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

emotional expressions being portrayed and mostly wanted to indulge my own interpretive sense. Later, during four years’ training in the Advanced Study of the Art and Science of Movement (Nonington College, Kent), which was based almost exclusively on Rudolph Laban’s concepts of Weight-Space-Time-Flow, the connection to music was intensified for me through a Main Level music course, specialising in singing. In this I found parallels in dance, an art that I had been taught throughout my youth as a student of classical ballet and, at Nonington, through tuition in contemporary dance. These insights were then further linked during my degree course when I choreographed a solo dance, Die Verlassene (the forsaken girl) for a final-year student whilst performing live the Hugo Wolf song upon which it was based. This project developed a satisfying intimacy of expression between the dancer and me. Through channelling the voice into the gestures and patterns of the dance, already choreographed by myself, the singer, I was able to support and, in a sense, control the dance and dancer through the music.

Louis Horst (1969, 11), an eminently respected American teacher within the modern dance movement during the Martha Graham era, once wrote, ‘Motion arouses emotion, and emotion also brings forth motion, and the moment we speak of emotion, communication is involved’. Among dancers, there is a common understanding about the power of movement, of motion, about the intersubjectivity of factors that are generally held to be discrete. Horst’s statement encapsulates this knowledge, which I absorbed also into my life as a singer.

1.2. Theatre Work

After I left college, these growing insights and interests were prime motivators. I felt driven to form my own fringe theatre company—working with drama, dance, poetry, and music—to explore possible integration of the arts and develop some of my own ideas about atmosphere and how the generating and dramatic interpretation of atmosphere can occur. I was interested in emotional expression. For me, emotive qualities often initiated and drove movement and vocal expression in these experimental