Based on video-recordings of several weeks of rehearsals of a Japanese theater piece played by French actors, and adopting an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective, this paper focuses on how the same few lines of a scene are subsequently enacted. In particular, it explores how the scene is played, not only in relation to the script but also to the situated moment-by-moment unfolding of embodied movements constituting the actions and achieving their detailed formatting and meaning. Whereas the dialogue refers to (...) the scripted text, we argue that the multimodal details of each scene constitute a unique situated course of action achieved for ‘another first time,’ whose multimodal configuration depends on the temporality and the shape of each step, gesture, and body posture, as they are embodied and responded to in the vivid present and its contingencies. We demonstrate this by revealing how variations of the scene are performed, explored, and serendipitously found by the actors. We focus in particular on embodied details like walking, sitting, hugging and kissing, and the sequential and temporal positions at which they co-occur with the lines of the script. The analysis demonstrates both the indexicality of the script interpretations and the creative contingencies of the embodied work of the actors. In this way, it aims at contributing to current growing literature revisiting theater rehearsal as a situated activity and an interactional multimodal achievement. (shrink)

This study investigates moments in which one participant in an interaction embodies that he is “doing thinking,” a display that is commonly referred to as “thinking face. ” From an interactional perspective, it is assumed that embodied displays of “doing thinking” are a recurring social practice and serve interactive functions. While previous studies have examined thinking faces primarily in word searches and storytelling, the present study focuses on argumentative activities, in which children engage in processes of joint decision-making. The paper (...) has two interrelated aims. The first aim is to describe how multiple modalities—beyond the face—are temporally coordinated to create multimodal gestalts of “doing thinking.” It is shown that thinking displays not only involve dynamic imaginative gaze but also stylized bodily postures. The second aim is to generate knowledge about the functions of thinking displays in children's argumentative activities. The analysis describes how both speakers and recipients use thinking displays in different turn positions and align them with verbal talk or silence. The data for this study comprise video recordings of decision-making processes in groups of older children. Drawing on a multimodal approach to situated interaction, it will be proposed that embodied displays of “doing thinking” provide a resource to shape participation frameworks, mark epistemic stances and create epistemic ecologies for collaborative reasoning. By investigating thinking displays in a particular conversational activity, the study sheds light on the diversity and context-sensitive functionality of thinking displays. It also contributes to recent research on children's collaborative reasoning as an embodied discursive practice. (shrink)