“Tears of Truth”

TORS 1770, Denis Diderot describes in his famous Paradoxe sur le comédien: "Garrick sticks his head through a crack in the door and in the course of four or five seconds his facial expression changes from wild joy to moderate joy to calm, from calm to surprise, from surprise to amazement, from amazement to grief, from grief to dejection, from dejection to shock, from shock to horror, from horror to despair.From this last stage he climbs again to the starting point."(Diderot 1770; as cited in Wilson 1961).This is indeed an overwhelming act of acting and has often become a starting point for questioning the emotional conditioning, the "sensibilité" of actors.In the 20th century-from Konstantin Stanislavski's theoretical writings and practical approaches at the Moscow Art Theatre through Lee Strasberg, who commented that Diderot's analysis "has remained to this day the most significant attempt to deal with the problem of acting" (Strasberg 2012), or Bertolt Brecht, Jerzy Grotowski, Eugenio Barba, Sanford Meisner and many others-countless theories and practical approaches have referred to Diderot and his question about how actors can best perform an emotional scene in order to be credible, convincing, persuasive and truthful.But how is credibility or "truth" to be measured and compared when talking about artificially produced emotions or rather deliberately produced emotional facial expressions?Does digital technology help or hinder distinguishing real from fake faces?"Tears of Truth", an offshoot of the "Actor & Avatar" project, was conceived to systematically examine crying, blushing and other facial signals forming part of emotional expression from the perspective of production aesthetics.The aim was to develop a framework and extensive database in order to examine production mechanisms in professional acting and their underlying determinants.A close cooperation between several disciplinesacting, theatre studies, psychology and computer science-was started to investigate the production and reception of complex emotions like crying and blushing because of their cultural-historical importance.Actors' access to and execution of emotional scenes are highly individual, making comparison a challenge, especially if we miss the opportunity to measure the emotion and ask about the subjective experience.Central in this investigation would be the expertise of professional actresses and actors.They would perform typical emotional states on a scale of increasing emotional intensity: joy, sadness, fear, anger and disgust, but also shame, pride, relief, as well as surprise, interest, pleasure, awe, triumph, and compassion, everything in fine gradation and convincing appearance.The coupling of theoretical, neuropsychological and practical expertise could help to better understand how professional actors perform a role and express feelings "on demand"."The mark of a good actor or actress is indeed the ability to cry on command" (Nochlin 2004).An investigation on facial expressions-both performed live and reproduced digitally-would help to model emotions along stringent

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