THPERF 102: Performance: Practice

Sources and References

Primary textbook — Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares (Theatre Arts Books). Supplementary texts — Sanford Meisner Sanford Meisner on Acting; Uta Hagen Respect for Acting; Keith Johnstone Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre; Viola Spolin Improvisation for the Theatre; Anne Bogart & Tina Landau The Viewpoints Book; Cicely Berry Voice and the Actor; Kristin Linklater Freeing the Natural Voice; Richard Schechner Performance Studies: An Introduction. Online resources — NYU Tisch School of the Arts and Royal Central School of Speech and Drama open performance course materials.

Chapter 1 — What Is Performance?

Performance, in the sense this workshop takes up, is a framed human action carried out in front of others and marked as something to be watched. Richard Schechner’s famous formulation — performance as “twice-behaved behavior” — is a useful starting point. Whatever an actor does onstage has already been rehearsed, shaped, imagined, or culturally inherited; the first requirement of performance is the willingness to do an action again, self-consciously, for someone else’s attention.

This broad definition lets us treat very different events as performances: a scripted monologue on a proscenium stage, a devised piece in a warehouse, a ritual greeting, a job interview, a street-corner busk. Schechner draws a spectrum from “make-believe” (where audience and performer share the fiction that what happens is pretend) to “make-belief” (where the performer uses real-world power — a wedding, a verdict, a protest). The classroom sits near the make-believe pole but borrows techniques that cross the whole range.

Within that spectrum, actor training focuses on a narrower craft: shaping the performer’s body, voice, attention, and imagination so that behaviour in front of an audience is both truthful and legible. Truthful, because audiences are acute lie-detectors and disengage from acting that has been merely decorated from outside. Legible, because the same audience cannot read subtext unless physical and vocal signals project clearly into the room.

The course’s working stance is therefore pragmatic. It does not ask students to decide, on day one, what “acting” really is. Instead it treats performance as a practice — a set of habits the body learns through repetition, correction, and play. Stanislavski called acting a “craft” precisely because he wanted to strip away mystique: actors, like carpenters and musicians, improve by doing the exercises. Grotowski pushed the same idea further by calling his studio work a via negativa — not an accumulation of tricks but a peeling-away of blocks that keep the performer from responding honestly. Throughout the semester the student is both apprentice and researcher of their own instrument.

Chapter 2 — The Actor’s Body and Breath

Before anything else, the performer is a body in a room. Whatever psychological intention an actor holds, the audience sees only muscle tone, alignment, breath rhythm, and the micro-tensions of the face. If the body is braced, the work looks braced; if the breath is shallow, the voice sits in the throat and intentions feel small. The first practical task is therefore physical availability.

Most beginning exercises work toward “useful relaxation” — not floppiness, but the release of unnecessary effort. A standard sequence, drawn from Alexander Technique and from Grotowski’s corporeal training, starts with lying on the floor in semi-supine: knees up, head slightly elevated, spine lengthening along the ground. The student scans for held places — jaw, shoulders, belly, hip flexors — and on each exhale lets the floor take more of the weight. From there the class rises through the spine vertebra by vertebra, arriving at standing without collapsing the length they just found.

The second layer is breath. Untrained breathers habitually lift the upper chest and clench the abdominals, cutting breath capacity roughly in half and locking the voice. Linklater’s core instruction is to let the breath drop — not push it, not pull it, but yield to it — so that the diaphragm and lower ribs do the work while the throat stays loose. A useful test: lie on the back, hand on the belly, whisper a long “huh” on the exhale, and feel the abdominal wall rise on the next inhale without conscious effort. That unforced cycle is the engine of voice and stamina.

Beyond relaxation and breath, the body needs articulate range. Warm-ups borrow from yoga, Feldenkrais, Laban, and simple cardio: rolling through the spine, circling the joints, leading the walk from different body parts (head, chest, pelvis, knees), shifting centre of gravity, playing with tempo. The aim is a performer who can sit still without stiffening, move without apologising, fall without bracing, and change quality on request.

