Pizzato, M: European Churches and Chinese Temples as Neuro-T

Mark Pizzato, MFA, PhD, is Professor of Theatre at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (USA), where he also teaches interdisciplinary film, arts, architecture, and religion courses. He has authored six previous books: Mapping Global Theatre Histories (2019), Beast-People Onscreen and in Your Brain: The Evolution of Animal-Humans from Prehistoric Cave Art to Modern Movies (2016), Inner Theatres of Good and Evil: The Mind's Staging of Gods, Angels and Devils (2011), Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain (2006), Theatres of Human Sacrifice: From Ancient Ritual to Screen Violence (2005), and Edges of Loss: From Modern Drama to Postmodern Theory (1998). He also co-edited, with Lisa K. Perdigao, Death in American Texts and Performances: Corpses, Ghosts, and the Reanimated Dead (2010).

Compares monumental designs and performance spaces of Christian, Buddhist, and related sanctuaries, exploring how brain networks, animal-human emotions, and cultural ideals are reflected historically and affected today as "inner theatre" elements.Integrating research across the humanities and sciences, this book explores how traditional designs of outer theatrical spaces left cultural imprints for the inner staging of Self and Other consciousness, which each of us performs daily based on how we think others view us. But believers also perform in a cosmic theatre. Ancestral spirits and gods (or God) watch and interact with them in awe-inspiring spaces, grooming affects toward in-group identification and sacrifice, or out-group rivalry and scapegoating.In a study of over 80 buildings - shown by 40 images in the book, plus thousands of photos and videos online - Pizzato demonstrates how they reflect meta-theatrical projections from prior generations. They also affect the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended (4E) cognition of current visitors, who bring performance frameworks of belief, hope, and doubt to the sacred site. This involves neuro-social, inner/outer theatre networks with patriarchal, maternal, and trickster paradigms.European Churches and Chinese Temples as Neuro-Theatrical Sites investigates performative material cultures, creating dialogs between theatre, philosophy, history, and various (cognitive, affective, social, biological) sciences. It applies them to the architecture of religious buildings: from Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant in Europe, plus key sites in Jerusalem and prior "pagan" temples, to Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, and imperial in China. It thus reveals individualist/collectivist, focal/holistic, analytical/dialectical, and melodramatic/tragicomic trajectories, with cathartic poetics for the future.

Includes a total of 55 photographs, tables, and figures useful to practitioners and scholars, with links to hundreds of additional photos and videos related to case studies in the book

List of DiagramsList of TablesList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Evolving Neuro-Theatrical Elements2. Monumental Developments in Patriarchal, Maternal, and Trickster Designs3. Places and Spaces with Super-Natural Translations4. ConclusionsWorks CitedIndex