Performance as Shared Mindfulness

Initiating from a discussion on performance as a liminal/liminoid practice that has the potential to create a space in which participants become aware, challenge established assumptions about the self and society, and open the way to social change, and from a discussion on mindfulness as a cultural practice that is also related to awareness and personal and social transformation, this paper intends to demonstrate that performance has a shared mindfulness quality. Although liminality, within the framework of anthropological and performance studies literature has almost unproblematically come to denote something ‘positive’, something that leads to enhanced social justice and mindfulness (in psychology literature in particular), to well-being and compassionate action within the world, I suggest that the degree and direction of this change depend – among other factors – on the moral/ethical considerations to which performances engage participants. Levinas’ thought on ethics as responsibility may contribute significantly to the study of the multiple and often contradictory experiences and meanings that performances, as shared mindfulness practices, generate.


Introduction
The investigation of the relationship between mindfulness and performance has mainly been an object of inquiry for cognitive behavioral and empirical psychology, (neuro)science, medicine and psychotherapy. This investigation has mainly focused on sport psychology and the role of mindful awareness in enhancing athletic performance (Gardner and Moore, 2012;Jackson and Delehanty, 1995), but also on the integration of mindful-based interventions as an effort to enhance human performance in various other domains such as education, business, military operations and policing (Chiesa, Calati and Serreti, 2011;Purser, 2014;Stanley and Jha, 2009;Zenner, Herrnleben-Kurz, and Walach, 2014). Moreover, in the past two decades there has been a growing interest in the exploration of the significance of mindfulness (defined as sustained and non-judgmental attention) for the performing arts. These studies investigate the effects of mindfulness on performance anxiety and performance quality, either with the application of various meditation techniques (Chang et al., 2003;Khalsa et al., 2013;Lin et al., 2008;Taylor, 2002;), or without it (Fatemi, 2016;Langer et al., 2009). There is a growing literature, thus, that discusses the positive effects that mindfulness might have on problems associated with normal healthy anxiety and stress, as well as problematic and disrupting symptoms of stage-fright for performers and artistic creativity and audience members' engagement with, and hence enjoyment of, the performance.
However, both tendencies in the literature that explores the relationship between mindfulness and the performing arts usually view mindfulness as a culturally neutral instrument in the pursuit of wellbeing, and approach (Western) performing arts as abstract and autonomous entities that stand outside of any specific historical, social, or cultural context. Chang et al., for example, argue that the results of their research indicate that 'meditation may be a useful tool for assisting performers in combating performance anxiety ' (2003, p. 126), while authors use the phrase 'musical performance' without any reference to particular genres, groups of people, musical traditions or occasions, which are inextricably tied to specific practices, behaviors, expectations, and meanings (Merriam, 1964). Langer et al. show the positive effects of nonmeditative mindfulness on artistic creativity and audience members' engagement in orchestral music performances, but they too present mindfulness as a technique that 'may lead to not only a more "perfect" performance, but also a more unique and personal sharing of the musicone goal of truly great music-making ' (2009, p. 133).
The authors call upon musicians 'of all ages and ability levels […] to break away from a practiceuntil-perfect mentality' and constantly search for novelty, which 'should lead to both higher levels of enjoyment as well as more insightful performances' (ibid.). The study, however, does not account for the fact that both pedestrian and academic (especially traditional musicological) discourses on Western 'classical' music, give emphasis to the idea that meaning is inherent in the text (the score), so that the performer's job becomes that of conforming to it, and performance remains 'a matter of getting it [the meaning] right, of adequacy rather than of contributing in a fundamentally creative manner to the generation of musical meaning in real time' (Cook, 2005, paragraph 6). Although this view does not always correspond to the actual everyday practices of performers and expectations of audience members' (ibid.), it does remain hegemonic and defines the criteria, according to which a good musician or a good and joyful musical performance are evaluated.
Departing from a discussion on the concept of liminality, as this has been developed by anthropologist Victor W. Turner and was later elaborated within the frame of performance studies, and from a discussion on the concept of mindfulness as this has been derived from the Buddhist teachings and elaborated within the frame of subjects such as sociology, anthropology, cultural and religious studies, I show that performance and mindfulness (in both Western and non-Western contexts) are not abstract ideas but cultural (or shared) practices, which may neither be experienced, nor understood outside of particular relationships and specific social, cultural, and historical contexts of meaning making. Investigating the interrelationships between mindfulness and performance practices, I argue that performance has a shared mindfulness quality: it engages participants emotionally, viscerally, and intellectually, and through critical perspective and evaluation, it promotes awareness and transformation, and has the potential not just to make participants think differently or to change their views and beliefs, but to lead them to alternative ways of being and relating to others i .
There is a strong tendency, however, in the relevant literature to view this transformation as 'positive'. Both, meditation (Hunot et al., 2013;Sedlmeier et al., 2012) and non-meditation (Langer, 1989(Langer, , 2005(Langer, , 2009  representation and media forms to counter power from within institutions rather than seeking to transgress them from a site located beyond power. Although Turner's work has been criticized as 'largely a-political in character' (Thomassen, 2014, p. 85), for contemporary avant-garde artists, liminality has become a methodology of artistic and political resistance (Wheeler, 2003). Instead of being understood as a by-product upon which artists may capitalize, liminality has become a quality that artists can intentionally produce, hoping to create renewed awareness and social change.
Instead of occupying a structurally invisible inbetween space, liminality forces itself upon the structurally visible in order to draw attention to, and thereafter challenge the normative.

