A Phenomenological Perspective

 

In my doctoral research, which concentrates on actor training (Hayes 2010), I refer to gesture using a phenomenological framework. I examine the perceptions of actors in training as they come to comprehend themselves as bodies under observation (by the audience). In the specific training that I both teach and research –The Malmgren Acting Technique – actors become conscious of their body’s movements in space. Part of this consciousness pertains to non-verbal communication between bodies. Bodily stances, angles of parts of the body in relation to the body’s axis, movement of arms, legs, feet, fingers, the head, hands, fleeting facial movements, all are able to convey what I term as pre-linguistic reflective communication (Hayes 2010, 248). I use the term pre-linguistic because these performed communications operate outside of symbolically structured dimensions solely defined by language. Malmgren’s acting technique, basing itself on many of Rudolf Laban’s terminologies for specific human movements, labels these kinds of movements as ‘incomplete actions’ (Hayes 2010, 51; Laban 1971, 86–87) indicating they are not functional actions. The developmental psychologist Spencer D. Kelly (Kelly et al 1999, 588) states that the unconscious moves performed whilst speaking ‘co-determine the meaning of any utterance’, where the person making the sound, whether words or exclamations, may be partially unaware of the totality of the meaning conveyed. Moreover, in present gestural research it is not clear whether any listener can fully comprehend the information encoded in these spontaneous gestures (Beattie; Shovelton 2007). I use the term ‘reflective’ to situate these non-functional communications within Jacques Lacan’s (1999, 216) concept of mimesis, where an ego or identity is established through differentiation between itself and otherness through a mirroring process. Bruce Wilshire (1999, 167) suggests that in terms of theatre, mimesis operates as an unconscious means taking on the ‘expressivity of others in the group’.

 

Gestures (‘gestes’) for Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception (2002) are the means through which any animate body explores her world and enacts intentions. He emphasised the vital role that the body plays in constituting any perception of reality. In Merleau-Ponty’s (1968, 152–153) model of the chiasmatic connection between any body/subject and firstly their own body and secondly the bodies of other body/subjects, Merleau-Ponty describes a process through which ‘a consciousness [is] caught up in the ambiguity of corporeality’ (Garner 1993, 448).  The embodied subject is at one and the same time grounded in and of the world and is able to reflect on that very condition. For Merleau-Ponty our realities are already established through our bodily intentions, which are always in part intertwined with others’ embodied intentions.  Merleau-Ponty established the body/subject as embedded and interactive with every other body/subject, creating ‘phenomenal fields’ of experience (Merleau-Ponty 1968). Gestures for Merleau-Ponty, through this intertwinement, are the accumulation or acquisition of communal habits or skills. Any body’s movements in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment are the intermediary position between culture and a given biological world (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 98; Casey 1998, 213), since every action is performed within an intersubjective space. The movements that I have termed pre-linguistic reflective communication emanate from what Merleau-Ponty terms the ‘autonomous’ or ‘prepersonal’ body (2002, 97) that ‘cleaves to’ the world even before the body/subject has assumed any perception of it. A wonderful and famous example of this is outlined by Iris Marion Young (2005) in her seminal article ‘Throwing like a girl’. It was 1977 when Young first presented her examination of young women’s motility and spatiality of throwing and in which, using Merleau-Ponty’s theories, she clarifies how the intentionality and motility of young women’s throwing abilities are unconsciously restricted through the girls’ bodily intersubjective experiences within a male-dominated environment. The results are the socially constructed habits of visible body comportments.