Communication in Theatre Directing and Performance: From Rehearsal to Production
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Communication in Theatre Directing and Performance: From Rehears ...

Chapter 2:  Communication Overview
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both song and rapid vocal utterances (Donald 1991). However, it has been suggested that, before language, emotional understanding played a key role in communication:

Before language, there was something else—more basic, in a way more primitive, and with unequalled power in its formative potential, that propelled us into language…That something else was social engagement with each other. The links that can join one person’s mind with the mind of someone else—especially, to begin with, emotional links—are the very links that draw us into thought. (Hobson 2002, 2)

Hobson (2002, 22–25) went on to assert that it is the connections between the inner mental activities of the individual and what happens between people that creates meaningful relationships, a theory echoing the Baron-Cohen and Ring (1994, 184) proposal that a ‘shared attention mechanism’ (SAM) plays a crucial role in triggering the TOMM (‘theory of mind mechanism’) to function. Colwyn Trevarthen (2002),1 introducing the term intersubjectivity (25), detailed a similar assertion:

Vision, hearing and touch are equivalent senses for the capture and appreciation of the fundamental ‘amodal’ motor impulses and emotions in another human subject. The baby has ‘innate intersubjectivity’ with his or her whole being. Demonstrations of newborn infants’ imitations of expression, and their responses to reciprocated imitations or ‘attunements’ of a partner in proto-conversational play, which caught psychologists by surprise (Kugiumutzakis, 1999), can leave no doubt that what Adam Smith (1975) called a ‘natural sympathy’ in us, for feelings that ‘move’ others, is a human birthright.

Studies such as those mentioned in this passage indicate that the world of individual behaviour is affected and transformed in meaning by interaction with others. ‘Being affected by others is a design feature of human beings’(Hobson 2002, 75), and discovery is an active rather than intellectual activity. In order, then, to become attuned to their performers’ feelings, understanding, fears, and emotional robustness, directors need