interaction in Grotowski, Kantor, and Meyerhold

Theatrical meanings are enacted in onstage 'ecologies' of actors and objects irrespective of spoken language. Applying the concepts of affordances and image schemas to extensive analyses of Vsevolod Meyerhold's The Magnanimous Cuckold (1922), Jerzy Grotowski's Akropolis (1962–69), and Tadeusz Kantor's Let the Artists Die! (1985), Paavolainen also traces intriguing continuities from their cultural contexts, through the directors' philosophies, to international reviews and scholarship. Artificial divisions of mind over matter and subjects over objects are rejected for the ecological grounding of all cognition: understood as fundamentally embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive, mind also is ultimately performed in the world.

Teemu Paavolainen is an Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Researcher in the School of Media, Communication, and Theatre at the University of Tampere. Author of many articles in Finnish, he recently had an article appear in Theatre Symposium. His current work further engages the cognitive ecologies of dramaturgy, theatricality, and performativity.