The 1885 book that graphed the human face into 81 expressions
Genevieve Stebbins, an American actress, wrote it after training under Steele MacKaye, who had studied in Paris with François Delsarte, a French singer and orator who died in 1871 without publishing his method. Motion away from yourself he called excentric, motion inward concentric, and balanced motion between the two normal. Those three combine with three essences — mental, moral, and vital — into what he called the ninefold accord, a grid meant to hold any gesture a person could make.
- ▪Genevieve Stebbins, an American actress, wrote it after training under Steele MacKaye, who had studied in Paris with François Delsarte, a French singer and orator who died in 1871 without publishing his method.
- ▪Motion away from yourself he called excentric, motion inward concentric, and balanced motion between the two normal.
- ▪Those three combine with three essences — mental, moral, and vital — into what he called the ninefold accord, a grid meant to hold any gesture a person could make.
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Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/08/05/delsarte-expression-system.html |
| Publication time | Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:56:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-05T18:45:41.648Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-05T18:45:41.648Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 4lkoGX6BhpM3 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The 1885 book that graphed the human face into 81 expressions Popkin 10:56 am Wed Aug 5, 2026 Delsarte system — Internet Archive Book Images / No known copyright restrictions (Wikimedia Commons) The Delsarte System of Dramatic Expression is an acting manual, first published in 1885, that set out to chart every movement a human body can make. Genevieve Stebbins, an American actress, wrote it after training under Steele MacKaye, who had studied in Paris with François Delsarte, a French singer and orator who died in 1871 without publishing his method. Delsarte organized everything in threes. Motion away from yourself he called excentric, motion inward concentric, and balanced motion between the two normal.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
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