Movement Training and the Body as an Instrument
Launch library · evergreen read
Physical training for actors extends well beyond basic fitness, encompassing posture, gait and gesture work designed to help a performer inhabit a character's body as fully as they inhabit their voice, since how someone moves communicates as much as anything they eventually say aloud in a scene, long after the cameras have stopped rolling.
Different roles demand entirely different physical vocabularies, and performers who train seriously in movement often describe developing a kind of physical memory, a bank of postures and rhythms they can draw on when building an unfamiliar character from the ground up, before rehearsals even properly begin in earnest, however the surrounding season's competition happened to shape up.
This discipline is easy to overlook because, done well, it rarely calls attention to itself directly on screen. Audiences register the effect, a character who feels physically coherent and fully lived in, without necessarily recognising the considerable specialised training that made such coherence possible in the first place.