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

conditions. Most of this seemed to me to be nonverbal experience that developed bodily/kinaesthetic forms of intelligence (see Gardner 1983) to create expression from bodily awareness. Significantly, my work was cultivated on the principle that motion involves communication and emotion, and it was, at the time, a topic mainly encountered in fringe rather than mainstream activity. One personal area of exploratory work engaged the body in sensing the external conditions of a particular place at a point in time and internalising those outer experiences using emotive qualities, which were then ‘translated’ into danced experience. My investigations involved going to several locations. For example, I hired a car and drove to ‘The Buttertubs’, a section of moorland in the north of England, where I meditated on the ‘feel’ of this place before externalising the feeling into expressive movement. I was also invited to take my company to perform in ‘Colourscape’, an outdoor series of enormous, differently coloured, plastic tents, again exploring the ambience and mood creations arising from the total suffusion of each separate colour. By meditating on the atmosphere of the place and then gently starting to move, we attempted to capture the ‘feeling’ of each space through a basic series of dance gestures, used as the starting point for improvisation, that sometimes reached liberated and stylistically diverse movement experiences. Like Louis Horst, I found emotional qualities and inner experience to be inextricably linked to the dance awareness as a part of the fundamentals from which I drew my artistic expression. At this time, I was also performing as a singer for the company, both with dancers and as a soloist. Part of this work, too, was exploratory, designed to be evocative of environmental ambiences. Thirty years ago, such work was relegated to the outer edges of artistic exploration. Now, however, not only the arts but also science is interested in emotions (as embraced, for example, within the new area of affective neuroscience—e.g., Davidson and Fox 1982; Panksepp 1994a, 1994b, 1994c; Aleman, Nieuwenstein, Bocker, and de Haan 2000—and music and emotion, e.g., Sloboda 1988, Ekman and Davidson 1994, Moss and Damasio 2001). The scientists are now asking questions that artists have long engaged with in their quest for inspiration: ‘What are feelings the perception of?