The underlying principle is Grotowski’s: the body is not the enemy of the spirit but its only instrument. Training does not manufacture feeling; it removes the interference that keeps feeling from traveling outward.

Chapter 3 — Voice for the Performer

Voice work extends the same logic from body to sound. Cicely Berry and Kristin Linklater, the two most widely adopted voice teachers in contemporary Anglophone training, share a basic premise: everyone is born with a free, resonant voice, and training is a process of removing habits — throat tension, clenched jaw, glottal attack, shallow breath — that muffle it. The goal is not to “sound theatrical” but to let a natural voice carry effortlessly.

Four pillars organise the practice. Support is the breath-pressure system under the tone: diaphragm, lower ribs, and abdominal wall cooperating so that the voice rides on air rather than being squeezed from the larynx. A supported voice can be quiet and still fill a room. Resonance is the amplification given by the body’s chambers — chest, mouth, nasal mask, skull. Hum exercises and lip-trills help the student feel resonance move; dropping pitch into the chest and then gliding up through the head voice teaches the full range. Articulation is the crispness of consonants and the shape of vowels. Tongue-twisters (“red leather, yellow leather”; “unique New York”) are not showing off but therapy for a lazy tongue. Range — pitch, pace, volume, inflection — is what keeps text alive; monotone reading is almost always a problem of range, not of interpretation.

Technical work is paired with textual application. Students speak Shakespeare sonnets and neutral prose aloud, noticing where their breath drops short, where vowels collapse, where a sentence drives to its operative word. Berry’s method is especially useful: read a passage while physically doing something — walking on each stressed syllable, pushing against a wall on the thought, throwing a ball on each new image — so that the body feeds meaning into sound. The voice is not a separate musical instrument bolted onto the actor; it is the audible edge of the whole body’s impulse.

A warning: voice training is slow and unglamorous. Students who practise ten minutes a day gain far more than those who do an hour once a week. The throat, unlike a muscle one can stretch, answers only to patient repetition and to the removal of habitual squeeze.

Chapter 4 — Observation and the Actor’s Eye

Uta Hagen, in Respect for Acting, insists that an actor’s first homework is not imagination but observation. The imagination draws on a bank of noticed details — the way a tired man leans on a kitchen counter, the weight of a heavy coat, the smell of a waiting room — and an unobserved life yields generic acting. Hagen gives students simple assignments: sit in a café and describe in writing what the person two tables away is actually doing with their hands, their shoulders, their eyes. Not what they feel. What they do.

This training in specificity has two payoffs. First, it builds a private vocabulary of behaviour the actor can reuse: the particular way one aunt pushed up her glasses, the stiff-legged walk of a neighbour carrying grocery bags. Stanislavski called this store the “emotion memory” and “sensory memory”; modern teachers tend to stress the sensory side, because direct memories of feeling are unreliable and occasionally traumatising. Remembered cold of winter boots, or remembered heat of a stove handle, is more useful than remembered heartbreak.

Second, observation sharpens the actor’s eye for their scene partner. Meisner’s whole technique rests on this: “acting is living truthfully under imaginary circumstances”, and living truthfully requires noticing what is actually in front of you. The partner’s tiny tightening of the jaw, a breath half-taken and released, a glance that landed and then skidded away — these are the material from which honest response is built. Acting fails when performers deliver pre-planned beats without seeing each other.

Exercises include: silent mirror work, where two students try to move so exactly in sync that a watching third cannot tell who is leading; the Meisner “repetition” game, in which partners swap a plain observation (“you’re smiling”) until nuance drifts and the line carries new meaning; and Viola Spolin’s “mirror what you see, not what you expect” games. Students also keep an observation journal through the semester — a notebook of three concrete human details each day.

The classroom lesson is that talent, so called, is often just attention. Students who learn to look — at their body, at their partner, at the world — begin to act with a specificity that untrained actors cannot match.

