The Prep Exercise

The Prep Exercise is an acting exercise designed to get the sensation of doing your real world Task in context into your body. It reveals to you what tactics you would use and how you would use them.

It is not designed to evoke or provoke emotions or emotional reactions from you, although it may do that as a byproduct of the exercise.

The Prep Exercise has you talk out your daydream. So if your Task is to prevent someone making a terrible mistake, you choose a person in your life who corresponds to relationship type in the scene.

So say you are warning your little brother against studying engineering when his real passion is art, then you would speak it aloud.

You need to add stakes and urgency. So let’s say this is the last chance of persuading him before he commits to a course you know he doesn’t want to do.

It is best at this stage to have a recording device. You then record yourself as you daydream aloud how you would go about preventing him making a terrible mistake. What would you say, how would you prevent him? What would he say? How would you counter that?

We do this for ten minutes. Then we listen bank noting the tactics you used.

Now you know what doing that task is like, you can start doing it on your scene partner and you know precisely what tactics to use. You can use your daydream as a marker, are you doing the same things you did in your Prep Exercise, with the same investment, the same urgency and stakes.

Warning 1: do not attempt to pretend the person is present, you know they are not! Just use your imagination and daydream.

Warning 2: this exercise is a preparation for getting connected to your task, not in pretending anything. Never pretend your scene partner is the person in the Prep, just use it to connect to DOING the task.

Any questions? Give me a shout.

To You, the Best

Mark Westbrook
Acting Coach Scotland