Faire face aux passions L’expression faciale sur la scène du xviii^e siècle

Throughout the eighteenth century, the actor’s face was seen as the privileged organ for displaying passion. The exact manner in which those passions would have been expressed, however, has not received enough attention. The present study places the embodied knowledge of the passions at the centre of this investigation, documenting an experiment taken from James Burgh’s The Art of Speaking. The results point to eighteenth century taxonomy of the passions as a powerful creative instrument for the actor.