Live Communication: The Business of Theater

Acting training begins with the body. Our bodies provide the context of everything we say, and as animals we are vastly more sensitive and responsive to physical signals than we are to the meanings of words. Ape groups have complex social hierarchies; they may even be capable of understanding complex language. They can be taught to communicate extremely sophisticated ideas using standard sign language. But the majority of what they communicate is by actions and a limited range of grunts. This does not make them unsophisticated socially. Power play, love, friendship, alienation, bullying, altruism – all these behaviors and more are observed and recorded among ape communities. It is almost impossible for people who work closely with them not to see them as almost human. But this obscures the truth. Apes are not like us in some surprising ways. We are almost exactly like them. The extraordinary sophistication of human language blinds us to the fact that for the most part we hardly use it. We may be able to express our ideas with great subtlety and clarity using language, but the content of what we say to someone rarely lands without most of its meaning lost or corrupted on the way. The bulk of what actually gets communicated successfully between people in a face-to-face communication is signed and signaled by body language and intonation, as it is with other apes.