Chapter 5 — Status and Presence: Johnstone’s Games

Keith Johnstone’s Impro introduced what is now a staple of performance training: the notion of status as a continuous physical transaction. Johnstone argues that in every human encounter, people are unconsciously raising or lowering each other’s status — through eye contact, sentence length, head movement, hesitation, pitch, use of space. Most bad acting is status-blind; most great acting is exquisitely status-aware.

The core exercise is simple. Two students play a mundane scene (a customer returning a kettle, two strangers on a bus) and are secretly assigned numbers from 1 to 10. One plays higher, the other lower. High-status behaviour includes smooth, slow movement, direct gaze, a still head, full sentences, and a readiness to occupy space. Low-status behaviour includes quick glances, head bobs, “um"s, a touched face, and contracted posture. The class watches and tries to guess the numbers. Almost always they can.

From this base Johnstone layers variations. Status can see-saw mid-scene: a servant can raise themselves by taking their time, a master can drop by fussing with their collar. Status can be played to the other person or to the space itself (a king treats the throne room as if he owns it). Status can be played against text — a character saying “please forgive me” while quietly winning. Comedy very often runs on sudden status inversions.

The pedagogical payoff is that status gives a beginning actor something concrete to do. Instead of asking, “How should I feel?” — a question that usually produces stiff acting — the student can ask, “Am I raising or lowering? Toward whom?” The body then organises itself accordingly and feeling tends to follow.

A sister concept is presence: the quality by which some performers make the audience watch them even when they are not speaking. Presence is not mysticism; it is the visible evidence of a body that is alert, unhurried, and committed. Grotowski and Barba trace it to what Barba calls the “pre-expressive” level — before character, before story, the performer’s physical readiness in the room. Johnstone’s games and status work are one reliable path to that state: the student stops hiding, occupies space without apology, and discovers they are, in fact, being watched.

Chapter 6 — The Core of Improvisation

Improvisation is not the opposite of structure — it is the live application of well-trained reflexes. Viola Spolin, whose Improvisation for the Theatre codified the North American tradition, treats improv as a set of “theater games” designed to free the player from self-consciousness and toward “the point of concentration”, a simple, specific task (keep the imaginary ball in the air, tell the audience where we are through the object). When attention is on the task, the ego cannot interfere; spontaneity emerges.

Johnstone came at improvisation from a different angle but converged on the same insights. His most famous principle is “yes, and”: accept the offer your partner makes and build on it. The opposite, blocking (“that isn’t a hat, it’s a teapot”, “no, I don’t want to go in”), shuts the scene down because it forces both players to start over. Accepting does not mean being passive — strong improvisers accept the offer and then raise the stakes: name the relationship, introduce a tilt, make a choice that costs something.

Three further principles are drilled repeatedly. Be changed by what happens: the scene moves when a character allows themselves to be moved — surprised, pleased, hurt — by what the partner just did. Make your partner look good: an improviser’s job is not to be clever but to hand their partner set-ups they can hit. Be obvious: Johnstone’s paradox is that beginners strain for cleverness and produce cliché, while players who say the first honest thing produce originality. The obvious thing, to this person, in this moment, is usually what no one else would say.

Exercises move from solo to group. One-word-at-a-time storytelling trains cooperation; gibberish scenes strip away verbal defence and force meaning into the body; object work (mime a cup, then a heavy cup, then a cup you are trying not to spill) builds physical specificity. Long-form improvisation — like the Harold, developed by Del Close — extends these techniques into full scene-structures without a script.

The broader payoff for actors is not that they will perform without text, but that they will perform text as if they were improvising it. That is the quality every audience recognises as alive.

Chapter 7 — Character: Outside In and Inside Out

Training traditions disagree about where character work should start. Stanislavski’s “inside-out” lineage (inherited and mutated by Strasberg, Adler, and Meisner) begins from the actor’s psychological identification with the role: What does this person want? What stops them? What would I need to be true about me for this behaviour to make sense? From this centre, the body and voice supposedly follow. The “outside-in” lineage (Michael Chekhov, Grotowski, and much British practice) starts with a physical choice — a walk, a gesture, a vocal placement, an animal image — and lets psychology be discovered through the body.

