The Dramatic Bodymind

The Dramatic Bodymind

. . . his own voice is his cunningly modulated instrument; his own face the canvass whereon he portrays the various expressions of his passion; his own frame the mold in which he casts the images . . . that fill his brain . . . 

Summarizing an enormous amount of contemporary evidence, Daniel Goleman explains that “we unconsciously imitate the emotions we see displayed by someone else, through an out-of-awareness motor mimicry of their facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, and other nonverbal markers of emotion.” Goleman further notes that through this imitation “people re-create in themselves the mood of the other person . . . “  Another way of saying this might be that affects, from one to another, and through means of prosody, create empirically demonstrable psychophysical morphic resonances. Quite literally, as an affective “note” or “tune” is sounded in one, it will begin to naturally reproduce itself in another.

The day-to-day imitation of feeling is ordinarily quite subtle. . . . when people view a smiling or angry face, their own faces show evidence of that same mood through slight changes in facial muscles. The changes are evident through electronic sensors but are typically not visible to the naked eye.

As Goleman notes “just seeing someone express an emotion can evoke that mood” and the phenomenon applies largely to physical affect (phisiostates) as well.  We can learn a great deal from this about the actor’s skills, or those associated with any affective prosodic field or profession, some of which we have already noted.

Socrates:  And are you aware that you produce similar effects on most of the spectators?

Ion:  Only too well; for I look down upon them from the stage, and behold the various emotions of pity, wonder, sternness, stamped upon their countenances when I am speaking . . .

The actor’s art, whether dramatic or comedic (or horror, action or any other genre) is in part literally creating affective ‘poetry’ and ‘music’ within the emotional resonance channels of an audience–complete with variously resonating “undertones,” “overtones,” potential “consonances,” “dissonances” and “harmonics;” for after all, this unconscious ‘mimicry’ and ‘re-creation of the mood’ is a phenomenon which occurs apart from all other aspects of our psychoemotional experience and reality. It is in part for exactly this reason that advanced skills of affective prosody both create and belong within their own unique domain, which naturally emerges socio-culturally as a result of its presence and use. A bit of comedy, “neatly and ingeniously performed” can literally ‘tickle’ an audience in addition to making it laugh. A bit of drama, done masterfully, will leave an impression upon even the very nervous system of whoever is present to witness it. Stanislavsky’s writing on the performance of Salvini turns out quite literally to be true.

This reality also lends itself to the experience of an audience seeing and feeling itself in the place of the very character, role or situation (and this is actually only the first way). Consider the heightened effect–and affect–this might have on an individual with naturally acute sensitivity, which is to say, an actor. Indeed both history and autobiographies have shown that what most consistently inspires actors in youth to become actors, especially today, is being audience to dramatic performance whether on stage or through movies. Edward Dwight Easty says:

[The actor] can never go to the theatre with the same desire . . . as other people. The actor sees more deeply into the play than the average patron around him. He . . . constantly projects himself into every part he sees. He sees himself as the villain, the hero, the lover, sometimes even playing Iago to his own Othello. 

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UL-Individual Interior                               Individual Exterior-UR


felt experience/                                          motor-mimicry/
comprehension/                                        emotion-specific feedback loop/

“sixth affective sense”                               cortical representations
                                                                      recognition/lexical affective vocabulary
__________________________________________________________________________

Sanford Meisner said that he believed talent comes from “affective impulses.” A heightened sense of affective prosody may literally lead to or be a heightened sense of ‘drama’ and ‘comedy,’ for within life’s moments which are particularly ‘dramatic’ or especially ‘comedic’ are indeed the most pronounced affects and the most vivid, pronounced and memorable affective prosody. The average individual may naturally ‘replay’ a scene with heightened affect ‘in their heads,’ in images, in their emotions and feelings for a long time. These moments also give rise to new affects. Children will indeed ‘play’ out highly affective scenes they have experienced in their playing. The impulse seems natural; a form of assimilation. Thus the child or individual with a heightened sense of affective prosody may then correlatively have other unique impulses which are both cognitive and indeed affective to use these ‘scenes’ in another way. The result of talent is the impulse to act; the impulse to create and communicate drama.

But this evidence also illuminates a very important fact: whether we realize it or not (usually not), all human beings possess a biologically innate, unconscious capacity for affective prosodic mimesis. This mimesis and its accompanying natural feeling reproduction seems to be an important aspect of how we in each moment acquire genuine recognition of emotions but actually over development and time, build, as it were, lexical affective knowledge and quite literally, a largely unconscious affective vocabulary. Kenneth Heilman and Dawn Bowers have been pioneers in this area.

