Empathy as Dialogue in Theatre and Performance

Lindsay B. Cummings

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137593269
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Darstellende Kunst

Empathy has provoked equal measures of excitement and controversy in recent years. For some, empathy is crucial to understanding others, helping us bridge social and cultural differences. For others, empathy is nothing but a misguided assumption of access to the minds of others. In this book, Cummings argues that empathy comes in many forms, some helpful to understanding others and some detrimental. Tracing empathy's genealogy through aesthetic theory, philosophy, psychology, and performance theory, Cummings illustrates how theatre artists and scholars have often overlooked the dynamic potential of empathy by focusing on its more "monologic" forms, in which spectators either project their point of view onto characters or passively identify with them. This book therefore explores how empathy is most effective when it functions as a dialogue, along with how theatre and performance can utilise the live, emergent exchange between bodies in space to encourage more dynamic, dialogic encounters between performers and audience.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Lindsay B. CummingsEmpathy as Dialogue in Theatre and Performance10.1057/978-1-137-59326-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Lindsay B. Cummings¹

(1)

University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA

End Abstract

During the intermission of a 2009 performance of Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York City, I overheard an usher ask a man sitting in the row in front of me what he thought of the character of the king. My fellow audience member replied that he did not admire the king. In Ionesco’s play, King Berenger refuses to accept his mortality, even as his mind, body, and kingdom crumble around him. The usher responded, “But do you empathize with him?” His tone implied that this was the truly important question, the ultimate litmus test for theatrical engagement. The man answered, “Yes, I do. I have a daughter.” Since he did not further explain his reasoning, I assume that he meant he would not want to leave her on her own, and thus he could understand the king’s strong desire to continue his life.

But the king in Ionesco’s play does not wish to live for the sake of others. In fact, Berenger’s desire to live is so strong that he would choose life even if it meant that everyone else in the world died. He wants to live because he fears letting go, giving up power, losing himself. The man in the audience was engaging in empathy by analogy: I have a reason to want to live, therefore I can empathize with the character’s reason to want to live, even if it is different from my own. Did this answer satisfy the usher’s question? What are we actually doing when we empathize in the theatre? Are we, as is often suggested, “putting ourselves in another’s shoes”? Are we “feeling with” another, sharing his or her emotions? Identifying? And what does this empathy achieve, if anything? These are the questions that this book explores.

Whether in the theatre or outside of it, empathy is the source of much disagreement. In the collection Empathy and its Development (1987), addressing psychological perspectives on the term, editors Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer call empathy “a broad, somewhat slippery concept—one that has provoked considerable speculation, excitement, and confusion.”¹ This description refers to the way in which “empathy” and the German word it was coined to translate, Einfühlung, moved rapidly across fields and disciplines, inspiring new and often contradictory meanings as they went. Following German aesthetic theorist Robert Vischer’s use of the term in an 1873 essay, Einfühlung was quickly adopted—and adapted—by phenomenological philosophers and psychologists.² With each new discipline and theorist to take up the word, empathy acquired new dimensions and meanings, so much so that as early as 1935, psychoanalyst Theodor Reik asserted that empathy had come to mean so much that it was beginning to mean nothing.³

Nevertheless, as the usher’s question implies, empathy does not mean nothing—either in our society or in theatrical spectatorship. Whatever we mean by empathy, whether we experience it or not is a question given much import. Discussions of empathy can be found everywhere these days, from politics to popular culture. Barack Obama used it frequently throughout his first presidential campaign and first term in office, arguing that the United States suffered an “empathy deficit.” He later ignited a national debate about the role of the judiciary by declaring empathy as one of his criteria for appointing judges.⁴ Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, a collection of essays ruminating on the nature of empathy, was one of the most widely celebrated non-fiction books of 2014. Empathy is now deemed essential to healthy interpersonal relationships and psychological functioning, as evidenced by the updated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V, in which “empathy” appears far more frequently than in the previous edition. The DSM-5 lists a lack of empathy or empathic “impairment” as one of the diagnostic criteria for a range of disorders, including antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and even obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.⁵ Scholarly interest in empathy has become increasingly prominent since the Holocaust, an event that by purportedly confounding understanding similarly confounds empathy—the method by which we comprehend others’ actions, feelings, and reasons.

In the current age of continuous global conflict, empathy seems to offer a ray of hope, leading some to claim that it is our empathetic capacities that make us human and upon which all social life and organization depend. David Howe, social work scholar and author of Empathy: What it is and Why it Matters (2013), writes, “Success in the social world depends on our ability to recognise and understand, interpret and anticipate the mental states and behaviour of others.”⁶ Consequently, “Evolution rewards the empathic.”⁷ In The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (2011), developmental psychologist Simon Baron Cohen similarly cites “empathy erosion” as the source of many social ills and lauds empathy as “the most valuable resource in our world.”⁸

Recent discoveries in cognitive neuroscience, meanwhile, position empathy not as a social skill but rather as a neurobiological fact. Mirror neurons, so-called because they fire both when we perform an action and when we see another perform the same action, have led many to claim that we have an innate connection to the actions, intentions, and feelings of others. Marco Iacoboni writes, “We are wired for empathy, which should inspire us to shape our society and make it a better place to live.”⁹ Empathy is thus a biological fact and an aspirational goal, a sign that we are “built” to be better, more compassionate, and more socially attuned than we are at present. In this view, empathy is the path to our greatest potential humanity—a rather lofty promise for a word that entered the English language little more than a century ago.

