Free Acting Exercise - Enhancing Your Creative Impulses

As actors, we all have creative impulses that can be used to help strengthen our performances and make character choices to benefit the entire production. Although creative impulses can enhance a performance, these impulses must be trained and only used at correct moments.

The exercise "Enhancing Your Creative Impulses" is designed around the notion of training actors how to utilize their creative impulses. This exercise can be performed in a class, and upon the conclusion of these exercises actors will have a better understanding of utilizing and training their creative impulses.

Noun Exercise

Within this exercise, the instructor will give an actor a noun. However, these nouns should not be ambiguous like "sandwich" or "car," but rather use a noun that has various connotations, such as "politics" and "religion."

After giving an actor a noun, do not let him prepare. Instruct him to immediately begin to improvise this noun - instruct him to perform any action or say any lines of dialogue that relates to the noun.

The goal is to not define the noun, but rather to react based on the actors immediate reaction to the word. The actor's response may be only made of movements, or it may include sounds or words. Allow the actor to perform for up to 45 seconds before moving onto the next actor.

Famous Impersonations

In the same manner as the Noun Exercise, the Famous Impersonations exercise is performed based off of the first the creative impulse that comes to the actor. To perform this exercise, give an actor a famous person name - one that everyone in the class is familiar with. The goal is for the actor to perform an action or deliver several lines of dialogue that reveal the essence of the person.

Fabric Exercise

To perform this creative impulse exercise, give an actor a piece of fabric. Instruct the actor to use the fabric to create a recognizable character from film, TV, stage or from a book. Do not use the cloth to make sweeping generalizations of a culture, but rather instruct the actor to use this material as a means of becoming a character.