Abstract
This chapter (“Language, Speech, Movement”) considers the function of language and verbal performance in the kinesthetic interchange between actors and spectators. Drawing upon the work of cognitive scientists and linguists, it explores two ways that language and speech condition theatrical kinesthesis. The first is through utterance, the kinetic process by which the body moves to produce meaningful sound. The second is through language itself, which—grounded in the body’s sensorimotor capacities—carries its own, linguistically embodied modes of action. In addition to continuing the discussion of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming begun in Chap. 4, this chapter includes discussions of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, Shakespeare’s King Lear and Macbeth, and Complicite’s immersive theatre production The Encounter, with Simon McBurney.
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Notes
- 1.
Jacques Lecoq, The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre, 52.
- 2.
Lecoq does not distinguish between emotion and movement: “Etymologically, the word emotion means ‘setting in motion’” (Moving Body, 48). This understanding parallels Sheets-Johnstone’s phenomenological insight: “In the ordinary course of everyday life, the affective and the kinetic are clearly dynamically congruent: emotion and movement coincide” (Primacy of Movement, 454).
- 3.
Lecoq, Moving Body, 51.
- 4.
See Stanton B. Garner Jr., Bodied Spaces, 120–158. While the embodied nature of language and the conceptual structures it represents have become an important topic in cognitive science and linguistics since the late 1980s, the phenomenological account of these is comparatively undeveloped.
- 5.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 200.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Ibid., 199.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
David McNeill, Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought, 2.
- 10.
Alvin M. Liberman and Doug H. Whalen, “On the Relation of Speech to Language,” 188.
- 11.
Alvin M. Liberman and Ignatius G. Mattingly, “The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Revised,” 2.
- 12.
Luciano Fadiga et al., “Speech Listening Specifically Modulates the Excitability of Tongue Muscles: a TMS Study,” 401. A different experiment by K. E. Watkins et al. also associated auditory and visual speech perception with increased activity in the motor system involved in speech production (“Seeing and Hearing Speech Excites the Motor System Involved in Speech Production”).
- 13.
Fadiga et al., “Speech Listening,” 401.
- 14.
Andew N. Meltzoff, “Elements of a Developmental Theory of Imitation,” 28. Also see Bénédicte de Boysson-Bardies et al., “A Crosslinguistic Investigation of Vowel Formants in Babbling.”
- 15.
For fuller discussions of Struck Dumb, see Garner, Bodied Spaces, 120–22.
- 16.
Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children, 54.
- 17.
Ibid., 55.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
This sequence can be found in Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, 59–60.
- 20.
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 133. Later in the same essay, Artaud observes, “No one in Europe knows how to scream any more, and particularly actors in trance no longer know how to cry out. Since they do nothing but talk and have forgotten they ever had a body in the theater, they have naturally also forgotten the use of their windpipes” (ibid., 141).
- 21.
Elena Passarello, Let Me Clear My Throat, 5.
- 22.
Ibid., 6. For a discussion of Brando’s vocal performances in A Streetcar Named Desire and The Godfather, see Katherine Kinney, “The Resonance of Brando’s Voice.”
- 23.
A man also is available on the balcony to stand in for Stanley when his name is shouted.
- 24.
Passarello’s performance can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-b6BZwfahw
- 25.
Pinter, Homecoming, 34.
- 26.
Ibid., 31.
- 27.
Ibid., 33.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 107.
- 30.
Sheets-Johnstone, Primacy of Movement, xxxi (emphasis in original).
- 31.
See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; Johnson, The Body in the Mind; and Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh.
- 32.
See Friedemann Pulvermüller, “Brain Mechanisms Linking Language and Action”; Pulvermüller and Luciano Fadiga, “Active Perception: Sensorimotor Circuits as a Cortical Basis for Language”; and Véronique Boulenger et al., “Grasping Ideas with the Motor System: Somatic Somatotopy in Idiom Comprehension.”
- 33.
David Kemmerer, “Action Verbs, Argument Structure Constructions, and the Mirror Neuron System,” 359.
- 34.
Ibid., 359. For a discussion of these overlaps in the context of the mirror-neuron model, see G. Buccino et al., “Listening to Action-Related Sentences Modulates the Activity of the Motor System: A Combined TMS and Behavioral Study.”
- 35.
Kemmerer, “Action Verbs,” 361.
- 36.
Guillemette Bolens, The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative, 39.
- 37.
Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 576.
- 38.
Dan I. Slobin, “Verbalized Events: A Dynamic Approach to Linguistic Relativity and Determinism,” 108 (italics and underscoring mine).
- 39.
Ibid., 113.
- 40.
Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, 218.
- 41.
Riverside Shakespeare, 1333.
- 42.
Ibid.
- 43.
Bert States, “Standing on the Extreme Verge in King Lear and Other High Places,” 425.
- 44.
McNeill, Hand and Mind, 23.
- 45.
David McNeill and Susan D. Duncan, “Growth Points in Thinking-for-Speaking,” 150–52.
- 46.
McNeill, Hand and Mind, 245–72.
- 47.
In their cognitive studies of acting, John Lutterbie and Rick Kemp provide fuller analysis of the language–gesture relationship from the performer’s point of view. Both draw upon McNeill’s analysis of this relationship, while Kemp integrates McNeill’s framework with Lecoq’s movement-based actor training. See Lutterbie, Toward a General Theory of Acting, 117–28, and Kemp, Embodied Acting, 63–92. In Cognition in the Globe, Evelyn B. Tribble argues that the coupling of language and gesture was an attentional and communicative resource for early modern actors and playwrights (85–110). Tribble credits Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy with the technical innovation of “yoking [. . .] action and accent such that the word extends into the world through the medium of the body” (105).
- 48.
Eugene O’Neill, Four Plays by Eugene O’Neill, 120.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
Riverside Shakespeare, 1364.
- 51.
Dench’s performance can be viewed in the 1979 television version of the Royal Shakespeare Company Macbeth, which replicates the staging of the 1976 theatrical production. See Macbeth.
- 52.
Riverside Shakespeare, 1364.
- 53.
For a fuller discussion of this, see Garner, Bodied Spaces, 131–36.
- 54.
George Home-Cook, Theatre and Aural Attention, 167.
- 55.
The Encounter premiered in August 2015 at the Edinburgh International Festival and opened at the London Barbican Theatre six months later. I attended McBurney’s production on tour at New York’s Golden Theatre in December 2016.
- 56.
Complicite and Simon McBurney, The Encounter, 3.
- 57.
Ibid., 41.
- 58.
Ibid., 47.
- 59.
The sound of leaves crunching underfoot was produced by McBurney scrunching the plastic packaging of a water multi-pack around the binaural head.
- 60.
Ibid., 48.
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Garner, S.B. (2018). Language, Speech, and Movement. In: Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91794-8_6
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