Theatre, both professionally and academically, often takes up the call to produce a better society through empathy. In more than one department meeting, professional conference, and hallway conversation I have heard colleagues offer, as a rationale for the continued importance of theatre in the age of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), the argument that “we foster empathy.” This statement is often connected to others like “we explore what it means to be human” and “we build a sense of community.” While these may sound like three distinct functions, their frequent appearance in concert speaks to the strong association between empathy, humanity, and community. This is the idea of empathy that Howe champions, and to which Iacoboni hopes we will aspire. These goals often position theatre not simply as an alternative to the skills and capacities developed in STEM disciplines, but as a corrective to the (presumed) lack of ethical, social, and community values fostered by these disciplines. These goals are also frequently presented, in college and university settings, in connection with initiatives in diversity or globalism. By becoming better empathizers, we routinely argue, we will appreciate diversity and become better global citizens.

And yet, for all of the excitement it has provoked, empathy has inspired an equal measure of controversy. It has been charged with promoting misguided identification, perpetuating an assumption of access to the minds of others, reinforcing power hierarchies, and encouraging an uncritical adoption of others’ viewpoints. In the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Charles Edward Gauss offers this unflinchingly negative summary: “Empathy is the idea that the vital properties which we experience in or attribute to any person or object outside of ourselves are the projections of our own feelings and thoughts.”¹⁰ Empathy in this view always consists of a mistaken sense of understanding. Did the audience member at Exit the King recognize the difference between his reason to live and Berenger’s? Who was he ultimately understanding: the character, or himself? As Amy Shuman argues, even when empathy is not an emotional projection or misattribution, it always involves a “transvaluing” of experience, shifting “the personal to the more than personal (human, shared, universal).”¹¹ In doing so, it may change the meaning of experience, obscuring particular details to render the experience accessible beyond its original context.

Despite these critiques, theatre is still celebrated for its ability to place lives and situations before us, inviting us to imaginatively enter other worlds and entertain experiences other than our own. This ability to give a distant “other” an embodied, affective presence is what makes theatre seem, to many, an ideal medium for encouraging empathy. Without negating the significance of embodiment, this book explores another possibility, suggesting that theatre creates a unique situation that can help combat the potential problems of empathy: theatre invites dialogue. Aesthetic models of empathy imagine emotion as moving in one direction, from spectator to aesthetic object. The most prominent critics of empathy in the theatre, Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal, describe it as a similarly unidirectional movement going in reverse, from stage to spectator. Theatre, however, is always an exchange—between performers and audience members, between performers and each other. Live theatre involves an exchange loop that is different from reading a novel or watching a film. In those later situations, our responses may alter as a result of our own evolving experience of the text, but the text will never adjust itself in reaction to our particular, individual response. A novel may address us directly (“Reader, I married him”), and assume a dialogue in doing so, but a novel cannot insert a “harrumph” to emphasize a point or pull a face to respond playfully to the audience’s laughter.¹² A film cannot adjust the pace and tenor of a speech to reach a bored spectator or hold a cue to accommodate a collective gasp of surprise. In theatre, an actor may adjust a line delivery or a stage manager may call a cue differently in a split second in response to the feeling she has of a particular audience. Theatre is dynamic, shifting, and taking shape in the moment, between all present.

To be effective in understanding others, empathy should be equally dynamic. I am calling this type of responsive engagement “dialogic empathy.” Dialogic empathy does not “arrive” at understanding, but rather consists of a constant and open-ended engagement, responding and reacting to the other as actors respond to fellow actors and audience, audience members respond to actors, and stage managers and other crew respond to subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) shifts in pace and performance both on stage and in the house. Few models of empathy, particularly those that have influenced our discourse in the theatre, account for this kind of dynamism.

In this book, I explore techniques for encouraging dialogic empathy in the theatre, particularly theatre aimed at promoting social change or increasing understanding for marginalized populations. In doing so, I draw on techniques and theories from community-based and publicly engaged performance. In these forms of theatre-making, dialogue is often a crucial part of the process, from the workshops, interviews, and story circles that go into play development to the talkbacks and other community events that frequently follow performances. Dialogue is certainly easiest to pursue in what Richard Schechner calls the “proto-performance” stages of training, workshop, and rehearsal and the “aftermath” stages of critical response, archiving, and memories.¹³ But these stages are not open to all who attend theatre, nor are they always utilized when available. Many theatregoers exclusively engage in the “main” event of performance itself, and any discussion of empathy in the theatre must account for this. Thus, I am intereste...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Interruptions: Estranging Empathy
• 3. Repetitions: Empathy, Poverty, and Politics in Eastern Kentucky
• 4. Rehearsals: Naomi Wallace and the Labor of Empathy
• 5. Empathic Economies: Performance by Refugees and Asylum Seekers
• 6. Conclusion
• Backmatter