In practice, most contemporary training teaches both and lets students find their own balance. The inside-out toolkit includes: the super-objective (the character’s overarching desire across the whole play); objectives scene by scene; obstacles that make the objective costly; and actions — active verbs the actor plays on the partner, line by line (to seduce, to shame, to recruit, to warn). Actions are load-bearing because they are playable: “to be sad” cannot be done, but “to make her pity me” can.

The outside-in toolkit includes Chekhov’s psychological gesture, a full-body movement that crystallises the character’s inner drive (a clenched pulling-toward for a miser, an overhead reach for a dreamer); animal studies, where the student observes an animal for hours then lets its rhythm and weight colonise their body; and mask work, in which a neutral or character mask erases the face and forces the whole torso to speak.

Uta Hagen’s nine questions synthesise the approaches into practical homework: Who am I? What time is it? Where am I? What surrounds me? What are the given circumstances? What are my relationships? What do I want? What is in my way? What do I do to get what I want? The answers, specific and personally imagined, turn an empty role into lived material.

What all methods share is a refusal of generality. A “sad king” is nothing; a king who has not slept in three nights, who is blaming himself for his daughter’s illness, who cannot look his counsellor in the eye, is a character an audience can watch.

Chapter 8 — Working with Text and Monologue

The monologue is the laboratory for solo text work. The student chooses a piece — usually one to two minutes, active rather than reflective, with a clear listener — and rehearses it over weeks alongside the rest of the course material.

A practical sequence runs roughly as follows. Read the whole play, not just the monologue, to recover the character’s history, relationships, and stakes. Paraphrase: put the speech into the student’s own words, line by line, until the thought sequence is their own, not the playwright’s sonic surface. This is the moment when beginning actors discover they do not actually understand half the sentences they were delivering. Identify the event — the thing that changes during the speech, the reason the character keeps talking. Monologues are almost never monologues; they are scenes with a silent partner, and the partner’s imagined reactions drive each shift.

Next, score the text. Mark operative words (the one or two words per line the thought turns on), the shifts (where the character surprises themselves or tacks into new territory), and the breath points (where a new thought begins, not where you need oxygen). Berry’s image is useful: the thought is a river and the words float on it; an actor who punches every word builds a dam. Instead, let the thought flow and allow the important words to rise naturally.

Finally, physicalise. Stand up and move through the speech with the listener clearly placed. Try it while walking, while folding laundry, while kneeling on a hard floor; try it whispered, shouted, thrown at an empty chair. Each experiment reveals something the sitting-still reading concealed.

Scene text requires the same care, plus the live presence of the partner. The classroom warning is that the most common mistake in beginner scene work is to plan every inflection alone at home and then arrive at rehearsal unable to adjust. Preparation should install readiness, not freeze delivery. The text is a score; the performance is what happens when two scored bodies meet in the room.

Chapter 9 — Scene Work and Partner Awareness

Scene work is where everything the course has trained — body, voice, observation, status, improvisation, character, text — is integrated. The unit of analysis is the exchange between two people. Meisner’s provocation is the guiding sentence: what you do depends on what the other fellow does. An actor who ignores this becomes a soloist playing in a duet, and the audience hears the dissonance immediately.

Partner awareness is built through graded exercises. Eye contact warm-ups at close distance teach students to stay in contact without defending with jokes or glances away. Impulse work: stand facing a partner, and whenever a physical impulse arises (to laugh, to touch the shoulder, to turn away), allow it, letting the other do the same. The rule is simple — nothing planned, nothing suppressed — and it breaks the habit of monitoring the self instead of the partner. Repetition exercises from Meisner make observation audible: partners trade a literal line (“you’re crossing your arms”/“I’m crossing my arms”) until the content shifts through tone alone.

On scene material, preparation is shared. Partners agree on the given circumstances (time, place, relationship, event just before the scene begins), their objectives, and the obstacles. They identify the scene’s turning points — the moments where someone shifts tactic because the previous tactic failed — so the arc is clear even as detail stays flexible. Blocking is kept light at first: it is easier to add precise staging once the emotional flow is alive than to impose staging onto inert acting.