A radiant smile, a piercing scream, a looming upraised fist! In humans and nonhuman primates, the ability to decipher the meaning of nonverbal social signals – facial expressions, tone of voice, body posturing – is present very early in life and remains relatively stable throughout the adult life span. 

Heilman and Bowers argue that “specific neural networks exist within the brain that are particularly concerned with deciphering the affective meaning of perceptual signals (facial expression/tone of voice). . . .” This neural network, organized primarily in the right hemisphere, “contains a “vocabulary” or neural representations of these nonverbal affect signals” which they refer to as the “nonverbal affect lexicon.”  

The overall network appears modular in organization . . . Broadly speaking, these affect representations are just one component of a cortically based affect processing network that is dedicated to reading [and communicating] the nonverbal social displays of other members of the species.

If we grant the actor an acute sensitivity related to this overall ‘module’–which is to say, following Howard Gardner, recognize a biopsychological potential to process information that can be activated in a cultural setting to solve problems or create products that are of value in a culture–we can begin to unlock some of the very important keys to his talent as well as his conscious desire and ability to utilize it.

At all times, we are communicating information about our emotional state, attitudes, and evaluations of whatever we are currently confronting. . . . translating a mental state into an externally visible signal like a facial expression. . . . Most often we are unaware . . . . Additionally, there are other cues to one's internal state (e.g., tone of voice, blinking, posture) that the vast majority of us have little or no control over. We produce most of our nonverbal cues . . . without phenomenological awareness.

As Marlon Brando once said:

A sensitive person receives fifty impressions where somebody else might get only seven.

It has been well pronounced by many throughout history and is well known among actors today that it is a wide variety of life experiences that serve the actor most vividly and profitably in his work. It is common, for example, for an actor to say ‘I used [such-and-such] in this part’ or ‘[so-and-so] in this role.’ Life impressions render lexical knowledge of affects and event-related potentials for articulated use in a socio-affective vocabulary. In the ordinary individual this process makes it possible to communicate socially and emotionally or simply affords potentials for emotional expression which also help mold and shape it. In the actor, if innately and inevitably receiving a healthy does of “fifty impressions” a few times a day, something different is occurring. In his 1888 study of the psychology of the actor, William Archer recorded numerous examples of what this is like from the perspective of the actor’s psychology, especially when the presence and benefits of this process would begin to be recognized.

The majority of my informants . . . admit that the actor’s habit of mind prompts him, as he goes through life, to seize upon and treasure up details which may be of use in his art; though this seems often to occur without any distinct act of will. 

‘Without any distinct act of will’ is important, because it highlights the natural process which is not even required to think about. The dynamic cognitive unconscious (zone#5) takes care of the complex information processing for us. We do not, for example, need to consciously calculate the details of Jack Nicholson’s expression to know what he ‘means’ by “Here’s Johnny!” We simply know immediately in the same way that we can decipher a sentence, or speak a sentence with meaning, without having to look up each word in a dictionary or consult the rules of grammar. We might, however, want to if we are writing an important essay or need to if we are reading a difficult one. But once this process has been learned, as it was through development, we needn’t ever repeat the process. One of the most valuable insights rendered with the help of cognitive science, and such brilliant theories as Multiple Intelligences Theory in particular, is that different minds think differently. As an as example of unconscious cognitive processes bringing contents to consciousness while providing subsequent associated abilities, Mr. John Drew, an “excellent” light comedian, told Archer:

 . . . I have been able . . . to trace effects made to certain incidents automatically registered in my memory, though at the time of using them I fancied them imaginary or invented. 

Drew, in other words, was scarcely even aware that he was actually ‘using so-and-so’ or ‘such-and-such’ within his conscious performance. Psychoaffective prosody patterns had simply been acquired and thus become potentials in his psychoaffective vocabulary and contents arising in his mind. The more vivid and dramatic an experience in life, the more vivid, emotionally powerful and lasting an impression it makes. An actor named Leonard Boyne told Archer:

'I once saw an Italian stab another fatally. I was on the opposite side of the road, and I gave a yell or scream and rushed to take the knife. That incident is always vividly before my eyes when I see Tybalt stab Mercutio ; and I have ever since, when playing Romeo, used the "yell." I have noticed a dead silence come over the house immediately, as if something beyond mere acting had happened. One of the audience told me the scream was so effective that he thought the man was actually stabbed, and he was completely carried away by the scene.'

