Exercises for Embodied Actors

Tools for Physical Actioning

Scott Illingworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000037630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

Exercises for Embodied Actors: Tools for Physical Actioning builds on the vocabulary of simple action verbs to generate an entire set of practical tools from first read to performance that harnesses modern knowledge about the integration of the mind and the rest of the body.

Including over 50 innovative exercises, the book leads actors through a rigorous examination of their own habits, links those discoveries to creating characters, and offers dozens of exercises to explore in classrooms and with ensembles. The result is a modern toolkit that empowers actors to start from their own unique selves and delivers specific techniques to apply on stage and in front of the camera.

This step-by-step guide can be used by actors working individually or by teachers crafting the arc of a course, ensuring that students explore in physically engaged and dynamic ways at every step of their process.

Part I

Foundations for Physical Actioning

1 Curiosity & Attention

Cobbling It Together

Part of what makes acting so difficult as a craft is the inability to stand back and see your own work. A cobbler (I know, not many around anymore, but stick with me) can finish a pair of shoes, take a look and compare them to other shoes, and, assuming they aren’t particularly self-deluded, assess their skills compared to those of others. Even better, someone will wear those shoes who likely doesn’t care much about the cobbler’s feelings and happily tell them if the shoes don’t fit or are poorly made or wear out too fast. The finished product of the cobbler’s craft has a function that it must serve for the wearer/audience when complete. It does or does not serve that function well. Having the finished product separate from yourself allows a whole range of options for assessing your work.

Maybe cobbling isn’t the best example. Perhaps it feels too utilitarian. “Shoes aren’t art,” you might argue, though I suspect Manolo Blahnik would disagree. Let’s look at musicians instead. They have the tremendous benefit of musical notes. Notes vibrate at certain frequencies. That is measurable. You either hit the note or you don’t. You are in time with the conductor or drummer or you are not. There is, of course, tremendous craft beyond that, but there are some satisfyingly objective assessments that a musician can use for calibration in performance and when listening back to a recording. Musicians occupy this interesting space where they both use their bodies as part of the work but still rely on tools outside themselves.

Maddeningly, acting is the craft of doing what we all do all the time – being human. The finished product looks (more or less, depending on the piece) like the rest of life. From that perspective, anyone can act. You’re already human. You practice every day. All of your social interactions include some elements of performance. So why, then, are most people not very good actors even though they have all that experience under their belts? Because most people don’t really know what they’re doing.

We are living, not observing how we are living. We respond to the world, but don’t often wonder about those responses. We operate from habit and pattern and most of life does not demand the kind of examination of intention or cause and effect that actors must apply to a performance. With all that practice at being human we are so habituated to our version of it we can’t see how we are as humans. We don’t recognize what we are doing moment-to-moment. We don’t really see what is happening in others or between us and others. Often, we don’t even know why we are responding the way we are to events and stimuli.

This is where training and practice must enter. To learn to act well you must make a study of humanness – your own and others. You must be a sociologist, psychologist, and neuroscientist. Acting is very real and utterly false. Part of that falseness is the repetition of events – knowing what is next. Sometimes it is the extremeness of the events – plays are full of traumatic and euphoric events that most actors never experience in real life. Your job is to become a ruthless observer of the true and a tireless practice-er of the skills that help the false appear to be true.

The appear part is important. Your experience in performing isn’t useful if it isn’t serving the story or reaching the audience. You have a responsibility to them. An actor can have a riveting experience for themselves that is uncommunicative or fails to produce empathy in the people watching. That is a frustrating complication of the work. My mentor and colleague, Mark Wing-Davey, argues that too often people seek to become actors because of how watching others act made them feel. Then they get on stage and try to experience the emotions that drew them to the work, failing to understand that the role of actor and the role of audience are different. Leave the response to the audience. Your job is the doing. Let your work produce empathy in others.

It is a daunting undertaking to study and replicate humanness. Perhaps you feel overwhelmed. Maybe you have a sudden interest in cobbling. Set those feelings aside for now. Turn your attention outside yourself and toward the doing. We’ll begin with the first and most important trait of good actors. It is the mooring you should grab hold of if everything else floats away.

Curiosity

When people ask about the one characteristic I look for in an actor above all others I answer “Curiosity.” I do not mean a passing, vague, selective, or self-serving curiosity. You must cultivate an insatiable curiosity for the world and others and information and contradicting points of view and everything that you encounter. Curiosity requires moving through the world with a quality of listening rather than speaking. It requires seeing the world in the form of a question rather than as confirmation for an answer you already possess. You must put yourself in places where the expected and the unexpected will cross your path and devour those experiences. The good news is that curiosity is something you can practice every minute of every day. Nobody needs to hire you in order for you to practice it and no job or task or conversation is without an opportunity to deploy it. The world is an endless stream of information about other people’s humanity, social behavior, needs, fears, and how it all plays out in their bodies in space.

Curiosity is the foundation for your work and must exist within the work itself. What you can observe and unpack about the human interactions around you provides a rich catalogue of ideas, inspiration, and experiences when you confront a new script or a moment between characters that feels utterly unfamiliar to you. A state of curiosity can make learning more possible.¹ I always object when people suggest young actors cannot do good work because they haven’t experienced enough in their lives yet. It assumes they’ve had an easy or privileged childhood and misunderstands our capacity to blend observation with imagination. If you are a voraciously curious observer of the world of any age, then you have the most important skill upon which to build the craft of an actor. No matter how old or experienced, a lack of curiosity means you pull characters as close to yourself as possible. You deny them their exciting distance from you. A failure of curiosity is the surest way to a failure of imagination.

