Performance/Art. The Venetian Lectures

This book explores the phenomenology of skilled performance, ranging from athletics to the performing arts, including music, dance and acting. Gallagher reviews a variety of studies concerning different degrees of mindful awareness operative in performance and suggests ways to make it more complex and dynamic. Performance/Art explores the phenomenology of skilled performance, ranging from athletics to the performing arts, including music, dance and acting. Gallagher reviews a variety of studies concerning different degrees of mindful awareness operative in performance, and builds on the concept of a meshed architecture, suggesting ways to make it more complex and dynamic. He draws on ideas from enactivist embodied cognition about how different types of movement can be meaningful and intelligent and can scaffold learning and problem solving. He also explicates the notion of an empathic mindfulness in performance and develops the idea of a double attunement to explain aesthetic experience in performance, distinguishing the latter from aesthetic experience in the observer/audience perspective.