A few months ago I wrote
about Edward Hall's book The Hidden
Dimension, on the science of proxemics
-- the study of 'social distance', how we relate physically and
psychologically to
space and to overcrowding. A month earlier I wrote
a fanciful piece about how people choose where to sit at a boardroom
table and what that says about them. Now I'm reading Impro, by British playwright Keith
Johnstone, which is ostensibly about the art of improvisational acting,
but which has a great deal to say about other subjects,
including proxemics.
Here's a passage on Status and Space that especially caught my
attention:
Imagine that two stangers are
approaching each other along an empty street. It's straight, hundreds
of yards long and with wide pavements. Both strangers are walking at an
even pace, and at some point one of them will have to move aside in
order to pass. You can see this decision being made 100 yards or more
before it has to. In my view the two people scan each other for signs
of status, and then the lower one moves aside. If they think they're
equal, both move aside. If they both think they're dominant (or if one
isn't paying attention) they end up doing the sideways dance and
muttering apologies. But this doesn't happen if you meet a frail or
half-blind person: You move aside for them. It's only when you think
the other person is challenging that the dance occurs. I remember doing
it once with a man in a shop doorway who took me by the forearms and
gently moved me out of the way -- it still rankles. Old people tend to
cling to the highest status they have had, and will deliberately 'not
notice' others while clinging fiercely to the (often walled) inside of
the walkway. A bustling crowd is constantly and unconsciously
exchanging
status signals and challenges, with the more submissive person stepping
aside.
Johnstone is interested on how this subliminal body language and
status-checking can be exploited, to both powerful and comedic effect,
on the stage. I'm more interested in its implications for human
behaviour in a crowded world. I didn't believe the above passage was true until
I started observing people (and myself) moving in crowds. You can easily pick out who
sees him/herself as dominant, and who's going to move aside, a mile away by their demeanor and
body language. It's hilarious to watch. Older people almost always
expect, and subtly signal to younger people to move aside, even young
people in gangs with attitude. And they do move aside, belying their whole
superficial demeanor. Women tend to defer to men of the same age, but
old, frail and pregnant women somehow trump everyone else -- everyone
moves aside for them. I watched adults puff themselves up and brace for
collision with children (especially those of cultures that let their
kids learn these status rules slowly) rather than simply
get out of their way. In one case I watched a very respectable,
well-dressed middle-aged man actually deliberately kick a child out of the way, and
then apologize to the mother (not the child) that he (the man) 'wasn't
paying
attention'.
I never realized how arrogant I must appear in crowds. I tend to
dislike them, 'pretend not to see' people in them (much to the dismay
of people who later tell me I 'rudely' ignored their smile or nod or
wave of recognition), and take on a hurried, distracted, disinterested,
hostile and elbows-raised demeanor. It works very well, except with
some children, and except when I have to pass people from behind.
Imagine how this plays out in protest demonstrations! And in lineups,
especially where first-come first-served is hard to observe because
there are no clear lines, or where some lines move much faster than
others. So here you are a dominant person, forced to wait passively
behind a long, crowded line of 'people of lower status', while other
people of low status move ahead faster or even cut into line. Foaming
at the mouth time! Ever noticed that the people angriest in lineups are
middle-aged businessmen? Maybe I'm finally starting to understand
pecking orders: Why they're important in nature, as a simple and automatic
mechanism for social organization and balance. And how, in man, in our
horrifically overcrowded civilization culture, they get inflated and
perverted into political hierarchies and produce megalomaniacs and
nuclear pissing contests.
What disturbs me most is what this bodes for us idealists trying to
establish non-hierarchical, leaderless political and economic structures
-- communities of peers. Are such structures unnatural? Or do we simply
need to learn to recognize the pecking order for what it is -- a
primeval tool for minimizing conflict and deciding who will do the
breeding -- and what it isn't -- a license to take an unfair share of
wealth and power?
 Impro has some other
wonderful insightful observations on several topics. Here are my
favourites:
On Creative Blocks:
At a time when I seemed to have lost all my artistic talents, I began
to explore [dream images] and hold
onto and attend to them..Then I progressed to attending to
mental images [things I pictured for example while reading]...The
effect was so interesting that I persisted...I looked in the window
[that I was picturing in my mind] and saw strange rooms in amazing
detail...I belatedly thought of attending similarly to the reality around me. The deadness and
greyness of my life and imagination were immediately sloughed
off...The dullness was not, as I had thought, an inevitable consequence
of age, but of education.
On
Overcrowding: People travel a long way for a 'view'. The
essential element of a good view is distance, with nothing human in the
immediate foreground. It lets us experience the pleasure of having our
space flow out unhindered. Posture improves, breathing improves...These
are all probably symptoms of human overcrowding.
On Social
Distance: When you hand out leaflets on the street, you can't
just thrust them into people's hands. You have to establish that you're
giving out leaflets, and then present one at exactly the right moment.
If you get it wrong, people will either ignore you or be alarmed. [It's
a very complex social activity, hard to do well, as any election
campaigner will tell you. It's a submissive act, requiring great
improvisational skills, and almost impossible for dominant
personalities to master.]
On Education:
Most schools teach children to be unimaginative...Many teachers think
of children as immature adults. It might lead to better teaching if we
thought of adults as atrophied children. Many 'well-adjusted' adults
are bitter, uncreative, frightened, unimaginative, rather hostile
people [anyone you know fit this description?]. Instead of assuming
they were born that way, or that that's what being an adult entails, we
might consider them as people damaged by their education and
upbringing. Many teachers express surprise at the switch-off that
occurs at puberty, but I don't, because first of all the child has to
hide the sexual turmoil he's in, and secondly the grown-ups' attitude
to him completely changes. A story written off as childish fantasy in
an eight-year-old may be taken, at fourteen, as a sign of mental
abnormaility. The adolescent therefore has to learn to 'fake'
everything.
On Art:
We have this idea that art is self-expression, which is weird. An
artist used to be seen as a medium through which something else
operated...Imagining should be as easy as perceiving. [In children, it
is.]
On
Acceptable Behaviour: Sanity is a performance...It's a matter of
presenting yourself as safe...
When people are perceived as unpredictable, they are socially
rejected...And it's no good telling a student he won't be held
responsible for the content of his imagination [he will]...so the
student must pretend to be dull...People's normal behaviours destroy
other people's creative talent. All
the social weapons we use against other people we also use, inwardly,
against ourselves.
On Assuming
an Identity: Our faces get fixed with age, but even in young
people you can see that a decision has been taken to appear tough, or
stupid, or resigned. (Why Stupid? Because then people expect less of
you). Sometimes in extreme situations people will break out of their
usual expression and you can't even recognize them...Our personality is
the Public Relations department for the real mind, which remains
unknown. It always seems to function at some level in terms of what
other people think. If I am alone and someone knocks on the door I
'come back to myself'. I do this to check that my social image is
presentable. Though I may later get 'lost in the conversation' [and get
outside my personality]. People isolated for long periods report
'personality disintegration'. [Perhaps this isn't madness -- maybe they
become who they really are].
A
final caution: Despite its insights, this book is hard work -- it's
written for those who know the jargon and rituals of acting, and for
the rest of us it's tough slogging.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
