A smallish woman lets out a king-size Yelp!

Is she signaling to someone?

Acting out a private psychological drama?

Or do we see up-welling of genuinely improvised emotion?

Her eyes bulge, and figuring from the posture of her left hand, she fears that during this violent quaking of her body she will lose her strapless baby-doll top completely.

No one in the woman’s vicinity reacts with anything like her intensity, and we do not know why. The party-goers in the background — fading from focus — display unguarded casualness, as they would at home among family and friends. Consider the tall man occupying the right-edge of our frame. Unlike our boisterous female subject, the dude has reached a deep state of oblivion; inundated by distressing memories, it seems at any moment he might crumple and fall to the floor.

Our screamer’s outburst will not fit neatly into any corpus of human (or chimp, or baboon) non-linguistic vocalizations. The lady’s demeanor borders on the uncanny; like a pagan priestess she appears to summon powers from an unseen world. Examine her right hand for example. That forearm — connected to those fingers — belong to a woman about to prophesy.

By happenstance, I witnessed a comparable scream and body language recently in real time on live television — expressed by the glamorous blonde girlfriend of a world-record-holding athlete, after he triumphed on the field. I saw the same bug-eyed screech, arm signals alike, with selfsame ligaments and muscles pulled string-tight. It was effortful in the extreme; she behaved as if her squeals could be heard above the raised voices of tens of thousands of cheering spectators. By some alchemy she mixed pain with fear, while at the same time radiating joy and almost orgasmic pleasure — an unlikely amalgam tailored to the situation as only she could perceive it.

In our present photograph, I believe we see a phenomenon of the same kind: a non-repeatable, idiosyncratic, inexpressible-in-words exhibition of feeling.