Theatre and Gesture
Theatre since its emergence has understandably been concerned with gesture as a meaning-making system. From the formal gestures of masked characters in Greek drama to the later emergence of specifically designated moves for each of the masked characters in the Commedia dell’ Arte, gestures have enabled the development of character (Walton 1984; Daniel 1965). Likewise in Asian theatre, for instance in the Vietnamese classical theatrical form of Tuông, gesture is specific and handed down through tradition to denote character, and expressive states.
It was François Delsarte who created the systematised set of gestures, used by actors and dancers, which influenced Rudolf Laban’s movement theories (The Delsarte Project 2011). Delsarte, who lived from 18 11 until 1871, wrote nothing of his work and it was not until 1885 when Genevieve Stebbins wrote, The Delsarte System of Expression that Delsarte’s theories were fully articulated. Delsarte formulated nine principles of gestures, stressing connections between experience or mental attitudes and their physical manifestations in gesture. Nancy Lee Chalfer Ruyter (1996, 64) writing in Dance Research: Journal of the Society for Dance Research notes about Delsarte and quotes him in stating that,
Of the three agents of expression that he designated as primary – voice, gesture and speech – he considered gesture to be ’the direct agent of the heart… the fit manifestation of feeling… the revealer of thought and the commentator upon speech.’
Rudolf Laban (1879–1958) extended the interlinking of gesture with mental attitudes in his later years of movement research for actors and dancers when settled in the United Kingdom after fleeing Germany’s Nazi regime. By 1947 he had published Effort with F.C. Lawrence, one of the first British management consultants, indicating the connection of gestural rhythms with psychological states. Later in Laban’s text, The Mastery of Movement (1960), published posthumously by his wife Lisa Ullmann, Laban names a set of ‘Inner Attitudes’ linking C.G. Jung’s personality types of Sensing, Thinking, Intuiting and Feeling with motion factors.
In an unpublished document named Movement Psychology (1954), entrusted in 1954 to Yat Malmgren (1916–2002), one of the United Kingdom’s renowned acting teachers from the last century, Laban outlined a sophisticated method of alignment of gestures with ‘Inner Attitudes’ for actors.
The study of ‘Inner Attitudes’ became the principal means of Malmgren’s actor training at Drama Centre London and through which Malmgren trained such actors as Sean Connery, Anthony Hopkins, Collin Firth, Anne-Marie Duff, and Pierce Brosnan. ‘Inner Attitudes’ can be understood as differing perceptual modes of dealing with the environment and others. Marion North (1975) furthered Laban’s techniques for investigating movement for performers and the links between movement and personality, creating her own system of movement awareness looking at patterns and rhythms of movement.
I offer these insights in indication of the fact that systematising gestures within performance styles has often been used as a means of reflecting affective predispositions and thought processes of characters as well as reflecting character motivations. At times this process has captured the public imagination and been used beyond the boundaries of performance. For instance in the late 1970s Warren Lamb wrote Body Code: The Meaning in Movement which was a popular book and instigated a system called MPA (Movement Pattern Analysis) for assessing peoples’ motivations. Perhaps more popularly Alan Pease in 1987 wrote the best seller, Body Language: How to Read Other’s Thoughts by their Gestures. Paul Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System relies on the recognition of the movements of the 43 facial muscles to discern emotional expression. Clearly, Dr Lightman from Lie To Me and his insightful skills have been preceded by others.