The Energizing Acting Technique You Need to Try

The Expert: Jamie Wollrab, embodiment and acting coach (HBO, Showtime, ABC)

You’ve memorized your lines. You’ve analyzed your character. You’ve rehearsed with your costars. But before you can deliver your best performance, you also need to prepare yourself physically and mentally—which involves more than just putting on a costume or queueing up the Calm app. This is where embodiment acting comes in.

Embodiment acting involves using the five senses and the five bodies—physical, mental, emotional, energetic, and universal—to stand so firmly in the present moment that your voice reaches a deeper, more powerful tenor. For actors, rooting into your body lets you arrive at a place of true presence. According to acting and voice coach Jamie Wollrab, this is where effective and powerful performance begins.

Wollrab has shared his method of embodiment coaching, self-expression, and character development for over two decades; his past students include “Once Upon a Time” star Lana Parrilla, “Shameless” and “The Conners” star Emma Kenney, and Carter Jenkins from the “After” films. With these tools at your disposal, you’ll be able to aptly attune your relationship with your voice. 

Connecting With Your Senses

This exercise takes 15 to 20 minutes, and Wollrab recommends doing it in the morning as part of a daily practice. The goal is to create a sense of safety and comfort in your body, which allows you to center more easily and thus move into character in a deeper capacity when the time comes. “It’s important to connect fully to your own instrument before opening to another actor or ensemble,” Wollrab says. “What I love about this technique is that it helps the artist create autonomy of their own experience.”

Wollrab leads his students through this exercise by first asking them to focus on their sense of taste. Notice what your mouth tastes like—perhaps it’s toothpaste or coffee. Take a few moments to fully embody your ability to taste by placing your whole awareness on that sense. Next, tap into your sense of smell. You may notice something you hadn’t smelled before because you’re beginning to open and soften the body. Take a few moments between each sense to breathe and relax deeper. 

From here, close your eyes and see what sounds you can hear in the room. Listen with your whole ear, finding the smallest sound in your space. After you’ve connected to your sense of sound, find something in the room you hadn’t seen before and gaze at it. Sense the object with your eyes and notice a new detail like you’re seeing it for the first time. Notice the color, the light, and the shadow.

Lastly, relax into your sense of touch. Observe how the fabric you’re wearing brushes against your skin. Feel how the seat beneath you presses into your body.

Notice how you’ve moved out of your thinking mind—planning, organizing, and fantasizing—and now find yourself experiencing the present moment. This groundedness will help you to act and share your voice.

Connecting With Your Five Bodies

Now that you’ve centered your mind, you’re ready to tap into the five bodies: physical, mental, emotional, energetic, and universal. 

To start, take a deep breath and feel your physical body in the space you’re in. This can involve anything from feeling your feet against the ground or noticing how your arms relax toward the floor. Start to observe your thoughts, see where they’re going, and watch what they’re focusing on—this invites your mental body to the present moment. 

The emotional body is next. Wollrab helps his students perceive exactly what they’re feeling in the moment by asking them to experience whatever emotion presents itself without judgment or attachment. 

Next, imagine the atmosphere around you, a few inches in all directions, and see how it feels—this is the energetic body, where you sense the energy of a space, an audience, and yourself. You’ve moved from a place of reaction to the external world, and you’re seeing things for what they are with a vision unclouded by nervousness and projection. From here, attune to your universal body by trusting your instincts about the space you’re in and the way your body feels. 

Now that all parts of you are embodied, you can perform from a more grounded space. “As this becomes a regular practice, you become more confident in your instincts and in what your body is intuiting,” Wollrab says of this exercise. “From this place, you can more easily access hints about the character you’re playing.”

Feldenkrais Exercise

This movement therapy technique—named after its creator, Moshé Feldenkrais—connects your mind and emotions to your body. You begin by lying on the ground and breathing deeply. Then, starting at your toes, tighten one body part as you inhale, then relax it fully as you exhale. For instance, as you breathe in, you tense your toes, curling them under; then, as you breathe out, you let go completely and feel the contrast of tension versus relaxation. 

After you’ve done the toes, you move up to the foot, contracting then relaxing, then to the ankles, the shins, the hamstrings, the glutes, the pelvis, and so on. Everything underneath the body part you are tensing should fully relax and melt toward the floor as you continue upward, all the way to the top of your head. 

The goal of this exercise is to learn how to tense the part of the body you’re focusing on while relaxing everything else. This brings a sense of control to your body that will benefit you when you act. By consciously contracting your muscles, you help release unconscious tension, which can affect your performance and ability to convey your message.

The core of a good performance centers around an actor’s ability to fully embody in the moment. Without bringing all of yourself—your five senses and five bodies—to a performance, your voice may ring hollow and feel uncentered. By cultivating an embodied presence with this daily practice, your voice will more powerfully resonate on the stage, screen, or wherever you share your craft.