Modern embodied approaches to cognitive science overlap with ideas long explored in theater. Performance coaches such as Michael Chekhov have emphasized proprioceptive awareness of movement as a path to attaining psychological states relevant for embodying characters and inhabiting fictional spaces. Yet, the psychology of performance remains scientifically understudied. Experiments, presented in this paper, investigated the effects of three sets of exercises adapted from Chekhov’s influential techniques for actors’ training. Following a continuous physical demonstration and verbal prompts by the actress Bonnie Eckard, 29 participants enacted neutral, expanding, and contracting gestures and attitudes in space. After each set of exercises, the participants’ affect (pleasantness and arousal) and self-perceptions of height were measured. Within the limitations of the study, we measured a significant impact of the exercises on affect: pleasantness increased by 50% after 15 min of expanding exercises and arousal increased by 15% after 15 min of contracting exercises, each relative to the other exercise. Although the exercises produced statistically non-significant changes in the perceived height, there was a significant relation between perceived height and affect, in which perceived height increased with increases in either pleasantness, or arousal. These findings provide a preliminary support for Chekhov’s intuition that expanding and contracting physical actions exert opposite effects on the practitioners’ psychological experience. Further studies are needed to consider a wider range of factors at work in Chekhov’s method and the embodied experience of acting in general.

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Chapter 1 analyzes Viktor Shklovskii’s reflections on Futurist poets, who presented their experiments as an inquiry into the biodynamics of verbal expressivity. Shklovskii suggested that Aleksei Kruchenykh’s trans-rational poetry (zaum’) uncovered deeply ingrained motor programs, which shape the verbalization of various ideas and states of consciousness. Shklovskii contended that identifying these motor programs, or “sound gestures,” and putting them to play was the Futurists’ method of palpating the “inner form” of words in the Russian language. In contextualizing Shklovskii’s conception, the chapter maps the spread of psychophysiological terms in Russian literary theory and linguistic scholarship in the 1910s, with a particular emphasis on the echoes of William James’s theory of the corporeal experience of emotion and Wilhelm Wundt’s ideas on the gestural origin of language.

In the 1920s Soviet avant-garde film was developing alongside modern dance, and the two arts often drew on each other’s stylistic and conceptual achievements. This chapter considers approaches to the cinematic mediation of dance and expressive movement, as they were articulated by the Choreological Laboratory of the Russian State Academy of Artistic Sciences (RAKhN) and two pioneers of montage, Lev Kuleshov and Dziga Vertov. In a historicization of the techniques and instruments used for staging and representing movement, Moscow’s Central Institute of Labor (CIT) promoted chronophotographic studies of labor efficiency and biomechanics. It then disseminated its methods in avant-garde circles; thus studies of movement inherited from science formed a conceptual amalgam with modern choreographic and theater discourses. Meanwhile, Russian thinkers theorized the capabilities of cinema to convey the character and duration of movement, and how film viewing differed from real-time observation in the theater, further enriching the future of dance’s potential on the screen.