Where there’s some overlap, there are differences in how the gestures are articulated.” “And because chimps live in communities that are relatively closed and quite aggressive with each other, each community has its own repertoire of gestures.
A former student of Roger Fouts, she too campaigns to end primate captivity. “This happens naturally in the wild,” says Mary Lee Jensvold, who advised Nick Lehane on his play. (It is still legal to keep primates as pets in the UK.)Ĭhimpanzee vocalisations aren’t under conscious control, but the apes can communicate using body gestures. These experiments have so transformed our view of chimp culture that many of the original researchers are campaigning to end the practice of keeping primates in captivity. Modern efforts to communicate with chimpanzees began in 1967 at the University of Nevada, Reno, when primatologists Allen and Beatrix Gardner set up a project to teach American Sign Language (ASL) to a chimp called Washoe. Read more: Chimp sign language and human communication follow the same rules
Then, as Lehane looked deeper, he discovered a much darker story. Fouts’s tales of experiments in fostering young chimpanzees in human homes had obvious dramatic potential. Lehane conceived the show after reading Next of Kin, a memoir by psychologist and primate researcher Roger Fouts. It is a moving story that is attracting attention from neurologists and cognitive scientists along with the usual performing-arts crowd. The play, Chimpanzee, by Brooklyn-based actor and puppeteer Nick Lehane, is a highlight of 2020’s London International Mime Festival. Rowan Magee, Andy Manjuck, and Emma Wiseman operate the chimpanzee, the sole actor in a puppet play running at the Barbican Centre in London. Now she is incarcerated in a research laboratory, deprived of company, her mind slowly deteriorating. When she was young, she lived as part of a human family. She gazes out at the audience from a raised platform and, through movement alone, weaves her tale. The puppet, a life-sized female chimpanzee, is made out of wood, rope, carved hard foam and paper mâché. In Chimpanzee, puppeteers create a thought-provoking and emotional story
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