The situational analogy seems to be important, for often this seems to be what consciously and unconsciously activates potentials and feelings most powerfully (which would also be true for an audience). Consciously working with this process, Francois Joseph Talma offered one of the most powerful and vivid descriptions of the dramatic mind.

I scarcely know how to confess that, in my own person, in any circumstance of my life in which I experienced deep sorrow, the passion of the theatre was so strong in me that, although oppressed with real sorrow, and disregarding the tears I shed, I made, in spite of myself, a rapid and fugitive observation on the alteration of my voice, and on the certain spasmodic vibration which it contracted as I wept; and, I say it, not without some shame, I even thought of making use of this on stage, and, indeed, this experiment on myself has often been of service to me.

The “re-creation of the mood” affords what Stanislavsky referred to as the actor’s “sixth ‘affective sense’”. Analogous to the way a singer can discern and modulate genuine pitches and between pitches, etc., an actor can discern and modulate between emotions and feelings, determining what is correct, natural, genuine, appropriate, etc.

I looked to another great visiting star. He pronounced the introductory words of his part. But he did not strike directly on the true emotion, and yielding to the mechanical habit of theatre, fell back on false pathos. I looked at him carefully and saw that something was taking place in him. And really, he resembled a great singer who used a sounding fork to find the true note. Now it seemed that he found it. No, it was a trifle too low. He took a higher note. No, it was too high. He took a note a little lower. He recognized the true tone, and came to understand it, to feel it, placed it, directed it, believed in it, and began to enjoy the art of his own speech.

This ‘affective sense’ or ‘sensibility’ also affords what Talma described as the actor’s ability to discover even foreign and unknown emotions and to thus “paint them by analogy.”

. . . amongst the irregular passions which disgrace humanity, there are some which possess points of contact with those which ennoble it. Thus, the sentiment of a lofty emulation enables us to divine what envy may feel; the just resentment of wrongs shows us in miniature the excesses of hatred and vengeance. Reserve and prudence enable us to paint dissimulation. The desires, the torments, and the jealousies of love enable us to conceive all its frenzies and initiate us in the secret of its crimes. These combinations, these comparisons, are the results of rapid and imperceptible labor of sensibility, united with intelligence, which secretly operates on the actor as on the poet, and which reveals to them what is foreign to their own nature–the vile passions of guilty and corrupted minds.

Nicholson need never have been possessed by a haunted hotel, and under such affliction wished to murder his wife and child, in order to produce “Here’s Johnny!” with a ‘truthful’ emotion. Bowers and colleagues have also conducted extensive studies which have shown–as is often the case with the other intelligences–that impairment directly affects both memory and the formation of mental images with affective content.  Applied conversely, unimpaired and with acute sensitivity, consider Coquelin’s description mental images after learning his part from a script.

Then, when I know it, I take up my man again, and closing my eyes I say to him, ‘Recite this for me.’ Then I see him delivering the speech, the sentence I asked him for; he lives, he speaks, he gesticulates before me . . . 

Chekov goes on extensively about the actor’s formation of dramatic (and comedic) images and how it is a factor working in the actor and dramatic artist at all times.

Vakhtangov was a rabid newspaper reader . . . . As he read his newspapers, flashes of remote events in Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies, as well as sequences from modern plays arose in his imagination.

Through this practice, explains Chekov, Vakhtangov developed images of how past theatrical works might be performed in an ever contemporary manner. In further studies, Bowers and colleagues have shown that even with regard to autobiographical memories of first-person experiences with strong affective content, patients are impaired regarding the affective aspects of the memories but show normal aptitude in affectively neutral subjects. Interestingly, Goleman refers to the unconscious “motor mimicry” described above as:

 . . . a low-key version of the Stanislavsky method, in which actors recall gestures, movements, and other expressions of an emotion they have felt strongly in the past in order to evoke those feelings once again.

