por He sign language It is the ability to express ideas, thoughts and feelings, through gestures and body movements. Unlike with verbal or written language, words are not used, but non-verbal communication.
From childhood, parallel to verbal communication, the human being develops year after year, this way of making themselves understood through mimicry. This process is acquired by observing different actions and reactions that express different ideas and needs.
A good example to understand what we mean when we talk about sign language is when you meet another person who does not speak your same language but needs to communicate something to you. Perhaps unconsciously, you begin to make body movements and gestures, in order to make yourself understood.
It could be said that mime language is one more tool for humans and animals, which is used to survive.
It is also used as a means of expression in different branches of art such as the theater in charge of the mime (from the ancient Greek μῖμος, pampering, “imitator, actor”), who tells a story through movement, without appealing to speech. Another example is dance.
6 well-known examples of sign language
1- Pantomime
Pantomime is a form of artistic performance. The person in charge of carrying out this representation is a mime. It is about telling various stories, emotions, feelings by omitting verbal communication and putting the body at the service and replacement of the word. Also included in dramatic mimicry.
Used as a resource for dramatic representation since Ancient Greece, this expressive tool evolved from generation to generation, passing through the Roman Empire, widely used in the Noh or Noh theater of Japanese musical drama.
His period of maximum splendor took place in Italy in the 16th century with the Commedia dell’Arte, that is, the Comedy of art.
There were great professionals, artists who used pantomime as a means of artistic expression, among which stood out: Charles Chaplin (United Kingdom, 1889/1977), British actor and director; Buster Keaton (USA, 1895/1966), American silent film actor and director, and Marcel Marceau (France, 1923/2007), French mime and actor.
2- Sign language
Sign language or signs is an expressive language through the use of different signs and gestures perceived visually and through touch.
It was Gerónimo Cardano, an Italian doctor, who in the 16th century established that deaf-mute people would be able to communicate through symbols, associating them with the object or thing referred to.
Later, exactly in the year 1620, Juan de Pablo Bonet published the first treatise on phonetics and speech therapy, which would help in communication between the deaf and dumb.
3- Silent cinema
The beginning of silent cinema was in the year 1888 with the first silent film entitled «The Roundhay Garden Scene» made by Louis Le Prince. Its heyday lasted from 1894 to 1929, a time when sound films took the reins of the seventh art.
In silent movies, there was no synchronization between images and sound, mainly there were no sound dialogues. Sometimes you could appreciate the accompaniment of live music to the images of the film.
Most of the movies filmed during the silent era were filmed in black and white. There are records that show that some filmmakers, such as Georges Méliès (1862/1938, France), had a team in charge of painting the frames, in order to give color to the films.
According to experts on the subject, towards the end of the 1920s, with the invention of talkies, there was a great crisis in cinema, because the visual quality of silent movies during the 1920s was much higher than that of its sound successor. . Several years were necessary to recover the people inside the audiovisual projection rooms.
4- Greetings with the hands
Another example of sign language can be all or some of the gestures that we use on a daily basis with our peers. From winking to a handshake.
There are several stories that try to explain this custom that we have of greeting each other with our hands. One of them tells us that doing this comes to us from the cavemen, who raised their hands to tell the other person that they did not have any weapons.
Over the years, this form evolved, changing according to the culture of each town and giving new meaning according to its form. There are some studies such as NLP (neurolinguistic programming), which inform us that depending on the way we greet, we will be demonstrating different postures. For example:
Palm down: Domination.
Straight/parallel palm: Empathy.
Palm up: Submission or shyness.
5- Attempts to communicate between two people who do not speak the same language
The situations in which we use all our baggage of sign language that we possess are in which, either by chance or by design, we come across another human being who does not speak the same language as us.
Whether traveling in another country, or with a tourist back home, these encounters happen. It is there when we begin to make all kinds of signs, with the face, the hands, the whole body, in order to make ourselves understood. Of all the examples, this is the one that clarifies the concept of sign language the most, since it is natural for us to imagine this situation.
6- Theater of gesture
The theater of the gesture makes us go through stories through trained actors to reach an excellence in body training. They are professionals of the gesture, they have their body and not only with the word, they express themselves, they bare their emotions or rather, that of their characters.
One of the great references of the theater of the gesture, recognized worldwide for his years of studies and practices, was the French mime, actor and teacher Jacques Lecoq (1921/1999).
Lecoq began as an athlete and physical education teacher, giving him these studies, a great knowledge about the body and its expression in space. Years later, he became interested in the Commedia dell’arte.
The main factor in training in the Lecoq method is the primacy of the gesture, of the body in motion, over merely verbal performance.
References
Mimic. Retrieved from es.thefreedictionary.com.
Corner of Psychology (2011). Mime language: How does it help to understand the other? Recovered from rinconpsicologia.com.
Le Corps Poétique (The Moving Body, the Poetic Body-Editorial Alba, Barcelona May 2003).
What is sign language. Retrieved from: cheesela.net.