Theatre/Ecology/Cognition: Theorizing Performer-Object Interaction in Grotowski, Kantor, and Meyerhold (Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance)

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.