77 Nonverbal Communication Beings have a shared language across cultures through gesture, facial expressions and ability to communicate with the body, something we know as nonverbal communication. The human body responds to active stimulation as “kinaesthetic awareness is structured into patterns of physical sensation that become part of cultural conscious so that to some extent, kinaesthetic patterns are absorbed and understood tacitly as part of culture” (Carr 2014: 54). In this way people are shaped by their culture. We can often see nonverbal communication taken out in the style of dance: Experience is made by the dynamic of the actual and the virtual; the dancer, as she or he dances, is actualizing her or his world. It takes attention to be able to actualize. As this attention becomes actualization, we no longer distinguish ourselves from our motion, the touch from its effects: they are interwoven as a complex experience of self-sensing (Little 2014: 253). Researching the body in performance opens our understanding of the ways in which bodies connect with the space and other performers, amplifying the vulnerabilities associated with touch-based performance. Within the somatic framework of the dance form, the transition from athletic, controlled movements to relatively simple actions, such as standing or walking, become anchored in the dancer’s engagement with his self-experience. In anchoring actor training in movement, physical embodiment and quality brings forth the imagination, meaning characterisation and storytelling becomes more natural. The physical “Viewpoints” suggested by Mary Overlie are made up of: space, shape, time, emotion, movement and story, later adapted by Anne Bogart and Tina Landau to develop the philosophy; Bogart and Landau created the new physical “Viewpoints”: spatial relationship, kinesthetic response, shape, gesture, duration, architecture, repetition, tempo and topography, which are used by the actor for perceiving, reacting and expressing. A Viewpoints workshop with teacher and practitioner, Stephen Atkins, who guides the students to explore a script through the work of Viewpoints, ultimately calls upon their sensorial intelligence. Each set of partners uses the same script and each has a motivation or intention for the scene whether that is breaking up, falling in love, betrayal or a misunderstanding as, “mental dispositions must have content: they are ‘about’ something - not just words”. Through changing up their proxemics, body language and contact with each other, the audience are able to read the dynamics of the relationship each time. Through storytelling, whether that is as an actor, or non-actor, the speaker does not “take the imaginary circumstances as real” as Merleau-Ponty suggests in a case study of gesture, “but
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