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

the right actor—that will impact on styles of communication). Younger performers may be more socially and collaboratively susceptible and therefore more of a production risk, either personally or as a team player. Yet the idea of waiting for maturity or ‘special talent’ to emerge could become depressing to the thousands of young students who embark on performance training every year. Perhaps addressing this issue may be one focus of the training actors undergo. However, in terms of their role, directors often find that, as a result of external factors, they have little choice in who is cast in a production (see Director 1’s perspective in appendix 2). It is therefore incumbent upon the director to support each individual in a particularized manner, perhaps being required to draw on intuitive aspects of communication, to expand the abilities of their performers. The alternative would be for them to ignore the individual’s weaknesses in character portrayal and allow the performer to be judged in the final analysis by the audiences and critics through the production outcomes. (This is discussed further in chapter 9.)

The work of Levenson, Ekman, and Friesen (1990) on emotional activity through external expression is much quoted by researchers into aspects of bodily communication, but their actual direction has been little advanced in the intervening years.³ The experiment they undertook indicated that voluntary facial action can generate emotion-specific activity in the autonomic nervous system (ANS). In other words, deliberately putting specified expressions onto the face—through voluntary, conscious activity—can trigger emotional understanding at a subliminal level. This finding is reinforced by studies in singing (see Salgado 2003) and in psychomotor behaviour. As Kerr (1982, 15–16) stated:

It may, therefore, be quite natural for bodily gestures and stances to echo and tap into emotional memories, drawing these up to the more