Here's a simple exercise that really pays off for actors and for characters.
As a rehearsal-coach I have often suggested this to actors in their preparation. And this week my student Emily Swain in the UK emailed me with this set of photos and a story about how effective the exercise was for her.
The exercise is called GIFTS and the value lies in how you are invited to spend time thinking about 2 sets of relationships — the one between you and your partner-actor and also the one between the characters you are playing. Here's how Emily describes it. Thank you to Emily and Rory and their director Ryan Ling for allowing me to share this story.
EMILY'S STORY
“This exercise brought me right back to source-work Miranda.
I was cast in a short film about a young man coming home to his widowed mother 2 years after his father's death. The story is about their separate grieving, abandonment, disconnect & the start of finding a way back to each other through pain, anger and betrayal.
So to the GIFT.…