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your life body has just grown to twice the size of your regular body. Your movement becomes affected. Perhaps you suddenly walk with better posture. Your eyes gleam. Your smile widens. These traits affect your physical body and are things we can all do without imagining a growing life body. However, if there isn't something to drive the physical reactions (smiling, gleaming, good posture), the physicalities look dishonest. So, in this choice, your character would approach this woman with confidence (perhaps to a fault, if you so desire!) that is honest to your character and his situation.

When our character cries, our life body does the opposite-it contracts and falls. So, instead of thinking about sad times of your own past, imagine your life body slowly falling. We all know what it feels like to be sad. Sadness is a sensation that is common in all of us and does not need horrid times of our past to remind us of how it feels. So, as the life body falls, our stomach and heart sink. It falls a little further and our throats choke. It falls a little further and we breathe a little quicker. It falls a little further, and we swallow more often than normal to try to keep from crying. Once our life body reaches our feet, we may very well cry. We have experienced all the other sensations, so by this point, our physical bodies have nowhere else to go.

This is an exercise in what's called "sense memory". It is a very useful tool for audition and rehearsal purposes. Right before you walk into the audition room, you can already begin getting into character by deciding what the character's life body is doing. Give it a try sometime!

Learn more about this author, Jennie Kelley.
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