The story of the most famous protest in sports history, written by one of the men who staged it.

Language use is fundamentally multimodal. Speakers use their hands to point to locations, to represent content and to comment on ongoing talk; they position their bodies to show their orientation and stance in interaction; they use facial displays to comment on what is being said; and they engage in mutual gaze to establish intersubjectivity. This volume brings together studies by leading scholars from several fields on gaze and facial displays, on the relationship between gestures, sign, and language, on pointing and other conventionalized forms of manual expression, on gestures and language evolution, and on gestures in child development. The papers in this collection honor Adam Kendon whose pioneering work has laid the theoretical and methodological foundations for contemporary studies of multimodality, gestures, and utterance visible action.

This study addresses the problem of meaning as it is conveyed by poetic language, attempting to move beyond some of the obstacles and boundaries of contemporary critical approaches. By providing a phenomenological context, and through a theoretical contemplation of certain myths as embodiments of the tacit 'logic' of poetry, the book argues that poems convey meaning much the way that spontaneous unreadable gestures do. Moving between theory and practice, and drawing upon the poetry of Wallace Stevens whose work is embedded with a richness and complexity of gesture, the author shows how the poetic text sustains and embodies an inconvertible, ancient and innately human form of linguistic knowledge.

Landmark study on the role of gestures in relation to speech and thought.

The origins of theatre date back to 500 b. C. with religious rituals of ancient Greece. Mime drama dates back to Theocritus, to performances of folk life, to gatherings in honour of the God Dionysus, during which the use of a mask was introduced. The Romans used to mime political situations inventing satirical pantomimes. A silent genre developed in the town of Atella, the Atellan Farce, with fixed characters, ancestors of the stereotypes of the Commedia dell’Arte or theatre of the Zanni. The father of the family of the Zanni was the servant Arlequin. In the Commedia dell’Arte of the Sixteenth Century, the face was covered by a mask that would define the nature of the character. Created by Deburau in 1665, the melancholic Pierrot will step on stage and as his ancestors, he will be forever in love and rejected. With Molière, the use of the mask will start to change until it will disappear leaving space to the expressiveness of the face and nature of the character. With Carlo Goldoni the “Commedia di carattere” will flourish. In the Twentieth Century it’s Charlie Chaplin’s turn to write an important chapter of the art of mime with the romantic hero Charlot who wanders up and down the streets in the city of London in the Twenties, desperate and alone. In his gestural grammar, Etienne Decroux covers the face of the actors with a veil to leave only the body mass to speak. On the contrary, according to his pupil, Marcel Marceau, the face and the hands represent the backbone to gestural eloquence as in Oriental techniques with the aristocratic Noh and the commoner Kabuki. Starting from Graeco-Roman Statuary, retracing the phases of gestural art, remembering the myths of gesture and, working side by side with Decroux, Marceau will decide to generate the last heir of this imaginary dynasty, the merchant of illusions, Bip, leaving him free to live and dream in the temporal space of a performance. Transforming the invisible into visible, bringing into the theatres all around the world his pantomimes, the French Master has made palpable the art of emotions.

This book explores how we move our hands when we talk, and what it means when we do so. Focusing on what we can discover about speakers—adults and children alike—by watching their hands, Goldin-Meadow discloses the active role that gesture plays in conversation and, more fundamentally, in thinking.