Communication in Theatre Directing and Performance: From Rehears ...

Chapter 1

Introduction

Sincerity is always triumphant in life and real art is a pledge of purest truth.

—Lehmann (1945, 167)

1.1. Getting Started

For well over twenty years, from the age of three, my body was in training for, firstly, physical arts—ballet, modern dance, gymnastics—and then, additionally, from my midteens, vocal performance. My training at the Royal College of Music included an introductory course in Dalcroze Eurythmics and gave me my first opportunity, partly through the drama programme and coupled with a period in the opera school, to conceptualise an understanding that was already a part of my unconscious experience. I had never previously, for example, had to consciously beat time or show that my body could remain coordinated whilst moving to two separate time pulses. Working in 1968 alongside the director of The Murder of Maria Martin, a Victorian-style melodrama with music composed by a very young Roger Vignoles, I realised that I felt capable of playing everyone else’s parts (and often tried)! I felt empathy with the