UNIT I. Developing Your Instrument

 

Body Awareness/Vocal Projection

MAIN OBJECTIVES:
1) Help the students get to know each other and build trust
2) Building body awareness 

1. WARM-UPS

 

Name Game with Gestures (Team Building) CLICK HERE FOR INSTRUCTIONS AND VIDEO

 

All jobs/vocations have tools they need to accomplish their task.  Ask students to name jobs their father/mother/relatives do i.e. doctor, plumber, secretary, etc.  Then ask them what tools are needed to do those jobs.  Stress that the actor’s “tools” are their body and their voice, and that each week we’ll warm those up and then learn the skills needed for our job. 

Texas Shakedown (Physical warm-up) CLICK HERE FOR INSTRUCTIONS AND VIDEO

Siren (Vocal Warm-up) CLICK HERE FOR INSTRUCTIONS AND VIDEO

Tongue Twisters (Vocal Warm-up) CLICK HERE FOR INSTRUCTIONS AND VIDEO

2. SKILL BUILDING

 

Mirror Exercise (Body Awareness, Concentration) In pairs, one student acts as a mirror and the other as a person looking in the mirror. The person looking in the mirror moves slowly and the “mirror” tries to mimic their movements precisely.
CLICK HERE FOR INSTRUCTIONS AND VIDEO

Space Walk (Body Awareness) An actor needs to be able to imagine his/her surroundings in order to move appropriately, and to communicate a sense of place to the audience. Students pretend to move through a variety of unusual environments. E.g. wading through water, walking through cotton candy, flying through clouds, etc.
CLICK HERE FOR INSTRUCTIONS AND VIDEO

Walk This Way (Body Awareness) An actor’s role and situation will determine the way they move on stage. Students move across the stage as though they are specific characters in a situation the teacher describes. 
CLICK HERE FOR INSTRUCTIONS AND VIDEO

3. CLOSING ACTIVITY

 

Who’s Leading? (Concentration, Teamwork) Students sit in a circle, and a leader makes rhythmic movements which are copied by the group. A student, who has stepped out of the room, does not know who the leader is and comes into the circle and tries to guess who is leading.
CLICK HERE FOR INSTRUCTIONS
(no video available)

 
 

© 2023, Friends of the Groom Theater Company

 

Curtains Up Curriculum by Friends of the Groom Theater Co. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Curtains Up is a training program designed for young actors, sponsored by Friends of the Groom Theater Company.
It is available to the general public for free under the terms of the Creative Commons License above.