Brains! Ever get caught in your head in the middle of a scene and want to eat your own brain for getting in the way? Or find yourself wracking your brain for inspiration to magically appear? Or pleading with your brain to stop hijacking your performance?
Speaking of brains, I think we’d all agree that playing a zombie is fairly easy. Single focus: eat brains. Why can’t other roles be that simple? They can, actually. Simple. Not easy mind you (pun intended). Like everything else in nature, the mind abhors a vacuum. In the absence of a clear, simple, focused point of concentration, the mind fills itself with whatever is available. Too often that’s self-consciousness, insecurity, and other things that hinder high-level performance. The beauty of a clear focus is it quiets the mind and frees the body to act spontaneously and live truthfully in the scene.
In 1963, Viola Spolin, the mother of improvisation released her seminal book, “Improvisation for the Theater,” and expressed an interest in demystifying the intuitive—refuting the idea that the magical force of intuition was unattainable except by chance or endowed only on a select, gifted few. But for many actors today, intuition remains a
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