Rick Kemp is Professor of Theatre and Head of Acting and Directing at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA. An actor, director and Fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar on Neuroscience and Art, his publications include Embodied Acting: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Performance (2012) and The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq (2016).

Bruce McConachie, Emeritus Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, has published widely in theatre history and cognitive studies. His scholarship includes Engaging Audiences (2008), Evolution, Cognition, and Performance (2015), and chapters in Theatre Histories: An Introduction (3rd edition, 2016). A former president of the American Society for Theatre Research, McConachie also acts and directs.

General Introduction Part I: Artistry; Introduction; Stanislavsky's prescience: The conscious self in the system and Active Analysis as a theory of mind; The improviser's lazy brain: improvisation and cognition; Devising - embodied creation in distributed systems; Embodied cognition and Shakespearean performance; The remains of ancient action: Understanding affect and empathy in Greek drama; Minding implicit constraints in dance improvisation; Applying developmental epistemic cognition to theatre for young audiences; 4E cognition for directing: Thornton Wilder's Our Town and Caryl Churchill's; Light Shining in Buckinghamshire; Acting and Emotion; Part II: Learning; Introduction ; Improvising communication in Pleistocene performances; Ritual transformation and transmission; Communities of gesture: Empathy and embodiment in Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane ; Dance Company's 100 Migrations; Creative storytelling, crossing boundaries, high-impact learning and social engagement; From banana phones to the bard: The developmental psychology of acting.