METHOD Acting Moments: The Abstract or Additional Movement
- Sylvie Marie Amour DeCristo
- Mar 1
- 6 min read
With commitment and dedication, you can use these exercises to evoke feelings and sensations at will. With the Foundation Sense Memory Exercises. Method Acting: Consciousness of the Senses. Method Acting Moments: Breakfast Beverage, you learn resilience, perseverance, experimentation, and character research through the senses. The work can shape your spiritual and intellectual life and provide you with profound meaning and an enhanced love for the craft.
Method Acting: Consciousness of the Senses
Method Acting Moments: Mirror Exercise
The exercises challenge your ability to handle encounters and surprises. Knowing yourself and the world is key to memorable, compelling and fulfilling acting. Your mission is to gain confidence and discipline while your passion for the craft grows and takes you to unforeseen heights of thrill and levels of mastery. Be curious and decide to have no limits for learning. The Method will arm you with steadfast preparedness for acting. Be careful when you chose the works you go for. Let the pieces and roles you take on be those that promote and enhance human values, roles which help you rise to your highest calling. Fall in love with what you do every single time so that your audience will fall in love with you.
The Foundation Sense Memory Exercises, their sequencing and combinations, were inspired by Stanislavsky’s work, to reinforce concentration and sensitivity via a sensible approach that enhances your imagination, provoking impulses, gestures, and behaviours that spur on the creative process.
The exercises provide a way to engage the mind and body for a given time exploring imaginary objects and activities. When the mind is involved, it uses the senses to understand better and more. The enhanced awareness you experience while practising these exercises help you feel the sophisticated beauty of everyday tasks and objects as well as allowing your understanding to deepen your work. The senses become the gateway for feelings and emotions. When practising these exercises, your attention is fixed in the present.
You are in-the-moment.
With commitment and dedication, you can use these exercises to evoke feelings and sensations at will. Making your characters and the life within the script real and meaningful.
The Sense Memory Exercises enable you to create a practical, imaginary reality through your observations of what you see, smell, hear, touch, and taste. The senses are unequally developed or relied upon during the practice, the exercises help clarify which senses are most active or less active, as well as which ones you most readily call upon the use.
The method requires you to make choices and pass judge what works and what does work. Following The Sense Memory Exercises, you can test your progress with the Scene Work. During Scene Work, your goal is to perceive the world of the character by fully utilizing your remembered and imagined sensory and personal experiences.
The use of the senses cannot be rushed. Awareness needs time and patience.
This is the internal way of working, in which the actor re-creates and re-experiences a remembered reality, not an imitation.
A common misperception of The Method was that the external aspects of the performance were not considered necessary.
External Acting The external style of acting serves well at times by the embracing and deconstruction of the lines, acting out the meaning of the words, with the lines in the script being the primary motivator.
Internal Acting Via The Method’s internal approach you rely fully on the situation, and the subtext in all of its vivid sensory details and meaning rises and merges to give the lines a deeper reality. An author’s words are sacred; however, it is the actor who gives meaning and life to the words.
Be Bold Be bold with Sensory Exercises, dig out your feelings and sensations to give life to the character. Be inventive while doing the exercises and make the most of the opportunity to build qualities that may be new or undeveloped within you. The qualities to explore are those such as empathy, curiosity, courage, daring, self-awareness.
The Purpose of Sense Memory The Foundation Sense Memory Exercises serve the purpose of activating the physical senses. However, it’s expected that emotional responses will show up, sometimes, intensely. At the beginning of your training, don’t work for the emotions or dwell on them. Acknowledge their existence and what triggers them let them go. Put them at rest while you work.
The Advanced Sense Memory Exercises Advanced Sense Memory Exercises are designed for you to stimulate both physical and emotional responses.
Dealing with problems on stage during training or rehearsal
You may become blocked or lose focus. If you find that the Relaxation does not help you to re-connect with what you’re working on using either of these two techniques known as The Abstract or Additional Movement and Speaking Out.
The Abstract or Additional Movement When negativity, self-judgment or disorientation take hold of your work, you can utilize these techniques to break through the distractions and find an explicit expression. The Abstract or Additional Movement helps you maintain control of your acting instrument while facing the reality of the moment to deal with the problem with physical movement and concentration. The idea is to train your mind to obey multiple commands while maintaining your focus.
Performance
Make a specific movement
The arms go out to the side at shoulder level, and the hands and fingers hang loosely and are relaxed, not rigid.
Move the legs one at a time, up and out to the sides. You do this sideways to break the habit of how you usually raise your arms and legs.
At the same time, make the loud sound from the chest, the same sound that you use during Relaxation, the sincere “HA!” or “AH!”
The sound and movement run counter to what you have been working on in the exercise, and this allows you to break through the obstacle, release the tension associated with it, then return to your practice. When you break the habit of non-expression by making the sound and movement you’re regaining control. It’s physically and emotionally liberating and it strengthens your power to regain control.
Speaking Out The technique Speaking Out deals with problems and obstacles you’re experiencing and is used during both the exercises and the scene work. When you speak out, you must say how you feel with a loud voice and then use your will to return to your exercise or scene.
With the Abstract Movement and Speaking Out techniques, Your self-examination and self-reflection will provide greater self-awareness. The confessional nature of these is a declaration and is good for the soul. You are taking conscious and specific steps to face and dissolve any problems that prevent you from committing to truthfully embodying the role.
After completing each sensory memory exercise do take the time to become aware of which senses generated impulses and behaviours that can be used in your performances. Always make notes of your discoveries in your Journal.
During the Sense Memory Exercises focus on your awareness on one sense at a time. This enables a thorough, detailed, patient sensory exploration, which may not feel reasonable to you but is crucial during the process of creating. The act of slowing down helps cultivate graceful movements which lend themselves to feeling life and not imitating life. The exercises act as a catalyst for you to discover different sides of your personality and initiate new and original ideas that ultimately lead to thinking like your character.
I always thought I was terrible at observing details and keeping my mind on something without tons of distractions. What surprised me during the beginning exercises, and I’ll always remember this, is how after I did the Relaxation, I was able to focus so quickly observing every detail. The time went by so fast and with way less of my usual distractions. My mind listened to itself, and I felt barriers of resistance fade away. At one point, I realized I wasn’t smelling anything, and I felt frustrated, but kept trying and then all of a sudden, I started hearing actual sounds from my childhood. I never thought of experiencing everything so closely before, and through each particular sense. It was an epiphany to know that a re-imagined reality using the reasons can lead you into the world of the character. Actor
As a playwright who first trained as an actor I think about my writing in the same way that I would develop a character I was going to be acting. I try to find the emotional truth that connects to my own personal experience, and I use my knowledge of sense memory to write those specific details which can only be recalled through the reasons. This work helps personalize characters and allows me to access them outside of my realm of day to day experience. When writing, I also use the exercises to find what aspects of myself still hurt or have joy and me long to explore. This sort of training helped open me up as an artist in a more general sense and to get in touch with my own beliefs and desires. Strasberg training has a level of specificity that can be applied to more disciplines than acting Playwright
The Foundation Sense Memory Exercises
Breakfast Drink Exercise
Mirror/Make-Up/Shaving Exercise
Sharp Taste Exercise
Sharp Smell Exercise
Three (3) Pieces of Material Exercise
Taking off and Putting on Underclothes, Shoes, and Socks Exercise
Sunshine Exercise
Sharp Pain Exercise
Sound Exercise
Overall Sensation Exercises
Shower and Bath Overall
Extreme Heat and Extreme Cold Overall
Strong Wind Overall
Drunk Overall
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