What is it about?
By becoming increasingly aware of our physical sensations, I guided my theatre students to experience emotional states that arose in their movement studies. The research discovered that the emotional states were not generated by the movements themselves, but that the movements triggered embodied memories of previous emotional experiences.
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Why is it important?
In theatre work, this sensitivity to physicality helps the performer to experience emotions on stage rather than to attempt to portray them. In a broader sense, the realization that movements are triggering emotional experiences helps us understand how we present encounters can be influenced by often unrelated past encounters without our awareness of them.
Perspectives
This research is the beginning of my investigation into disrupting prejudice. In this paper I discovered how useful and how deceptive it can be when emotional states from earlier learned experiences are triggered by activities experienced in the present. These past experiences colour and influence our interpretation of events in the present even when they are completely independent of them. By learning to experience them and access them through somatic work, it opens the door towards recognizing the learned biases we hold and disrupting their power over our thoughts and behaviours.
Edmond Kilpatrick
Simon Fraser University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Generating emotions out of movement and posture or merely the sensations of emotion: a performative inquiry, Journal of Theatre Dance and Performance Training, September 2017, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/19443927.2017.1327884.
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