Rehearsal discipline matters. Run the scene without stopping even when it is going badly; notes come after, not during. Resist the urge to “fix” the partner. Most tangles unknot themselves when each actor focuses on their own side: am I actually pursuing my objective, am I actually seeing what my partner is doing, am I letting their behaviour affect me. Scene work rewards humility and repetition. A ten-minute scene, properly rehearsed, will be done fifty or more times before it plays well, and each pass will feel like it reveals something that should have been obvious the first time.

Chapter 10 — Movement Vocabularies

Alongside psychological technique, contemporary training draws on structured movement systems that give performers a shared vocabulary for composition. The most widely taught in English-language schools is Viewpoints, developed by Mary Overlie and expanded by Anne Bogart and Tina Landau. Viewpoints breaks stage action into nine observable elements: spatial relationship, kinesthetic response, shape, gesture, repetition, architecture, tempo, duration, and topography. Rather than deciding what a moment means, performers play inside these elements — walking slowly through a room, suddenly echoing a partner’s gesture, freezing for an uncomfortably long duration — and compositions emerge.

The Viewpoints classroom ritual is the open “Viewpoints session”: a group moves through a neutral space, alert to each other and to all nine elements at once, and the teacher or an outside eye watches for moments that catch. Nothing is pretended; everything is done. Over time the ensemble builds a sensitivity to group rhythm that no amount of verbal direction can install.

Laban Movement Analysis offers a complementary vocabulary. Rudolf Laban categorised effort along four factors — weight (light/strong), time (sustained/sudden), space (direct/indirect), and flow (bound/free) — whose combinations yield the eight basic efforts: pressing, flicking, wringing, dabbing, slashing, gliding, punching, floating. Asking a student to play a line as a “gliding” person and then as a “punching” person instantly reveals how much character lives in effort quality. Laban is especially useful when working on plays from different periods or cultures, because it gives a non-psychological handle on stylised movement.

Other vocabularies commonly introduced include Grotowski-derived plastiques (chains of isolated physical actions that train the body’s expressive articulation), Suzuki training’s stamping and low-centre work, mask and commedia dell’arte physicality, and simple Feldenkrais-inspired awareness sequences. Each offers a different lens; together they build a performer who can move with intention and variety, rather than defaulting to the unconscious gait and gestures of daily life. The underlying principle is Barba’s: the stage body is a dilated body — more alert, more organised, more available — than the body in the street.

Chapter 11 — Devised and Collaborative Creation

Not all performance begins from a script. Devising is the process by which a company builds a piece from scratch, usually around a theme, a source text, a site, a question, or a group of performers. The workflow is roughly: gather material through improvisations and research, organise the material into fragments the group finds interesting, test and cut, then shape the surviving fragments into a running order.

Devising demands skills the scripted tradition does not always teach. Students have to generate material without a playwright’s safety net, which means tolerating the early period when nothing seems to work. They have to curate — recognising when a moment has life and letting it be, rather than arguing it to death. They have to share authorship, which requires giving up favourite ideas quickly when someone else’s idea turns out to serve the piece better. Companies like SITI, Complicité, Forced Entertainment, and DV8 offer documented models.

Practical techniques in the classroom: task-based improvisation, where a prompt (“make a short piece about waiting”) is explored physically before anyone discusses meaning; source adaptation, where a poem, news story, or personal interview becomes raw material for scenes; site response, where the architecture of a particular room or outdoor space is treated as collaborator; and score construction, where fragments are sequenced and re-sequenced until a shape emerges. Bogart’s Composition exercises are a standard tool — give a group twenty minutes and a list of ingredients (a song, a direct address, a physical repetition, a costume change) and see what they build.

The rehearsal-room ethics of devising are worth naming. Because there is no author to defer to, power dynamics surface quickly. The group needs clear agreements about how decisions are made (consensus, director-led, rotating), how contributions are credited, how disagreements are handled, and when the piece is “locked” so performers can rehearse without the ground shifting. Without those agreements, the work either stalls or produces resentment.

