2.
Position
Within any situation a person must adopt a position that will have
a relationship to the positions of all the others in the room. These positions will arise out of the
physical demands or constraints of the situation and the relationship of the
agents. For example, on an airplane the
relationships of most of the characters will be situational and
accidental. For those who are sitting
with acquaintances, friends, or family, those positions will also be
relational.
While there are 360 degrees of possible difference in any person’s position in regard to each of every other's, there are general
differences possible in positional relationship. Each character may address the other from
either a facing, side, or back position.
The other person has the same set of choices. Together they can adopt relative positions
that are:
1. Face-to-face
2. Face to side
3. Face to back
4. Side to face
5. Side to side
6. Side to back
Of course if one person is unhappy with the positional
relationship they may endeavor to move in order to achieve one more
desirable. When they do so the other
person must choose to either submit to the new relationship or try to change it
back or to another. Because movement also forces a change in meaning of the
proxemic distance there is significance as well in the proxemic change.
There is no precise set of meanings that may be granted to any of
these positions, as the meaning is always a function of the feelings of the
participants, based on their prior relationship and their present
situation. Lovers may choose to be
face-to-face in order to bask in the vision of the loved one. A parent or teacher may demand a face-to-face
relationship when delivering a lecture.
Enemies may maintain an unvarying face-to-face relationship because of
their unwillingness to trust the other out of their sight.
People who do not know each other very well usually maintain a
more unqualified face-to-face relationship when forced to engage in
conversation, perhaps because they need to take advantage of all available
visual cues in order to accurately "read" the communications and
avoid mistakes that may result in giving offense. Psychological experiments suggest that women
have a marked preference for conducting conversations with friends in a largely
face-to-face relationship. Perhaps this
is because that as children they often develop friendships by sharing secrets
with each other. Many circumstances
situationally force people into a side-by-side relationship. Standing in military ranks, traveling in
various forms of private and public transportation, attending a variety of
educational or recreational experiences, and many others situations formally
require side-by-side position. In
psychological experiments men show a marked preference for talking with friends
in a side-by-side relationship. Perhaps
this develops because as children so much male friendship building grows out of
a sports context in which conversations are maintained while watching the field
of play or in competing side-by side.
In scientific studies very small children left alone with another
of the same sex will quickly demonstrate a preference for different positional
relationships. The little girls will immediately bring their
chairs into a face-to-face position while the little boys will move their
chairs side-to-side. No one has
proven satisfactorily whether the tendencies are genetically influenced or
societally encouraged or both. Of course
the natural preference of each sex for a different positional relationship is
an excellent source of conflict onstage as well as one that may seriously
strain relationships in real life.
The period of courtship is the only time when men naturally and
unconsciously defer to women’s preference for the
face-to-face position. Some writers have
posited that the reason for this is that males consider courtship a competitive
event and therefore find it natural to adopt the face-to-face position in that
circumstance. Women continue to desire
the development of intimacy face-to-face. However, according to Deborah Tannen,
one of the leading figures in the field of interpersonal communication, men
grow intimate through silence during a shared activity. However, it is possible to achieve a compromise
by finding a time when she can be face-to-face and he is not required to look
at her as when they are out for a ride and he is at the wheel. This an excellent time to ask for and receive
the sharing of secrets which they crave without making him feeling the
uncomfortable challenge which he associates with the face-to-face position.
Turning one's back on another may be an act of rejection or,
conversely, may signify a relationship so close that one is comfortable
trusting the other with his back. Intimates
may feel comfortable in conducting conversations without being able to see the
other's face because they know each other so well that they trust themselves to
interpret the other's meaning through verbal cues alone.
A scene must begin with each of the characters in a particular
positional relationship to the other.
That relationship may remain quite constant, especially if they are in a
formal setting such as sitting at the ballet.
It may also change many times during the course of the scene if the circumstances
permit, as discoveries are made and the feelings of relative status, or of
liking and loathing arise through the medium of those discoveries. Perhaps that is why so many people choose to
end a relationship with another in a relatively formal setting such as an
office or a restaurant, hoping that the proxemic and positional requirements
will constrain the other to maintain the social decorum of the place. Of course if the interruption of the other
person’s expectation is too great
formal constraints may be insufficient to keep him or her from receiving an
equally unexpected glass of burgundy in the face.
Discovering the
moment-to-moment pattern of varying positions is another of the highly visible
variables of behavior that the audience can read.
