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How to be Relaxed for the Whole Body in Acting

How to be Relaxed for the Whole Body in Acting

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 […]

How to Create Opposites in Character in Acting

How to Create Opposites in Character in Acting

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 […]

How to Handle the Timing During Acting Rehearsals

How to Handle the Timing During Acting Rehearsals

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 […]

How to Become the Character During Acting - Thought to Action

How to Become the Character During Acting – Thought to Action

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 […]

How to Utilize Sense Memory When Acting

How to Utilize Sense Memory When Acting

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 […]

How to Understand the Essentials of Movement in Acting - Shoulders and Head

How to Understand the Essentials of Movement in Acting – Shoulders and Head

We’ve seen how the head carries sense and meaning, so the shoulders and neck must be free, poised and flexible. All gesture and action with the arms and hands flow freely from the centre of the upper chest. Try this small experiment to get the feel of this. 1- Raise your arms and elbows to […]

How To Introduce Text in Acting

How To Introduce Text in Acting

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 […]

Acting - How To Shape A Speech

Acting – How To Shape A Speech

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: […]

How to Use Improvisation in Acting

How to Use Improvisation in Acting

The work needs an observer, who may be the director, acting teacher, or a fellow-actor who has common sense and can watch astutely. He or she will advise the actors on what emerged during improvisation with clarity, humanity and insight. You need to know several things before starting: where are we? What point of what […]