The Work

The techniques of Embodied Character focus on the processes of character. What it feels like to be “in character”. The embodied, sum total of a character’s point of view, beliefs, aims, intentions, feelings, attitudes, and bodily tensions. Similar to being “triggered” in life, there is an immersive quality to the experience of character in the body; being driven by forces beyond our understanding and below our consciousness. This is the process of character that it’s the actors job to engage with.

This approach encourages actors to explore how their own bodies and creativity interpret character material and bring it to life in real-time. At its core, understanding how Character asserts itself within the human experience is fundamental to our work.

A working map of character, borrowed from developmental psychology, is offered as a way to understand the human experience while distilling tools to jump into various Embodied Character experiences. This framework helps actors understand how Character interacts with storytelling and guides the actor’s body to translate innumerable archetypical mythologies into embodied experiences-of-character

The possibilities are infinite. The process is fun and spontaneous and has no hint of “right” and “wrong”. There is no influence from the teacher in the forms of opinions or taste. The work tends to allow actors to question who they thought they were and find a whole new sense of freedom and permission to play just about any note on their emotional piano at any time.

This movement towards an Embodied approach to acting offers the actor a safer and more empowered path that aligns with ideals of personal growth work. Growing out of the Method Acting schools, which emphasized experience over performance, this evolution gives more power to the actor’s creative intuition and innate healing wisdom. Exploring what wants to come through the actor spontaneously, handing the reins over to an intuitive power as opposed to manipulating the actor into “real” or “intense” performances with ideas of “good” and “bad” acting.

The healing instinct that lays deep within the human being is freed when we stop fighting with what wants to move through us. When we allow what wants to be expressed, instead of seeking results or “intensity”, we spontaneously seek wholeness through expression. In acting and character work, this wholeness is healing for the actor and audience, it creates compelling characters that tell stories.   

Creative expressive work starts with expressing what’s present in the here and now, without judgment that it should be any different. As we move deeper into the body and we loosen control, we gain access to a primal, instinctual self. This self holds the fullest expression of our humanity. The deepest rage and joy that we temper in our own personality. From this primordial self, we can build new and different character-experiences.

Each character owns their own experience of life, their own mythologies about the purpose of life and their own deep longings. In training, as the actor finds the ground of their humanity, they can build up an infinitude of characters based on the human experience of having a persona built on top of primordial energies.

The idea behind a non-critical process is that the actor discovers their own goals/desires/tastes/opinions about what they want to create and how their instrument wants to function. Doing “good” work becomes more about creating what interests and excites the actor and less about an idea of “good acting”. The path to that creation may vary from role to role, actor to actor. Actors can suffer from the paradigm that an authority outside themselves can judge their work. When this dynamic is abandoned and the actor allows their flow, they find themselves surprised and delighted with their own work.