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

This evidence echoes the observation Damasio (1994) made regarding different methodologies of acting (quoted previously) and supports the evidence that humans’ bodies process some emotions in an automatic manner.

Research has found that a considerable amount of emotion-specific activity is expressed in the autonomic nervous system and the enteric nervous system, as well as having endocrine manifestations (Panksepp 1994a, 1994b), anchored either by subjective reports of affect or by external indicators such as facial expression and bodily postures. There are numerous, mainly ancient, brain areas (notably the amygdala, hypothalamus, and hippocampus) that are involved in responding to emotions and the laying down of long-term memory traces.

So, in summary, people experience things in the world, and in the creation of a memory relating to these experiences, they also place them into categorically mapped retrieval systems. As actors—working collaboratively with other bodyminds to explore the expression of behaviours that contain layers of psychological meaning—the viewing of an interpretation relating to one’s character, modelled, for example, by the director, may activate a memory or retrieve some personal knowledge that concurs with the watched expression. Such a revelation may never have been exposed without the trigger of observation that stimulated the subconscious emotional memory. Thus, when evaluated from a scientific perspective in relation to human communicative capacity, intersubjective communication produced through modelled behaviours may be one of the key forms of directorial communication.