As we have seen, a characterization is a putting-together of many qualities both physical and mental: appearance, age, health, energy, dress, habits, along with temperament, intelligence, attitudes, education, and likes and dislikes. One or two of these visible characteristics will be of paramount importance: a costume and the actor’s bodily demeanor can convey dramatic meaning [...]

Rehearsal is when the timing and pacing of the play and the acting from moment to moment is established, both of which are the key to communicating with the audience. The prime example of timing and pace is the act of the stand-up comedian, whom we can describe as a solo actor, telling the audience [...]

Let’s try to summaries what happens during the process that leads the actor from ideas, understandings and intuitions to the full physical realization of a character. These may vary from ‘he’s a dancing athletic tough guy who clowns a lot’ (Mike, in Berkoff’s East) to ‘She’s elegant, magnificent, stately, and everything she does is calculated [...]

Sense memory is Stanislavsky’s term for our recollections of our real sensations and how we react to our sensory perceptions. Sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell are our personal radar. If the actor is doing something special, perhaps it’s because he’s showing a kind of super-sensibility, feeling, hearing and seeing with more intensity than the [...]

1- Start by using the relaxation exercises
2- Stand with the feet slightly apart. Raise the arms and stretch upward; look upward, reach for the sky. Now let the arms slowly fall, from wrists to shoulders, as the head falls on to the chest. Let the spine melt from the top, at the same time as [...]

Children from ten to twelve are often very perceptive. They will begin to need to work on material which has a structure. The teacher might find it useful to create short scenes from books they’ve read, children’s stories, plays and children’s plays, and always from stories with dialogue: Dickens, of adult novelists, springs to mind [...]

A long speech has a shape, a profile: imagine this speech drawn as a graph, and think that it is rising to a peak of interest and excitement. In speaking blank verse, with its linguistic richness, inflection and stress must be subtly used, and quite long passages can be spoken with little change of note: [...]