Acting Exercise - Going From Conscious to Instinctual

We've all been put through acting exercises ranging from reliving past personal experiences, to moving like a wild animal, to everything in between. In essence, every exercise has one thing in common: get our work as an actor from the conscious to the unconscious. It is a repetition process focused on helping us transition from the conscious choices in our head to the instinctual reactions of our gut. It's the same approach that is followed in every creative art form and in every sport.

However, it is very hard to identify the validity of an impulse. They all come from somewhere, and therefore must reflect our instincts about a character, scene or fleeting moment. Yet, we need get to a point where we trust our strong impulses because they have led us to exciting results over a long period of time.

There are actors who have profound impulses that show up without a significant amount of training or performance experience. On the other side of the spectrum, there are actors who have been working on their craft for fifteen years and have rarely ever been able to allow the scene to flow from instinct and not conscious control.

What our experts at Child Actor LA are presenting here is based on the simple premise that all scenes, whether they're from theater, film, or television, have three things in common: circumstance, relationship and state of being.

When we understand these three elements of a scene, we're able to draw on our deepest universal connection to the scene and character. We start discovering the character through the instinctual connection we have to ourselves in that situation. This is the most effective way to find the distance between our characters and us. We can then focus our energy towards building that bridge and finding the character's truth. Along the way, we are inspired by the tangible experience of our growing craft.

By examining the larger circumstances of each scenario first, you will discover how much you already know about the relationships, the emotional stakes and the life of the character you are portraying.

The goal of the following exercises is to free the actor from seeing the text as a prison, and help him find how performance of a text can feel organic and improvised at all times. We are presenting these seven steps by our professionals at Child Actor LA not as a final, all encompassing process, but as a starting point for discussion.

The Seven Steps

• Develop a one-page overview of the scene, emphasizing the key emotional and personal elements that you connect to immediately. This will help you bring your personal understanding to an imaginary circumstance.
  

• Put the script DOWN and improvise the scene from the scenario you've created until the discoveries you've made start to move your emotions without predetermined choices.
  

• Rewrite the scene (or your character's portion) emphasizing the subtext/unspoken needs, wants, desires of your character that you found in the improvisation. Use anything that pulls you emotionally into the true ESSENCE of the scene.
  

• Rehearse this "pre-scene" several times until you feel the character and the scene coming to life and discoveries flowing from you. The improvised text might start locking in, but don't worry about that. Keep playing. Take special note of the feeling you have before starting the scene now. Identify it and recreate it until it feels organic in your body.
  

• Put yourself in that state of being and work from the scripted scene, putting all the other work you've done into the confines of the actual text from the script. You will feel tremendous impulses to say what you've improvised in the pre-scene. Good. Think it, let it wash over you, and then put those impulses into the text from the script.
  

• Once you feel strongly about the actual scene and the work you're doing, go back and improvise the scene a number of times. This is ESSENTIAL for you to gauge how free you truly are and how many thoughts, as the character, are running through your body during the scene.
  

• Improvise the scene and perform the actual scene with a one-to-one ratio. NOTE: Make sure that you put yourself in the identified/discovered state of being each time before you begin. Notice how putting yourself in this state starts the body easily into the emotional experiences that come with the scene.