Abstract
This chapter (“Movement and Animation”) examines the fundamental structures of self-movement and external movement perception. It considers the centrality of movement to animacy and the perception of animacy in living and non-living elements of one’s environment. Humans have a perceptual predisposition to recognize biological movement and involve themselves kinesthetically with movements that fall within a repertoire of familiar sensorimotor experience. The chapter applies these insights to theatre by exploring the phenomenology of animacy in performing objects and the kinesthetic dynamics of stillness and movement with actors onstage. The sections include discussions of Sandglass Theater’s puppet play about dementia, D-Generation: An Exaltation of Larks; the statue scene in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale; and Samuel Beckett’s Footfalls.
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Notes
- 1.
Simon McBurney, foreword to Jacques Lecoq, The Moving Body, x.
- 2.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Primacy of Movement, xxv.
- 3.
Jan Patočka, Le monde naturel, 46 (my translation).
- 4.
Oxford English Dictionary.
- 5.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas 2, 273.
- 6.
Ibid., 271 (my insertion).
- 7.
Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity, translated and cited in Jean-Luc Petit, “Constitution by Movement: Husserl in Light of Recent Neurobiological Findings,” 223. On the fundamentality of kinesthesia to self-constitution, Petit writes: “Before becoming, in the full sense of that word, an acting subject, the subject of its acts, the organism, is already ‘on the move,’ because only as already on the move is it capable of finding out about itself, discovering its own capacities and mastering them, and indeed of becoming for itself the pole of its own acts, if not a subject” (ibid., 222). See also Ludwig Landgrebe, “Phenomenology as Transcendental Theory,” 107–109.
- 8.
Husserl, Ideas 2, 159–60.
- 9.
Sheets-Johnstone, Primacy of Movement, 117 (emphasis in original).
- 10.
Ibid., 131.
- 11.
Sheets-Johnstone, “Kinesthetic Memory,” 87.
- 12.
Drew Leder, The Absent Body, 45–49.
- 13.
Barbara A. Gowitzke and Morris Milner, Scientific Bases of Human Movement, 256. Sheets-Johnstone discusses and critiques Gowitzke and Milner’s movement taxonomy in “Movement: The Generative Source of Spatial Perception and Cognition,” 323–29.
- 14.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 97.
- 15.
Rudolf Laban, The Mastery of Movement, 83–88.
- 16.
Erwin Straus, The Primary World of Senses: A Vindication of Sensory Experience, 257.
- 17.
Merleau-Ponty uses the term kinetic melody in Phenomenology of Perception, 135. In The Working Brain, Luria applies this term to the process of learning to write: “In the initial stages [. . .] writing depends on memorizing the graphic form of every letter. It takes place through a chain of isolated motor impulses, each of which is responsible for the performance of only one element of the graphic structure; with practice, this structure of the process is radically altered and writing is converted into a single ‘kinetic melody,’ no longer requiring the memorizing of the visual form of each isolated letter or individual motor impulses for making every stroke” (32). According to Luria, lesions of the premotor cortex result in “a definite disturbance of skilled movements, which are no longer performed smoothly, and each component of the skilled movement now requires its own isolated impulse” (179–80, emphasis in original). Sheets-Johnstone discusses the notion of kinetic melody in “Kinesthetic Memory,” 69–73.
- 18.
James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 223.
- 19.
“When the moving point of observation is understood as the general case, the stationary point of observation is more intelligible. It is no longer conceived as a single geometrical point in space but as a pause in locomotion, as a temporarily fixed position relative to the environment” (ibid., 75).
- 20.
Noë, Action in Perception, 1.
- 21.
Ibid., 130 (emphasis in original).
- 22.
Gibson, Ecological Approach, 126.
- 23.
Leder, Absent Body, 19.
- 24.
Edward S. Casey, The World at a Glance, 202.
- 25.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, 168–69.
- 26.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 144. Later in the chapter where this passage appears, Merleau-Ponty refers to the cane as “an appendage of the body, or an extension of the bodily synthesis” (154).
- 27.
Rudolf Laban, Choreutics, 10.
- 28.
Gibson, Ecological Approach, 116.
- 29.
Straus, Primary World, 239.
- 30.
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, 1.
- 31.
Sheets-Johnstone, Primacy of Movement, 55.
- 32.
T. G. R. Bower, “The Object in the World of the Infant,” 37.
- 33.
Sheets-Johnstone, Primacy of Movement, 223 (emphasis in original).
- 34.
Accounts of neurodivergence underscore the perceiving subject’s role in external movement perception. Individuals with cerebral akinetopsia (or “motion blindness”), which in severe cases is brought about by damage to the posterior brain, are unable to perceive fluid visual motion. Individuals with a milder, sometimes temporary, version of this condition report seeing movement stroboscopically instead of perceiving it as continuous. In gross akinetopsia, motion perception is more severely disrupted. One patient reported being unable to pour tea or coffee into a cup because “the fluid appeared to be frozen, like a glacier.” She was unable to cross the street because she could not perceive the movement of cars: “When I’m looking at the car first, it seems far away. But then, when I want to cross the road, suddenly the car is very near” (J. Zihl et al., “Selective Disturbance of Movement Vision after Bilateral Brain Damage,” 315). See also S. Zeki, “Cerebral Akinetopsia (Visual Motion Blindness): A Review.”