Mindfulness in Context
The concept of 'mindfulness' has its roots in Buddhism, a religion that originated in India in the sixth century B.C. and spread to most parts of Asia and, in the twentieth century, to the West. There is an enormous body of philosophical writing that has been produced by the monastic and scholarly traditions of Buddhism (Kalupahana, 1976), while the many forms of Buddhism practiced throughout Asia have been shaped through processes of adaptation, hybridization and interaction with older animistic and shamanistic traditions, and other religions (Gellner, 1997;Spiro, 1982). According to a widely accepted definition of mindfulness in psychological literature, 'Broadly conceptualized, mindfulness has been described as a kind of non-elaborative, non-judgmental, presentcentered awareness in which each thought, feeling, or sensation that arises in the attentional field is acknowledged and accepted as it is' (Bishop et al., 2004, p. 232). This definition 'reflects the point of view of the therapist engaged in practical interventions' (Dreyfus, 2011, p. 43) (Gethin, 2011;Sharf, 1995). Although mindfulness is usually described as a form of awareness that is presentcentered and non-evaluative, many scholars have noted that this description misses the original content of the term sati, which in classical Buddhist accounts meant 'to remember', 'to recollect'. In practice, mindful meditation requires remembering one's ethical and spiritual goals 'of trying to root out greed, hatred and delusion' (Gethin, 2011, p. 270) and cultivate wisdom, compassion and lovingkindness. It also fails to encompass the original concern of meditation with enlightenment, which in the monastic context required 'the renunciation of family, social status, and other attachments' and the engagement with 'study, ritual observance, and meditative practice' (Kirmayer, 2015, p. 452 Buddhist insight 'is the realization that the awareness of the self as separate is essentially misleading and illusory, a mere by-product of the ongoing process of samsāra' (Samuel, 2015, p.

494). This assertion, however, is in tension with
Western values of individualism embedded in mindful therapies, its primary concern being with pre-ordained and separate individuals (the personal self) and with their adjustment to preexisting social contexts.
Approaching the individualization and psychologization of practices of mindfulness as both the symptom and the cause of neoliberalism, however, allows us to view these practices as only top-down interventions and ignore 'the diversity in motivations, experiences, and efforts of people practicing self-governance and the collaborative nature of the political processes by which it is promoted' (Cook, 2016, p. 156 Transformation and change, however, are not inherent in mindfulness and performance practices.
As we shall see next, performance, viewed as a shared mindfulness practice, may also lead to affirmation of existing identities and structures.
Moreover, the degree and direction of awareness and change (when these actually take place), that is, whether they will lead to broadening traditional social boundaries, wider acceptance of difference and hence to enhanced social justice, or to destruction of the self and society, depend, among other factors, on the ways in which people reflect on what sort of person one should be, how they want to live, and responsibility for others. These are ethical considerations-closely related to the political-that refer to particular categories through which participants in these practices experience and interpret the world, but also to how researchers describe and analyze the world, and they are historically and culturally specific (Fassin, 2012;Laidlaw, 2014).

