The performing arts as ‘cognitive hybrids’: The power of the performatic Spiel-Raum

At the dawn of 21 Century, digital technologies – alongside with the spread of a globalized corporate empire – have brought about radical changes not only to the material aspects of communications but also at an epistemic level, affecting the very ways in which human knowledge is produced, expressed, distributed, shared, archived and transmitted. Within this post-modern scenario the performing arts, as artistic practices as well as academic disciplines, will play a crucial role, even though in uncommon ways, as compared to how we are used to understanding and practicing them. Without ignoring the pressure to rethink what knowledge is from the point of view of digital technologies, a re-assesment of mimesis as an archaic, oral and pre-verbal human skills is most needed. Since performance activities, and especially the performing arts, can be viewed as cognitive hybrid practices, thus they constitute the most important Spiel-Raum (“room-for-play”) for these leaps in our cognitive past. Evidence to support the thesis is provided by making use of the work of three scholars, who have focused on mimesis in different ways: Walter Benjamin’s concept of “mimetic faculty”; Eric Havelock’s analysis of Platonic refusal of mimesis, and neuroscientist Merlin Donald’s theory of the evolution of the human mind, in which he locates a pre-verbal stage named “mimetic culture.”