- 35.
Neurologically, the brain processes biological motion differently than it processes non-biological motion. For a useful overview of the interdisciplinary research being conducted on biological motion perception, see Johnson and Shiffrar, eds., People Watching.
- 36.
Marc Jeannerod, Motor Cognition: What Actions Tell the Self, 99.
- 37.
Francesca Simion et al., “A Predisposition for Biological Motion in the Newborn Baby.”
- 38.
For a discussion of these and other animacy experiments, see John A. Pyles and Emily D. Grossman, “Neural Mechanisms for Biological Motion and Animacy,” esp. 308–312. Arieta Chouchourelou et al., “What Does ‘Biological Motion’ Really Mean? Differentiating Visual Percepts of Human, Animal, and Nonbiological Motions,” addresses animacy perception.
- 39.
William Wordsworth, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 68.
- 40.
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, 141.
- 41.
William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, 276 (hereafter referred to by title).
- 42.
Kenneth Gross, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life, 66.
- 43.
Ibid., 33–34.
- 44.
Jiři Veltruský, “Puppetry and Acting,” 88.
- 45.
Jan Mrázek, Phenomenology of a Puppet Theatre: Contemplations on the Art of Javanese Wayang Kulit, 30–31.
- 46.
Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” 11 (emphasis in original).
- 47.
Ibid., 15. For a useful discussion of puppetry and the uncanny, see John Bell, “Playing with the Eternal Uncanny: The Persistent Life of Lifeless Objects.”
- 48.
For additional information on TimeSlips, see Anne Basting, “Dementia and the Performance of Self.”
- 49.
Additional information on D-Generation, which was directed by Robert Salomon, and a five-minute video that includes scenes from the production, can be found on the Sandglass Theatre website: http://sandglasstheater.org/d-generation/ (accessed 22 May 2017).
- 50.
Gross , Puppet, 55.
- 51.
Samuel Beckett, Dramatic Works, 13.
- 52.
Eric Bass et al., “D-Generation,” 3.
- 53.
Riverside Shakespeare, 1650.
- 54.
Oxford English Dictionary.
- 55.
Riverside Shakespeare, 1650.
- 56.
Ibid., 1651. Kenneth Gross offers a powerful discussion of Shakespeare’s statue scene in The Dream of the Moving Statue, 99–109.
- 57.
William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, 155, note 20.
- 58.
A photograph of Allen as she appeared in the statue scene can be found on the Folger Shakespeare Library website in a section of the Winter’s Tale page entitled “Picturing The Winter’s Tale,” http://www.folger.edu/winters-tale (accessed 30 July 2017).
- 59.
Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, 68.
- 60.
This play of motion and inanimacy was an organizing dynamic of the 2016 Cheek by Jowl production of The Winter’s Tale. Throughout the play, but especially at the beginning and end, scenes of intense physical theatre were counterpointed by intervals of equally intense stillness where movement was frozen or suspended. The play was introduced by the figure of Time sitting motionlessly on stage while the audience took their seats, and during Leontes’ Act 1 soliloquies Hermione and Polixenes sat mannequin-like, de-animated, as Leontes manipulated their bodies to reflect his jealous imaginings. Characters were “statued,” in other words, well before the play’s concluding scene. In this denouement Natalie Radmall-Quirke sat immobilized as Hermione/Hermione’s statue and held this position so long before and after Pauline called on her to “be stone no more” that it began to feel as if she might not move at all. Rising, she walked around the gathered characters, approached Orlando James’s Leontes, and held her hand out for him. His moment, too, was held, to the point that both Hermione and Leontes entered a kind of suspended animacy.
- 61.
Riverside Shakespeare, 1342.
- 62.
Ibid.
- 63.
Ibid., brackets in original.
- 64.
Bottom’s death-scene as Pyramus in the tradesmen’s play at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a memorable example of an actor who cannot stay dead. Animacy trumps inanimacy during his failed attempt to non-perform.
- 65.
John Gielgud, Stage Directions, 20–21.
- 66.
Garner, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama, 52–86. This formalizing impulse can be seen in the stage designs of Edward Gordon Craig and Adolph Appia, Craig’s concept of the Über-marionette, Stanisław Witkiewicz’s Theatre of Pure Form, and the theatrical work of visual artists such as Wassily Kandinsky.
- 67.
Garner, Bodied Spaces, 37.
- 68.
Beckett, Dramatic Works, 426.
- 69.
Ibid., 427.
- 70.
Ibid., 432.
- 71.
Ibid., 429.
- 72.
Ibid., 429.
- 73.
Bille Whitelaw, quoted in Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater, 60.
- 74.
Brater, Beyond Minimalism, 64.
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Garner, S.B. (2018). Movement and Animation. 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_2
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