Use your eyes

Let’s hope the unseasonably sunny weather continues, though perhaps it might relent a little on Sunday, when the London Marathon looks like being run in conditions warm enough to be difficult to cope with. However, our classes continue as normal and I hope the fine weather will encourage a few more people to turn out, both on Thursday and on Saturday. If you haven’t been for a while, they are drop-in classes and one of their delights is that we never know who is going to surprise us and reappear, so don’t be shy about coming along.

And the Words of Wisdom this week: Use your eyes! When we look at people we look at their eyes. When they look at us they look at our eyes. We read people’s eyes and we signal with our eyes and we are wonderfully skilful at interpreting people’s character and mood from a momentary scanning of those few square centimetres in the upper part of their face. Gaze is a more fundamental channel of communication than spoken language: we can communicate with people who do not speak a word of our language by using the expression of our eyes. We can even communicate with some species of our animal cousins in the same way: the language of gaze is pre-human. So, especially on screen or in small scale theatre, actors should use their eyes and lead with their eyes. When you watch a film, note how often the most powerful shots are the reaction shots, where a character is not speaking at all. One look can be worth a thousand words so … use your eyes!