Reclaiming Your Charm

 I got an e-mail from David Wahl (Creative Creativity) a while ago, which mentioned this activity from The Art of Comedy.

 Reclaiming Your Charm

This exercise helps you discover your true, inner personal charm. One thing that’s important in acting is likeability. Tapping into one’s authenticity is vital in your comedy acting. This charm exercise allows people to embrace the power of agreement, that is, to agree with the other person and to see the magic in the other person.

Sometimes, in comedy, people tend to leave out their unique personality and likeability. They sometimes forget how to be charming and can be rather robotic in their acting. Although comedy certainly uses exaggeration, it has to be based on a layer of truth. The actor has to be real and likeable. As simple as this exercise may seem, it can be challenging, because sometimes people want to lock their personalities away.

People Needed: 2 or more

Scene: Two actors onstage

Directions: One actor is onstage when the other actor enters. The goal of the scene is for the two actors to be as charming as they can. They have a coversation with each other and aren’t concerned about being funny. They focus on tapping their own personal charm and talk with each other in great depth. They compliment each other, express kindness toward one another and notice everything about the other person in a most flattering way.

I haven’t had a chance to try this one yet, but I am intrigued.  As far as I can tell it is trying to teach charisma.  Teaching charisma?  Can it be done?  Isn’t it one of those things that you either have or you don’t?

Does anyone have any hot ideas for teaching charisma?

I’d love to run a workshop on charisma.  Some status work, some body language, the beep beep game*, the presentation minus trick game*…

*as found in impro for storytellers.

‘make an object, say a line’

Last week I had the pleasure of tutoring some High School Theatre Sports teams.

I never know quite what I’m going to teach but I always prepare a list of exercises that I think might be useful that I can glance at when I’m stuck.

My stand out performer this week was definitely ‘make an object, say a line‘.

Make an object, Say a line

How it works: Standard open scene, but players can’t speak unless they have created an object through mime (one object earns you one line).

What it does: mime skills, less talking, less worrying about story, less talking about what you are doing*.

Origin: unknown.

*Players will hopefully work out that if they mime a cup and say ‘I just got a cup’ then they have put themselves back to square one (needing to mime a new object).

Brain Training: Delayed mirror

Here’s a great warm up that I just learned. I’m going to call it Delayed Mirror (because once again, I don’t know the real name).

-Get into pairs. Someone claps out a regular beat.

-Person A tells a story, saying a word on each beat.