Theatre and Consciousness

Human beings have speech, we have consciousness, but 130,000 years ago we had nothing: why? Theatre and Consciousness argues that the functioning of human consciousness in interpreting and staging a theatrical performance is among the most highly selective and adaptive operations known to science. The emergence of the human mind out of discontinuous, pulsing, neuronal brain patterns is a study in complexity theory, possibly as complicated as the organization of the universe. According to this book, the theatre as a substrate of consciousness is one element that defines modern man as a reflective species, having evolved over 190,000,000 years. The emergence of Homo Sapiens is unique and fundamentally unpredictable; our developed speech is closer to birdsong than to any other species' communication on earth, we have survived five galactic «beam-splitters» from space, and our evolutionary, discontinuous cortex has found a pattern to existence that may include up to twenty-six folded dimensions of «string-theory» space. This book asserts that the story of theatre is the story of the evolution of our second generation star.

Auteur

The Author: Gordon Scott Armstrong is former Secretary of the American Society for Theatre Research and Review Editor of Theatre Research International. He has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the University of Rhode Island, and has designed and directed theatre productions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. In addition to numerous articles in professional journals, his full length works include the revised Golden Ages of the Theatre and Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats and Jack Yeats: Images and Words. He currently lives in Newport, Rhode Island, and Marin County, California.