For beginning performers, a modest devised project — a three-minute piece made by a small group over two weeks — is invaluable. It exposes how much structure is needed to make anything, and how much real material can be generated by bodies at play in a room.

Chapter 12 — Performance in Non-Traditional Settings

Most of the history of theatre happened outside proscenium theatres, and most contemporary performance studies programmes insist that students experiment with non-traditional settings. The reason is not novelty for its own sake; it is that performing in a black box trains only a narrow set of reflexes. A performer who can hold attention in a café, a hallway, a park, or a gallery has learned things the stage alone cannot teach.

Different sites demand different adjustments. Outdoor and street work requires larger physical scale, broader vocal projection, and a willingness to interact with genuine passers-by who did not sign up to be audience. The performer’s job is to earn attention ethically — never startling or trapping people — while accepting that some will walk past. Site-specific pieces treat a particular location as a co-author: the disused factory’s echoes and peeling paint are part of the dramaturgy, and the choreography grows from the room’s affordances. Immersive and promenade work dissolves the boundary between actor and audience; spectators move through a built world, and performers must handle unpredictable proximity and improvised encounters without breaking the fiction.

There are also hybrid modes — applied performance in schools, hospitals, prisons, and community workshops, where the goals are therapeutic or educational as much as aesthetic; digital and mediated performance, where the camera or stream becomes the frame; and performance art, where the body’s real presence and real endurance are themselves the content (think of Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present).

Across all of these the core questions are consistent. What is the frame — how does the audience know this is performance? What is the contract — what have we implicitly promised them, and what may we ask of them in return? How does the performer stay truthful without losing legibility when the room is not designed for theatre? And, critically, where does care for the audience belong: a stranger leaning on a gallery wall has different expectations from a ticket-holder in seat C-14, and performers who ignore the difference produce work that feels imposed rather than offered. The classroom exercise is usually a short piece — two to five minutes — devised for an unconventional space and presented once, with discussion after.

Chapter 13 — Feedback, Critique, and the Rehearsal Room

The final craft of the course is learning how to give and receive feedback. A rehearsal room is a small, intense community that will either make the work better or sour into self-protection. The difference usually lies in the quality of its feedback culture.

Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process is widely taught and worth naming in full, because it solves most of the recurring problems. It has four steps. First, statements of meaning: audience members say what stayed with them, without evaluation. (“I noticed I held my breath during the letter scene.”) This gives the maker real information about what landed. Second, the artist asks questions: the person who made the work, not the audience, sets the agenda, because only they know which problems they are actually working on. Third, neutral questions from the responders: questions without an embedded opinion (“what were you hoping we’d feel at the door-slam?”) rather than leading ones (“why was that so loud?”). Fourth, opinions, offered with permission: a responder may say “I have an opinion about the ending, would you like to hear it?” — and the maker may decline. This last step is where traditional notes go wrong; putting it behind a gate protects the maker’s working focus.

A general vocabulary is also useful. Feedback should be specific (point to the moment, not the whole piece), descriptive before prescriptive (what you saw, then if invited what you suggest), and separated from identity (“the gesture read as tentative” rather than “you were tentative”). Actors are their own instruments, and sloppy critique can wound the instrument.

Receiving feedback is a skill too. The discipline is to listen without explaining — no self-defence, no “yes but I meant” — because explanation only steals information the actor needs. Write the notes down, thank the responder, and test the note in the next rehearsal. Sometimes the note is wrong, and testing is how you discover that; sometimes the note is right and invisible to the actor until they try. Either way, the tribunal is the next run-through, not the arguing voice in the room.

Beyond the protocol, the rehearsal room runs on a few unwritten agreements. Arrive warm. Know your lines. Do not direct your scene partner. Protect each other’s risks — if someone tries something brave and it fails, do not laugh. Stay curious longer than you want to. These habits are what turn a group of students into an ensemble, and an ensemble is the condition under which good performance becomes possible.