Intersubjectivity and Intercorporeality
Since  (Schechner, 1985;Turner, 1982) viii . More recently, they have also placed emphasis on performance as a site of emergence of postmodern aesthetic practices and on the role of performance as a liminal genre in the construction of various-racial, ethnic, class, and gender-identities (Jones, 1998;Muñoz, 1999;Phelan, 1993;Schneider, 1997 There are many hierarchical utopias, conservative utopias, fascistic utopias' (Turner, 1982, p. 49).
Having considered the possibility of a fascist communitas, if only briefly, Turner discounts it tout court-such communitas cannot be real communitas -because for him communitas utopia 'is found in variant forms as central ingredient, connected with the notion of "salvation"' (ibid.) x .
Drawing on an ongoing discussion on intersubjectivity and intercorporeality that follows Although those who share a meditation center make up a community of strangers, they are not alone: They are not alone not only in the physical sense, but they are not alone in experience.
They spend time in other minds: they react to the movement and non-movement of others, they feel comfort when they learn that their experiences are 'normal', and they assume that the others understand their experiences since they participate in a similar event (ibid., p. 323). relations' (Laidlaw, 2014, p. 179). Levinas's (1998) approach to ethics as a responsibility that arises when we encounter the other could enrich

Responsibility
Much of the existing work on ethics in performance is based on Levinas' thought, because his emphasis on the face-to-face encounter with the Other suggests some kind of relationship to theatre similar to the encounter between audience and performer (Grehan, 2009;Ridout, 2009 'Responsibility for the other, going against intentionality and the will, which intentionality does not succeed in dissimulating, signifies not the disclosure of a given and its reception, but the exposure of me to the other, prior to every decision' (Levinas, 1998, p. 141 (Levinas, 1998, pp. 156-62). This interplay of ethics and politics informs the ways in which subjects read events as they unfold in the world around them, as well as the ways in which they might respond to or engage with a performance.
From a Levinansian point of view, the audience in a performance is an audience as long as people encounter the other onstage, and due to liminality, this encounter has the potential to make participants reflect in complex, contradictory and hence productive ways on the function of both response and responsibility xi in the specific context. However, in order to find a space for response and responsibility, or ethical engagement, the subject may become silenced in the process.
Levinas' approach has been criticized for overemphasizing the Other, a view that may lead to negation of the self and thus to inhibiting the possibility of ethical exchange (Ricoeur, 1992). As Grehan (2009) (Nelson, 2013). For Theravada Buddhism, for example, the self is very much a relational self (Bodhi 2000: 884), because individuals and cultures construct identities, a sense of constancy, out of the attachments they make to the phenomenal world; based on illusions of permanence, identities allow them to deal with the suffering that characterizes human existence. For Levinas, identity is constructed through experiences of exposure and vulnerability that the encounter with the Other generates. In order to master existence, the subject consolidates itself: "The I is not a being that always remains the same, but is the being whose existing consists in identifying itself, in recovering its identity throughout all that happens to it. It is the primal identity, the primordial work of identification ' (1969, p. 36).
For those practicing mindfulness within the frame of Theravada Buddhism, therefore, ethics emerge through a dispositioning of the self, that is, through stepping aside and realizing its implication with others in the world. In order to pursue liberation from suffering, the self needs to distance itself not from the world as it is, but from a clinging to permanence that often constructs the world as we want it to be. The doctrine of nonself, that is, that there is no a priori self but only the self we have created as a result of our experiences, enables a kind of awakening to a self of transience and change (Verter, 2013). This, in turn, compels us to imagine responses to the world other than the usual ones dominated by our own habitual attachments. And because the self is part of a changing world, the idea of nonself creates another kind of relation, an ethical relation, not only to ourselves, but also to the world.
Notes i Mindfulness has been part of performance training in the West for a long time. Constantin Stanislavski (1955[1937), Jerry Grotowski (1991), Eugenio Barba (2006Barba ( [1991), Peter Bridgmont (1992), Michael Chekhov (1993), Peter Brook (2000), Yoshi Oida (2006Oida ( , 2007, and Philip Zarilli (2009) inscribed, some anthropologists insist on the distinction between the two concepts, and others do not. Since in everyday discourse there is no distinction between the two, in this paper I will use the terms interchangeably (Fassin, 2012).
iii According to Campbell (1999), New Religious Movements led to the gradual 'Easternization of the West', a process in which the West moved away from its traditional values (monotheism, human lordship over the natural environment, and a belief in a single lifetime) and adopted an Eastern paradigm (pantheism and deep ecology, the human potential movement, and reincarnation. iv As early as the 1930s to the 1950s, health was used as a metaphor to explain the condition of Western 'civilization' and its first attempts to 'turn East' (Conze, 1951). vii For reviews, see Auslander, 2003;Carlson, 2003;McKenzie, 2001;Shepherd, 2016. viii In Turner's view, liminality is not identified with marginality. He used the term marginality to define the state of simultaneously belonging to two or more social or cultural groups (e.g. expatriates) and insisted that marginality should not be confused with true 'outsiderhood' (being outside of the social structure), which characterizes individuals such as 'shamans, diviners, medium, priests, those in monastic seclusion, hippies, hoboes, and gypsies' (1974a, p. 233