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

As such, those systems are creating a transmission that allows immediate comprehension to occur between transmitter and receiver and thus, in social species such as humans and monkeys, conveys a potential survival advantage, as well as transmitting cultural values. In terms of the latter, by watching the execution of traditions and customs, each generation is unknowingly storing that information through their own bodyminds, sometimes (as explained earlier in this section) unconsciously. In modern parlance, one is looking at the activity of a ‘community of practice’(Wenger 1998), which passes on cultural information, understanding, and values amongst its members, ‘a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavour’ (Wenger 1998, 1).

So-called cultural learning is believed to be widespread in the animal kingdom, particularly amongst primates (Gattis, Bekkering, and Wohlschlanger 2002). Cultural learning has often been observed in the wild, for example, with chimpanzees washing potatoes, otters using stones to crack open shellfish, or dolphins placing sponges on their snouts to protect them from abrasive corals. But in captivity, learning was recently confirmed through studies at Marineland in Niagara Falls,⁷ where a particularly inventive male killer whale devised a completely new strategy for catching seagulls in his tank. Within a few months, this never-before-seen strategy was emulated by his family group of five other whales. Imitation learning, then, would appear to be a natural form of skill acquisition throughout the animal kingdom, with evidence that this includes the faculty for communication.

2.2.2. Modelling

As yet, there seems to be no real agreement on a precise definition of ‘imitation’. Ruled out are certain behaviours such as observational conditioning, for example, contagious crying in newborns (Bard and Russell 1999). Heyes (1993) stated that imitation is about behaviour from conspecific⁸ observation as distinguished from social (nonimitative) learning, thus implying an inner connection to outer behaviour, that is, in those ‘like us’ (conceivably having ‘artistic’ identity as a variant).