Embodiment: a cross-disciplinary provocation

Thirty years ago this provocation would not have been written. Embodiment has grown rapidly throughout the course of the past three decades into a relevant and challenging concept intersecting a range of disciplines and research programmes responding to its development. This provocation explores select theories of embodiment from the embodied cognition research programme as well as some practical processes and conceptual applications of embodiment from the field of actor training and actor-based performance training. I am largely responding to the work presented at the Embodied Cognition, Acting and Performance Symposium for which this Special Edition of Connection Science is an outcome. The articulations of the term embodiment currently inform two separate disciplinary understandings of this concept. Here, I highlight a move towards cross-disciplinary approaches to the concept of embodiment and offer an integrative new articulation of the term, bridging received divided between these two distinct and ever developing fields. This provocation argues that embodiment offers a valuable and challenging dimension to our emerging interdisciplinary discourse and that embodied processes are central to the ongoing integration of these two disciplines. This focus on our ongoing interdisciplinary strategies subsequently invites the proposition that embodiment, as an issue of central importance to both disciplinary spheres, may indeed be the key to any future transdisciplinary developments in research and practice occurring between the distinct fields of embodied cognition and performance practice.