Values

I got to thinking about the concept of values reading a book called The Mastery of Movement by theatre director Rudolph Laban.  The book is a technical manual on understanding movement for the purposes of acting, miming movements as a method of communicating to an audience ideas action and intent.  In addition to being renowned in theatre, his concepts are also used in Psychology by researchers studying body language, as he has a detailed, codified system of explaining movement that I still don’t comfortably understand.

In context, Laban talks about values as being important to understanding and portraying a character, because people strive after things that have value to them, and so those values create motivations to expend effort and orient their behavior in that direction.  Understanding what that character values affects the movements that person will take, direction, facing, and how they will treat people.  Desire for value also precipitates conflict, either internal conflict within themselves between contradictory values or the values of society, and external conflicts between two or more people.  If you observe the conflicts between two people or groups, that can give you information about what values those people hold, and what their goals are regarding the values they are attempting to achieve or uphold. 

In the context of theatre, values that audience members observe by actor movement and actions can evoke emotion or a partisan perspective in the person viewing.  Sympathy, antipathy or apathy are all possible when the actor communicates his character, but is dependant on whether the observer can relate to the experience based on their own life.  Of course, I think the goal of any art is to evoke any combination of strong emotions in the spectator, and so the audience needs to be taken in to consideration before any kind of presentation, in that they should be able to relate to it in some way.

A personality can change temporarily on the path to advancement towards a value.  For example, a gentleman can be harsh in dealing with a particular difficulty, or a talkative person may become silent around of certain people.  However their personality will eventually revert to their ‘true’ personality as they progress towards their value or the situation changes and they can no longer advance towards the value, or perhaps temporary resolution of the conflict supersedes direct advancement toward the value.

Inner attitudes, based on the values an individual or character holds, are most visible in small areas of the body, sometimes only barely visible, but is especially obvious in the eyes.  People often feel the need to be deceptive so any obvious movements could be disguised or omitted, except in pro deceivers it will still be visible by micro expressions most often in the eyes and face.  A good example of this is a drug addict, one of the most stigmatized stereotypes in our culture.  A junkie may be a good liar, tell you they need money for something else or explain away their looks or behavior as not being caused by addiction but instead some other plausible reason.  However, when presented with their drug of choice, the addict’s eyes will fix on the drug and follow it if it moves around without being aware they are doing it.  This is what the person values, and society is critical of it for being a petty, shallow, self-destructive value compared to more highly held values like power, wealth, fame.  This is also where the seven deadly sins of Christian ethics comes from (gluttony, sex, sloth, etc), because repeated sin is believed to destroy the grace and charity within a person.  The person’s worth in society is relative to how able they are to be useful or beneficial within that society, and the incorporeal ‘body’ of society are the values that are taken for granted by the average person as common knowledge and natural.  People immersed in sin are in a poor position to help others, because that value erodes the value of charity.

This got me thinking about present day examples.  What are the values held by someone who is using their cell phone all the time?  Do they value social contact, or is it a narcissistic appeal that they have more control over the social experience in that it will be more oriented about them or their needs?  Maybe not as overt as the seven sins, narcissism was alluded to in recent interpretation of Psychologist Abraham Maslow theory of the Hierarchy of Needs.  As you proceed higher and higher up the list, that is most of your basic needs fulfilled such as food, shelter, security, being loved, there could be a dark side toward self-actualization, as many physical needs are met people turn inward in a sense, and perhaps they become less motivated.  Maybe not everyone has the tools or the capacity to become self-actualized, and instead they stall out part way up the hierarchy and, having no apparent motivation, fixate on themselves, in a particular way, as the only value that remains in their life.