How do you train curiosity? Leave space in your daily life to follow it. That means taking time to travel through your city or town in a way that few of us do in modern life. Your eyes are naturally curious, moving more frequently than you might imagine and drawn to the places with the most useful information.² Leave them free to discover objects and people in shared spaces instead of locking them onto a screen. There are many ways to be curious through technology, too, of course. Your work as an actor, however, requires practice cultivating curiosity in shared spaces without the mediation of technology. It means prioritizing your foundation as a theatre-maker over the comfort of disconnection from your immediate environment. The boredom you might feel creates space to listen to your own thoughts and where they take you. I’m pro-boredom. It’s painful. An article in The Atlantic described one study where “two-thirds of men and a quarter of women would rather self-administer electric shocks than sit alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes.”³ On the flip side, another study suggested that the more time we have to exhaust the obvious answers, the more creative our responses become.⁴ That’s where you must reside.

Curiosity is also a foundation for empathy. Try this out. Find a wood floor and look at it. What can you see of the construction or the stain color or the flaws or cracks? How old is the floor? Who was the laborer that laid it down those years ago? Were they paid a living wage? What kind of wood is it? Where was that specific tree? Is that forest still there or was it all cut away for floors like these? Everything you see can inspire an internal “Why?” or “How?” Don’t be satisfied with the simple answers. Almost every answer leads to new and more specific questions. Questions born from curiosity are a valuable way to see the way the labor and lives of others, often invisibly, intersect with you. Make it visible. There is still much we don’t understand about how curiosity works, but evidence indicates that a high level of curiosity about an idea or topic helps develop memories about it and is associated with reward patterns in our brain.⁵

With that in mind, take a few moments now and do the following experiment about curiosity. This is the first of many experiments and exercises throughout the book. Whenever possible, I encourage you to really do them. Even if you can’t do it right at this moment, come back to it before you read too much further. The experiments build on one another and often the text immediately following an experiment asks you to reflect on the experience in order to understand the ideas presented. You’ll notice that for each instruction the first part is italicized and sometimes there is additional instruction that isn’t. The italicized portions are the key step-by-step instructions for the experiment. In regular typeface are questions to ask yourself as you do that step or side-coaching that a teacher or director might offer as actors explore the instruction. It will become clear as you read that the instructions and additional text come from my experience teaching these experiments out loud with groups of students. I’ve tried to re-create that feeling for you here. If you’re doing this work in a class or as part of a group, some of the experiments work best with one person taking the role of teacher or director and guiding the rest of the group by reading out loud. Most, however, can easily be done simply reading the instructions by yourself.

Rewarding Curiosity

1. Select something you really enjoy doing but feel a bit guilty spending time on. Keep it something simple like checking social media, or pampering yourself, or eating a cookie.
2. Plan to do that activity right after this experiment. Have the reward sitting nearby.
3. In the location you’re currently sitting, select an object or architectural element to investigate.
4. What gets your interest about it first?
5. Begin to ask questions about that item.
6. Start simply. Perhaps you ask technical or more literal questions first. What color is it? What shape is it? Does it have marks or wear from use? What function does it serve in that location?
7. Make sure to expand beyond the easily observable. How long has it been here? How did it get here? What materials is it made of? Where do they come from? What people were involved in its creation? What are their lives and working conditions like?
8. Be careful not to invent answers you cannot know. If a question is answerable, that’s great. Many are not answerable from where you are and with the information you currently have. The answers aren’t the goal.
9. Exhaust your ability to ask questions. When you’ve run out, sit with the lack of questions and see what comes up. Try changing your position related to the item and let a literal new perspective help generate new questions.
10. Once you’ve done this with the item for no less than 10 minutes, immediately allow yourself the reward you decided on before the experiment.

Was it challenging to keep your focus on a single item for that long? Did your mind wander? To what? Did you feel irritable or frustrated or trapped by the task? Calmer? What feeling did the reward produce?

This isn’t a one-time exercise. Active curiosity should become a daily practice. Perhaps, for you, the reward isn’t necessary. Others may need help making curiosity a new habit in life and linking the act to patterns of reward in the brain. With time, you’ll see how many moments each day offer the opportunity to practice and build this skill. Once you become a more habitually curious person, though, we must turn that into a tool you can use. The next step is taking that open and available curiosity and aiming it in a meaningful way.

Attention

Attention is where your curiosity points at a given moment in time. Curiosity is the state you must exist in. Attention is the conscious way you aim that state at a target. It is not merely focus or the performance of focus. Too often in rehearsal or performance actors lock their eyes on a partner’s eyes – really trying to “see” the other. They often see nothing. They are performing an idea of attention. As Sartre wrote, “The attentive pupil who wishes to be attentive, his eyes riveted on the teacher, his ears open wide, so exhausted himself in playing the attentive role that he ends up by no longer hearing anything.”⁶

Attention can mean looking into someone’s eyes. More often, however, it means allowing different elements of their behavior, language, breath, clothing, walk, or whatever else might be observable to grab hold of your curiosity. Then, without locking onto that element needlessly, let the information you discover and your ongoing curiosity draw your attention to the next thing. You likely did this without even realizing in the first experiment. Your curiosity led somewhere specific. It provoked a discovery or question that brought you to the next thing. Your thoughts and ideas springboarded one to the next.

To understand how it operates in life, imagi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1: Foundations for Physical Actioning
• PART 2: Seeing Yourself
• PART 3: Building an Embodied Role
• PART 4: Experiments for the Classroom & Ensembles
• PART 5: Program Notes
• Appendix
• Index