Vol. 60 No. 2 (2015): Spectator’s Body, Emotions & Empathy

The last decades, audience and reception studies in theatre, film, media and video gaming debunked the long-lasting illusion of the (so-called) spectator’s passiveness. Many theories and experiments from brain studies, neurology and psychology confirmed the fact that spectatorship is not a cold mirroring reflection activity, but an active, multi-level, complex, participatory one – even if one speaks about live performance or about film, audio or video art. The new technologies provoked unbelievable changes not only in aesthetic, style and artistic offer, but also in terms of scientific knowledge about spectator’s cognitive, corporal and emotional processes. And, in fact, the spectator/cultural user is the ultimate beneficiary of artistic communication.

This issue is thus focused on the investigation of spectator’s body, emotions and cognition processes; opening the debate on the following themes: otherness, the significant other and spectator’s self; spectatorship and own-body knowledge; emotion and empathy in spectatorship processes; spectator’s body and fictional space’s perception/immersion; visual, sound, haptic and olfactory in performance/film; performativity and interaction: what are we expecting from the spectator?; corporeal and verbal violence on stage/in movies: functions and limitations; spectatorship and pleasure.