ANIMAL STUDIES

Observe animals to change your physicality!

PHYSICALITY

This is how you use your body (opposed to the voice or mind) to represent your character - you might want to think of it as your physical presence. Your physicality can be a really powerful tool, particularly on stage, to more truthfully represent the character. You can change your stance, posture, gesture and facial expression.

CHANGE YOUR PHYSICALITY

It’s really easy as an actor to say, well, this character moves like me. But, sometimes you want to break away from the ways of moving you’ve spent a lifetime learning. This is important if you want to more honestly and accurately represent your character.

Exercise: Animal Study 

1. THINK. Consider the character you’re playing. Start by identifying some personality traits that you think represent your character. Then find an animal which, for you, shares the same characteristics.
2. OBSERVE. You need to spend as much time as possible observing your animal. You want to see the way they eat, how they interact with other animals, how they move when they’re scared, how they sleep? What is the animal's natural posture? When does it move? Why does it move?
3. IMITATE. You need to imitate or mirror the animal's movement. Now, you aren’t a squid, or a spider, or a blackbird so you’re never going to be able to accurately represent their movements, so don’t think about ‘acting like’ your animal, instead think about representing the essence of that movement in human form!

Animal Study: An example

Character: Willy Lohman
Play: ‘Death of a Salesman’ by Arthur Miller. 

1. THINK
   Willy Lohman is an old travelling salesman, he’s not very wealthy, and throughout the course of the play he begins to lose his grip on reality. (It’s a wonderful play if you’ve not read it!) The character traits I would identify for Willy are his loyalty, his strength and the weight of responsibility he carries with him. For me, that makes me think of an... elephant. 
2. OBSERVE
   Get on YouTube and watch lots of wildlife footage of elephants. You might notice that they often use their trunk to explore the spaces in front of them before they move; that they use their breath as a warning noise; that their head sometimes seems lower than their shoulders. 
3. IMITATE. 
   You might hang your head slightly, lead from your nose, and use your breath to echo the weight of an elephant's breath. You're trying to channel my INNER elephant, whilst my OUTSIDE stays human!

Try it for one of your characters and see what you discover!

USEFUL LINKS

TO WATCH:

NATIONAL THEATRE: Animal Study (3mins 10secs in)

STRASBERG DISCUSSING ANIMAL EXERCISES WITH A STUDENT

ACTOR MOVEMENT: animals in action

TO READ:

BBC Bitesize: Developing Character

THEATRE GROUP: Willy Loman as an Elephant