To You <-> To Me: Generating Non-Egocentric Habits of Embodied, Embedded, Enactive and Extended Spectating

My practice-research tests how participatory theatre processes can be informed by 4E cognition in order to generate new approaches and habits of embodied and ecological audiencing and spectating. In the project ‘To You, To You, To You: Love Letters to a (Post)Europe’ (2018) (https://www.toyoutoyoutoyou.com/ ), curator-researcher Lisa Alexander invited artists to gather and to respond with the action, idea or form of a love letter. My action-response: ‘To You <-> To Me’ used cord, fabric, and trust, inviting the audience to perform an unconditional act of love towards me, the performer on stage. I acknowledged my need to be lifted and supported as a European citizen living in the UK during this precarious historical moment. I will repeat this performance-action at the conference in June. I will use a handmade bizarre object, inefficient aesthetics and audience participation to create a collaborative performance-action using my method of the ‘scenographic contraption’ (Penna, 2013). The revealing nature of the contraption does not attempt to hide or disguise its malfunctions, its precarious nature and exposes in turn the artist-scenographer-inventor who made it; this exposure is an invitation to the audience to contribute critically, to judge, observe, participate, collaborate, conspire, make their own stories, and allow themselves to be exposed. My invitation stresses the political importance of a non-egocentric responsiveness to this precarious historical moment following Varela et al.’s enactivist call of ‘acknowledging the other with whom we dependently cooriginate’ (Varela et al. 1991: 254).