Exercise: Observe two people whom you do not know well
interacting in a public place for five minutes.
What kind of positions do they establish between themselves at the
outset? How do they vary those positions
during the course of the interaction?
How do you interpret their relationship based on those choices? Record your impressions.
Spend five minutes in
conversation with another. Vary your
position from time to time. Does this
produce any emotional change in you? Does
it affect the behavior of your partner?
To the extent you can determine the purpose of your conversation, try to
use the changes of position purposefully to achieve your intention. Record your impressions.
3.
Facial Expression
The face is accurately regarded as the most specific, most
complex, most telling expresser of inner life.
The expression of thought and feeling through facial expression is
present also in some of the mammals, but not to the extent it is in man. Perhaps that is because emotion arises out of
discovery and the head contains all of the organs of discovery--the sensory
organs of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch and the rest of the body
merely extends the organ of touch. The
eyes naturally express the emotional affect of a particular discovery that a
stimulus to sight makes possible. One
may smile at the unexpected appearance of an old friend, for example. The nose may wrinkle at the sudden onslaught
of a bad smell. The mouth may draw
together in a moue of distaste at the unexpected tartness of an apple. The ears may "prick up" at a
frightening and unaccountable sound in the night.
Animals are, however, as far as we can tell, free expressers. They use clear and truthful channels of
expression and seem unable to mask or exaggerate or pretend their feelings as
people do. While our bodies can achieve
these sophisticated strategies to some degree, our faces are veritable machines
of such expression. The face, especially
among primates, seems to have enjoyed evolution development for expressive
capacity as well as sensory intake.
Primate faces possess many muscles, the movement of which accommodates
chewing, uttering, listening, seeing, and smelling. These and other muscles are used as well to
achieve a wide variety of expressions. Perhaps this capacity developed as an
evolutionary acknowledgement of the utility of possessing a silent organ of
complex communication.
All expressions, whether free, masked, or pretended, are created
through the cooperation or the tension between muscles surrounding the eyes and
those surrounding the mouth. In a smile,
all the muscles lift. In sadness, all
the muscles droop. In a frown the muscles
of mouth and brow often contract and draw toward the center. In surprise and fear the eyes often widen and
the eyebrows lift even while the mouth
drops slackly open. These are but
a few descriptions of the simplest expressions of which the face is capable. Often two or more emotions can be seen to war
(or blend) in the face. The eyes may
frown while the mouth is stern, or vice versa.
There are expressions of angry surprise, comic dismay, angry
embarrassment, and many more.
Paul Ekmann, the generally accepted authority on facial expression
(see his The Expression of Emotion
for an extraordinarily helpful in-depth discussion of the subject) has
identified the seven expressions of emotions that are universally recognized
and used by all humans, even those in the most isolated tribes. The seven are: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust,
contempt, and surprise. Clearly there
are any more facial expressions that these (10,000 according to Ekmann) but the
rest of these are blends of these seven.
The thirty-seven feelings that we generally recognize as distinct have
already been discussed in the section on Emotion. The pure seven are those (along with
confusion) that we are most likely to used as character masks to conceal our
true feelings for tactical purposes.
As with all of the others, "working" this element of
expression should never be a matter of pre-planning specific choices of
expression. It is necessary for the
actor to be certain that she is free of any tension arising from her
circumstance as an actor and that she is in all ways available to the
particular expressive demands of her character.
She should decide whether her character is, in general, a high-expresser
or a low-expresser. She should also
decide whether her general tendency in the circumstances of the scene would be
toward free expression, masking, exaggeration, or pretense. She must be particularly attentive to all
discoveries, for those will be the moments which will have the greatest
tendency to change not just individual expressions but the expressive strategy
which they have heretofore adopted. It
is impossible to do this subject justice within the limits of this text, but it
is not as necessary to do so as it is with some of the other elements of
behavior because we are ordinarily far more aware of our expressions and more
consciously reading the expressions of others than we are with any other
element. We are already conscious of
having control of our expressions and using them to our advantage.
Exercise: Observe two people whom you do not know well
interacting in a public place for five minutes.
With what kind of facial expressions do they greet each other at the
outset of the interchange? What are the
gross changes in facial expression you can detect during the course of the
interaction? Can you identify each of
them as signifying a particular emotion?
How do you interpret their relationship based on those changes?
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