Mental Acting Exercise

A few years ago, a study was done by Dr. Denis Waitley Ph.D on Olympic athletes testing something called Visual Motor Rehearsal. It was also used on NASA astronauts in the Apollo program. In the study, athletes were hooked up to bio-mechanical feedback and told to run their particular event in their head, visualizing as much detail as they could. When the visualization was done, the machine showed that the bio feedback was exactly the same as if the athlete had just been performing the event. In other words, the same muscles fired while imagining as fired when performing. This study was ground-breaking in that it showed how everyone contains a mind body connection that is so powerful that the body cannot tell the difference between what the brain is experiencing and what it is imagining.

Incredible! This was a breakthrough for athletics, but what can it do for the actor? I think it’s actually the same. Rather than running an imaginary race, we imagine ourselves on stage, giving the greatest performance of our lives. The same muscles fire while we imagine as would fire if we were experiencing. What if it could allow us to feel the difference between the greatest performance we could give and the worst performance we could give? What could it mean for you to be able to actually model for yourself the sequence of feelings that become your best performance and avoid that sequence of feelings that result in your worst? Even if this exercise works half as well as I think it can, how marvelous of a tool could it be in our hands?

I want to put this out as a challenge to every actor, as an experiment that we all take just sixty seconds out of our day to do this during the rehearsal process. Try it once a day and see what happens. Find a place where you can sit or lay back comfortably with no distractions. Allow your neck to free and your back and chest to expand to their full surface area and take a few deep breaths. Close your eyes and begin to imagine what it feels like to be out on stage in your costume. The audience is full and the stage lights are on. Feel the heat from the lights and imagine the performance in as many details as you can. Now begin reciting your lines in your head and see what happens. How are you moving? How is the audience reacting? Are they laughing in all the right places? When you’ve done this for at least sixty seconds, open your eyes feeling refreshed and take note of what you’ve learned. Was their anything you experienced that you would like to incorporate the next time you rehearse for real? Then try again, imagine the optimum outcome of your performance, then once again imagining the worst outcome. What are the differences between the two?

See what happens by playing with this visualization technique. If it works, great! If not, you’ve only lost sixty-seconds. This exercise could be a great way to delve deeper into a character, help put your blocking deeper into your muscle memory, or model your optimal performance. I even suspect that it would help to overcome paralyzing stage fright.

So remember that what your brain imagines to be real becomes real to your body. But we knew that already, didn’t we? It’s the basis for being an actor: living truthfully under imaginary circumstances. And this is something that I want feedback for. Try it and email me your responses to it, or your changes to the method and I’ll post them on the site for others to try and maybe we can create a truly great exercise for every actor to benefit from.

Sin Boldly!

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