SOCIAL AND PUBLIC SPACE

Social distance, too, has a close phase and afar phase. The close phase is four to seven feet and is generally the distance at which we transact impersonal business. It is the distance we assume when, in business, we meet the client from out of town, the new art director or the office manager. It is the distance the housewife keeps from the repair man, the shop clerk or the delivery boy. You assume this distance at a casual social gathering, but it can also be a manipulative distance.

A boss utilizes just this distance to dominate a seated employee- a secretary or a receptionist. To the employee, he tends to loom above and gain height 'and strength. He is, in fact, reinforcing the 'you work for me' situation without ever having to say it. The far phase of social distance, seven to twelve feet, is for more formal social or business relationships. The ' big boss' will have a desk large enough to put him this distance from his employees. He can also remain seated at this distance and look up at an employee without a loss of status. The entire man is presented for his view. To get back to the eyes, at this distance it is not proper to look briefly and look away. The only contact you have is visual, and so tradition dictates that you hold the person's eyes during conversation. Failing to hold his eyes is the same as excluding him from the conversation, according to Dr Hall. On the positive side, this distance allows a certain protection.

You can keep working at this distance and not be rude, or you can stop working and talk. In offices it is necessary to preserve this far social distance between the receptionist and the visitor so that she may continue working without having to chat with him. A closer distance would make such an action rude. The husband and wife at home in the evening assume this far social distance to relax. They can talk to each other if they wish or simply read instead of talking. The imper- sonal air of this type of social distance makes it an almost mandatory thing when a large family lives together, but often the family is arranged for this polite separation and must be pulled more closely together for a more intimate evening. Finally, Dr Hall cites public distance as the farthest extension of our territorial bondage. Again there is a close phase and a far phase, a distinction which may make us wonder why there aren't eight distances instead of four. But actually, the distances are arrived at according to human interaction, not to measurement. The close phase of public distance is twelve to twenty five feet, and this is suited for more informal gatherings, such as a teacher's address in a roomful of students, or a boss at a conference of workers. The far phase of public distance, twenty-five feet or more, is generally reserved for politicians where the distance is also a safety or a security factor, as it is with animals. Certain animal species will let you come only within this distance before moving away.

While on the subject of animal species and distance, there is always the danger of misinterpreting the true meaning of distance and territorial zones. A typical example is the lion and the lion tamer. A lion will retreat from a human when the human comes too close and enters his 'danger' zone. But when he can retreat no longer and the human still advances, the lion will turn and approach the human. A lion tamer takes advantage of this and moves towards the lion in his cage. The animal retreats, as is its nature, to the back of the cage as the lion tamer advances. When the lion can go no farther, he turns and, again in accordance with his nature, advances on the trainer with a snarl. He invariably advances in a perfectly straight line. The trainer, taking advantage of this, puts the lion's platform between himself and the lion. The lion, approaching in a straight line, climbs on the platform to get at the trainer. At this point the trainer quickly moves back out of the lion's danger zone, and the lion stops advancing. The audience watching this interprets the gun that the trainer holds, the whip and the chair in terms of its own inner needs and fantasies. It feels that he is holding a dangerous beast at bay. This is the non-verbal communication of the entire situation. This, in body language, is what the trainer is trying to tell us. But here body language lies. In actuality, the dialogue between lion and tamer goes like this - Lion:' Get out of my sphere or I'll attack you.' Trainer: 'I am out of your sphere.' Lion: 'All right. I'll stop right here.'

It doesn't matter where here is. The trainer has manipulated things so that here is the top of the lion's platform. In the same way the far public sphere of the politician or the actor on a stage contains a number of body-language statements which are used to impress the audience, not necessarily to tell the truth. It is at this far public distance that it is difficult to speak the truth or, to turn it around, at this far public distance it is most easy to lie with the motions of the body. Actors are well aware of this, and for centuries they have utilized the distance of the stage from the audience to create a number of illusions. At this distance the actor's gestures must be stylized, affected and far more symbolic than they are at closer public, social or intimate distances. On the television screen, as in the motion picture, the combination of long shots and close-ups calls for still another type of body language. A movement of the eyelid or the eyebrow or a quiver of the lip in a close-up can convey as much of a message as the gross movement of arm or an entire body in a long shot.

In the close-up the gross movements are usually lost. This may be one of the reasons television and motion picture actors-have so much trouble adapting to the stage. The stage often calls for a rigid, mannered approach to acting because of the distance between actors and audience. Today, in revolt against this entire technique, there are elements of the theatre that try to do away with the public distance between actor and stage. They either move down into the audience, or invite the audience up to share the stage with them. Drama, under these conditions, must be a lot less structured. You can have no assurance that the audience will respond in the way you wish. The play therefore becomes more formless, usually without a plot and with only a central idea. Body language, under these circumstances, becomes a difficult vehicle for the actor. He must on the one hand drop many of the symbolic gestures he has used, because they just won't work over these short distances. He cannot rely on natural body language for the emotions he wishes to project no matter how much he 'lives' his part. So he must develop a new set of symbols and stylized body motions that will also lie to the audience. Whether this 'close-up' lying will be any more effective than the far-off lying of the proscenium stage remains to be seen. The gestures of the proscenium or traditional stage have been refined by years of practice. There is also a cultural attachment involved with the gestures of the stage. The Japanese kabuki theatre, for example, contains its own refined symbolic gestures that are so culture oriented that more than half of them may be lost on a Western audience.