Performers are athletes, plain and simple. Before athletes take the field, they have routines and warmups that they go through to get themselves primed for peak performance. As actors, you need to develop a toolbox for yourself that makes you feel ready to do your best work. If you’re going to singing auditions, hopefully you are in a habit of warming up vocally beforehand. (Find downloadable vocalises here.) But beyond stretching and vocalizing, the most important thing to you need to do is focus your brain on the task at hand. The following three drills are used by elite athletes as ways to get their heads in the game. Try them out and see how you feel at your next audition.
Body scan. The skill of reducing tension starts with developing body awareness, or proprioception. You will get the biggest “bang for your buck” in terms of tension release by focusing on the joints. The joints have what are called mechanoreceptors, which are designed to provide movement feedback to the brain. When a joint gets used to holding, these signals get blocked, and the surrounding muscles start to tighten as well. By doing a body scan of your joints, you can reduce the holding of the surrounding muscles and free up a lot more
Leave a Reply