Five Sense Rehearsal: Sight

In this series on rehearsal techniques, we are focusing on using the five senses as a way to play with our content. When we prepare for a talk, an interview, a training, even a tricky conversation, it’s important to surprise ourselves by using techniques that bring out the unexpected. We often think of preparation as simply “looking over” or “running through” the content. This is great for familiarizing ourselves, but keeps our relationship with the content pretty superficial.

In rehearsal, we deepen that relationship, giving the content an aliveness, a spontaneity.

We’ve talked about hearing the sound of the words, tasting the language, and this week we use sight: we use our bodies to show the words, to move them. We’ve all seen speakers who seem divorced from their bodies, their arms, faces, breathing held tight, rigid, as if they are more electronic speaker than human speaker. By showing the content in our bodies, we reconnect and release ourselves to inhabit the words, let our words play us.

My long-time mentor and teacher, the great acting coach, Alice Spivak, worked with the National Theater of the Deaf. She said that any deaf person should be able to understand any play by sight alone; the text is shown through the body, the emotional expression, the story is shown.

This week, we practice our content silently, showing the talk through our bodies. Gestures are a perfect place to start. Gestures are simply emphasizing and illustrating our content. Then, move that freedom to the rest of the body. It may feel very silly. Wonderful! When we feel silly, we know we’re moving in the right direction. It’s an experiment! Enjoy.