76 Silence and solace in connecting through touch Emma Gibbon This essay is the taken from the first chapter of my dissertation. Embodiment Not only as performers, but as beings, we are present in the space; sensorily conscious of one’s environment, in order for our selves to be exposed to experience. Through Merleau-Ponty’s understanding in Phenomenology of Perception (2012), the body is a means “of expressing that my body is in and toward the world”, explored through the term “body schema” (103). The ways in which we explore our body’s relation to space and external objects, seen through Merleau-Ponty’s understanding that there would be “no such thing as space if [one] did not have a body”, means that there is a system working to experience concepts, quality and feeling in the state of being. It is mainly through physicality that we transform our relation to different sensations (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 104). Our body is made up of five modes of perception, touch being the “mother of the senses”: sight, hearing, taste and smell (Montangu 1986 in Lannen 2022: 169). These lead an artist to a free-flowing performative state of self, which movements suggest “something of the complexity of the relationship between conscious somatic experience and a sense of self” (Carr 2014: 49). The act of movement alone changes our perception of being, through articulating muscles into forms and shapes changing rhythm and quality where “the outer manifestation of some passion…will cause a reflex within” (Wangh 2000: 22), suggesting that by manipulating the external sensations, the performer finds the way to embody a role through understanding the bodymind connection. By actors feeding into their bodymind connection they face the task to also “‘re-earth’ philosophy through theatrical practice - to connect with everyday experience in its embodied, visceral, tactile forms” (Johnston 2021: 14). Philip Zarrilli published his own creative process in “(Toward) a Phenomenology of Acting” (2020) that explores the art of listening and receptivity similar to that of the calligrapher’s attentiveness to the sound of the brush (2020: 3-4). Performers must move with intention through their deep state of consciousness within a character to perform the wider intentions of the story they communicate, for this is the art of storytelling: “The art of the actor is to recreate, which is not the same as repetition: repetition if mechanical is deadening; repetition of a moment of truth is impossible” (Fortier 1997: 33). Embodiment is the foundation to understanding why your character may introduce physical contact that influences the nonverbal storytelling.
View this content as a flipbook by clicking here.