In an audition situation, strain in your facial muscles is a dead giveaway of struggle. No matter how intense the emotions of your piece, your job is still to make what you are doing look easy. If we see you exhibiting tension patterns that have more to do with you and less with the character, we will be taken out of the scene and will begin to worry for you. Therefore, before you go into the room, you must think like an athlete; much as an Olympian would do a specific set of drills to be ready for peak performance, actors need to have a protocol for reducing facial tension. In this article, I’ll be addressing one of the most common areas of gripping—the jaw.
The jaw is one of the most important joints in the body; along with your arms and legs, the jaw (temporomandibular joint, or TMJ) should be thought of as an appendage that hangs from your core skeleton (head/neck/spine). Since it’s one of the main connection points to this central body axis, it’s an exceptionally easy area to hold tension. This also means that freeing your jaw can have great benefits for your whole system, as well as for your performance ability.
Many of us have heard of TMJ disorder. This is a tension pattern of the jaw muscles
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