• Part 1: About Bodyspeak

    BodySpeak™ – Samuel Avital’s unique approach to the art of movement – is difficult to place in any category. To attempt to describe it is to…

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  • Part 2: Early Life

    Avital was born to a Sephardic family in the village of Sefrou near the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. He was the son of loving and…

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  • Part 3: Teachers and Lessons

    From Decroux, Avital acquired the grammar of movement. He learned to analyze minutely, the complex maneuvers of corporeal mime and then to reconstitute the analysis…

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  • Part 4: The Workshop Laboratory

    In these early years Le Centre Du Silence became Avital’s laboratory, where he could fully distill the teachings of the mime masters and develop his own…

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  • Part 5: The Sixth Sense

    Ever since Aristotle first identified the five senses – sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, we’ve been used to thinking that we have just these…

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  • Part 6: Kinesthesia and the Mind/Body Split

    According to psychologist Howard Gardner, (20) there are seven distinct types of intelligence: verbal, musical, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, and two types of personal intelligence – self-awareness and…

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  • Part 7: Return to the Body

    In its integrative role, mime belongs in the context of a twentieth-century undertaking that we might call “The Return to the Body.” The Western discovery…

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  • Part 8: References and Notes

    1. Poetics: IV, 2. Quoted in Marcel Jousse, The Oral Style, trans. Edgard Sienaert and Richard Whitaker (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990) 24. 2. Mime and Beyond, 103.…

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