Vocal + Gestural = Role Play
A lecture by Professor Steven Brown
24 February 2025, 4PM | UNATC – Multifunctional Hall, 3B Tudor Arghezi St.
On Monday, February 24, 2025, Professor Steven Brown will deliver the presentation “Vocal + Gestural = Role Play” at UNATC, in the Multifunctional Hall, located at 3B Tudor Arghezi Street.
Professor Steven Brown visits UNATC on the occasion of the research project “The Role-Playing Brain,” in partnership with Jameel Arts & Health Lab at New York University Steinhardt, an initiative of the World Health Organization and Culture Runners (https://www.jameelartshealthlab.org/).
Within the “The Role-Playing Brain” project, neural bases of role-play in actors and novices will be analyzed using magnetic resonance imaging, contributing to an enhanced understanding of how theater can aid in therapeutic processes and personal development.
In “Vocal + Gestural = Role Play,” Steven Brown will present aspects of role-playing from the perspective of the protoacting concept, which he proposed for understanding the development of role-playing from a social context to an aesthetic one. Discussions will include topics such as vocal modulation in role play and gestural language in the production of role play in artistic and everyday contexts.
Steven Brown is the director of the NeuroArts Lab and an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behavior at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Genetics and Development at Columbia University in New York and has conducted postdoctoral research at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver (https://experts.mcmaster.ca/display/stebro)
His research focuses on the neural basis of the arts, including music, dance, acting, narrative art, filmmaking, drawing, as well as aesthetics and creativity. He is the author of “The Unification of the Arts” (Oxford University Press) and co-editor of “The Origins of Music” (MIT Press) and “Music and Manipulation” (Berghahn Books). Steven Brown has published over 50 research articles in prestigious journals such as Scientific Reports, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, on the neuroscience and psychology of the arts.
Among his most significant recent publications:
Role playing in human evolution: from life to art, and everything in between.. Frontiers in Psychology. 15:1459247. 2024
Storytelling as a fundamental form of acting. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. 16:272-289. 2022
Group dancing as the evolutionary origin of rhythmic entrainment in humans. New Ideas in Psychology. 64:100902-100902. 2022
How Pantomime Works: Implications for Theories of Language Origin. Frontiers in Communication. 4. 2019
The neuroscience of Romeo and Juliet : an fMRI study of acting. Royal Society Open Science. 6:181908-181908. 2019
During the presentation, Alexandru I. Berceanu will introduce the project “The Role Playing Brain.”
The research team of “The Role-Playing Brain”:
Alexandru Berceanu
Steven Brown
Elisabeth Bahr
Sanjna Banerjee
Konstantina Theofanopoulou
Iulia Diana Samson
Radu Crăciun
Mihaela Onu
Nisha Sajnani