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

and the extent to which singers rely on the whole body in both rehearsal and performance, may be a key issue concerning the singer’s art.

Davidson (1993, 1994) has widely researched the topic of bodily communication in performance, although mainly with pianists and in terms of audience perception of expressiveness. The latter has also been studied by Gabrielsson (1982) and later by Gabrielsson and Juslin (1996), Juslin and Sloboda (2001), Persson (2001), and Juchniewicz (2008). Davidson (1994, 279) showed that the entire head region was reported as essential for the accurate perception of expressive intention. Juchniewicz (2008) showed that increases of physical movement in performance significantly increased audience rating of the performance, including phrasing, dynamics, and rubato. Through the visual feedback of bodily expression, audiences seemed to gain more understanding, more awareness of the emotive content in the overall performance and also seemed to find a deeper truth level reflected in the performance. Earlier research (Davidson 1993, 280) provided evidence that, for audiences, it is mainly (and in some nonmusicians, relatively exclusively) visual information that imparts expressive information in the perception of expressive differences within the musical performance.

The body, then, exists partly as a conduit, being incorporated into the communication vocabulary between director and singers, as well as channelling the internal, emotional narrative of the performer’s psychological and dramatic portrayal to the external world of addressees’ perceptions. Therefore, any external observations will need to pay heed to its potential in terms of movement’s nonverbal communicative prominence. Bodies are powerful communicants.