Physicality, awareness of space

What inhibitions do you still have in using your body to express yourself? What are the strategies you can use to overcome this?

One of the inhibitions that I’m facing most of the time is the conflict between my mind and my body, because when my mind and my body couldn’t coordinate with each other, my body wouldn’t be able to execute exactly what I intended to express in mind, resulting in unconvincing and weak performance. This is because of the organic temperature of the body is not high enough to prepare the body for physical action and the body is not feeling comfortable to the theatre space. When the body is feeling outlandish to the surrounding, it will react resistibly. Therefore physical warm ups are extremely important in order to adjust the body temperature to suit the environment so that the body will feel comfortable hence able to react accordingly to the mind and execute perfectly what the mind intended to express. This is extremely effective to me because in the process of warming ups, it stretches the limitations of what my body can do, and also define a fine line to the limitations, which also helps to avoid physical injuries.

One example was during the combined session for the pre-promo showing, before the performance I was quite stiff because of the atmosphere, so I took some time to walk around the space, doing some light stretching and at the same time producing some ridiculous noise to warm up my throat, and after a while I felt more comfortable to the surrounding, and I was able to overcome the stage fear too.

Another limitation is that stage fear would sometimes overwhelm my body, shuddering during performance (sometimes due to the air-conditioner being too cold) instead of executing the right action and speech. Sometimes the worries come from unfamiliarity with the performance and therefore causing the lack of self-confidence. The simplest way, of course, is to rehearse the play a few more times which will definitely help in building up my confidence. Also, by rehearsing, it gets my body to remember what the actions to carry out are and when to carry them out, it then becomes a simultaneous movement according to the emotions in the speech, and hence the coordination in the mind and body would be achieved easily.

Posted by Cheng Hung