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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Whiten and Ham (1992) said imitation is a form of social learning where B learns aspects of the intrinsic form of an act from A, acknowledging that no imitative act can be an exact replication. This definition echoes the artistic idea of ‘form’ in Kabuki theatre (the kata, as described by Brandon, Malm, and Shively 1978).

Newborns’ imitation highlights predispositions towards facial/manual actions, vocalisations, and emotionally laden expressions (Nadel and Peze 1993). In the work of Meltzoff and Moore (1977), which indicates that not all human infants exhibit imitative ability, 50% of the eighteen participant neonates were found to imitate. In contrast, Kugiumutzakis (1999), using more relaxed settings and a more natural style of communication, reported that 80% of newborns imitate. This was an important development in understanding human behaviour. As Ramachandran and Oberman (2006, 41) explained,

Andrew Meltzoff of the University of Washington has shown that if you stick your tongue out at a newborn baby, the infant will do the same. Because the baby cannot see its own tongue, it cannot use visual feedback and error correction to learn the skill. Instead there must be a hardwired mechanism in the child’s brain for mapping the mother’s visual appearance—whether it be a tongue sticking out or a smile—onto the motor command neurons.

Others report that it takes a special type of relationship to elicit social interaction with infants. Mothers have shown intimate control of their babies through emotional signalling in, for example, ‘visual cliff’ experiments (Sorce et al. 1985), in which potential danger expressed on a mother’s face was reported to have sent fourteen of nineteen one-year-olds scurrying away from the source.9 It is this ability to interpret projected feelings from another that is believed to lead people to become identified with parts of others’ selves. People are innately able to achieve this through the mechanisms of imitation:

There is something about our propensity to imitate others that is as basic as our intellectual prowess, something that makes us Homo imitans as well as Homo sapiens. What is that something?