I am not sure if there is an actor in the world today who relates the notion of “affective memory” to this description of Daniel Goleman’s. Lee Strasberg’s affective memory technique–sometimes called “emotional recall”–is indeed something completely different. It is organized in different cortical areas, particularly the amygdala, and is consciously accessed in a wholly different way (one quite involved, time consuming and often arduous). Though slightly different, even “emotional memory” as described by Boleslavsky, Robert Lewis, Uta Hegan and others is simply not what Goleman describes. All of them have nothing whatsoever to do with the recollection of “gestures, movements, and other expressions of an emotion”, which is to say psychophysical psychoaffective prosody patterns and the feelings and emotions that accompany them both innately and as a result. In his apparent ‘naiveté’ however, Goleman appears to be completely correct.

It was indeed Talma who first spoke of “emotions recollected in tranquility.” We can see this cognitive potential in the fact that even though “oppressed with real sorrow” he is prompted in mind to make “a rapid and fugitive observation on the alteration his voice, and on the “certain spasmodic vibration which it contracted” as he wept. This is a form of pattern recognition, and it cannot be emphasized enough, a form of psychophysical psychoaffective pattern recognition. Stanislavsky made direct and fervent reference to emotions, over time, being “transmuted into poetry.” 

Time had so clarified and poeticized [Shakespeare’s] impressions that they had become splendid material for his creations.

During a crisis stage in his career, the results of which would very much set the course of the rest of his life and search for an adequate technique and performance system for the actor, he spent the summer of 1909 in Finland, dejected and ruminating over his artistic past. He asked questions such as why it was that some great actors seemed always to be perfectly inspired and perfect in their performance, while other actors, including himself, struggled to achieve this and even more so to maintain it but in fleeting moments.

Duse, Yermolova, Salvini, had played their great roles many times more than I had played mine, but this did not stand in their way of making those roles perfect with every repetition.

Looking back into his past successful role as Dr. Stockman in An Enemy of the People, he records in his autobiography that, like Mr. John Drew, the excellent light comedian cited above, the strangest contents and realization suddenly emerged in his mind.

The perceptions I had put into the role of Stockman had been taken by me from living memories. I had seen with my own eyes the destruction of one of my friends, an honest man whose inner conscience would not permit him to do what was demanded of him by the great of this world. On the stage, during the playing of the role, these living memories used to guide me, and always and invariably awoke me to creative work . . . How was it that I could have lost them? How could I have gotten along without them?

In this state of reflection, and without the concerns and confusions of the stage, or the confusions of technique which surrounded it, he suddenly re-entered the dramatically inspired frame of mind. The role, its effect, its feelings and the means of producing it, vividly filled his consciousness once again.

But how well I remembered every movement of every muscle, the mimetics of the face, legs, arms, body and the slitting of the eyes that belonged to a short-sighted man.

Impressed upon his very nervous system, experientially acquired into his own unique affect lexicon, vivid in his mind, his memories, his sensibilities and his feelings, and available as context-bound event-related potentials in his psychoaffective prosodic vocabulary was everything that was necessary for his conscious creation and performance of the role. Like a painter with the right colors, like the singer having been given the right song, what inspired Stanislavsky to the performance of the role, and what he spent the rest of his life attempting to understand and develop for succeeding generations of actors, was his talent.

Sitting on a bench in Finland and examining my artistic past, I accidentally struck on the feelings of the Stockman long lost in my soul.

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References:

Archer, William (1888). Masks or faces?: A study in the psychology of acting. London: Longmans, Green, and Co.

Bowers, Dawn; Blonder, L.X. & Heilman, Kenneth M. (1999). Florida affect battery. Center for Neuropsychological Studies, Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, University of Florida.

Chekhov, Michael (1991). On the technique of acting. New York, NY: Harper Perennial

Cole, Toby, & Chinoy, Helen Krich (Eds.) (1970). Actors on acting. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press

Coquelin, Benoit Constant (1887). Art and the Actor. Alger, Abby Langdon (Trans.) New York, NY: Dramatic Museum of Columbia University. Google Books. Retrieved August 1, 2007 from

Goleman, Daniel (2005). Emotional intelligence. (10th Anniversary Edition). New York, NY: Bantam

Lieberman, Matthew D. (2000). Intuition: A social cognitive neuroscience approach. Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 126, No. 1. 109-137

Meisner, Sanford, & Longwell, Dennis (1987). Sanford Meisner on acting. New York,
NY: Vintage Books

Ross, Elliot D. & Monnot Marilee (2007). Neurology of affective prosody and its functional-anatomic organization in right hemisphere. Brain and laguage

Stanislavski, Constantin (1989). An actor prepares. New York, NY: Routledge

Stanislavski, Constantin (1952). My life in art. New York, NY: Routledge