Method Acting Moments: Breakfast Beverage

The purpose of the Method Acting sense Memory exercises is to activate each of your senses, one by one. Exploring in great detail imagined objects, people, activities, and places. Concentration and focus are the key elements.

We use the technique to assess the feelings and behaviours of our characters. Training our mind, body, and senses helps us create a truthful presence on the stage. Here will share the Breakfast Beverage ExerciseStrasberg stated that actors must understand their own nature and how to respond with the senses before transforming into a character.

The sense memory exercises convey the necessity of experiencing life, the world, people, and objects through the five senses: what you see, smell, hear, touch, and taste. The time and intensity devoted to practising the exercises train your concentration. The senses act as gateways to feelings, behaviours, and responses.

The awareness of sensory experiences in the creation process makes your character fuller and closer to the reality you are creating for your character to inhabit.

With this method, characters emerge organically and unanticipated. Each sensory exercise acts as a catalyst for the Actor/Actress to discover different sides of their personality, as well as to initiate new and original ideas that ultimately lead to thinking and behaving like the character. Stanislavsky didn’t add “Intuition” to sense memory. However, this is something we will touch upon in other pieces of literature.

In sense memory, Method Acting exercises the process of the memories experienced through the five senses is internal.
The subconscious mind takes over, bringing specific impulses to the surface.

The personal memories triggered through the sense memory exercises, where you explore events, places, and people from your own life, accentuate your creativity, giving you a limitless range of feelings, actions, behaviours, and gestures needed for your character.

The trained Actor masters the ability to start and stop emotions at will and never be swallowed up by them. In a way, they cannot speak or respond to the other actors.

Sense Memory exercises will enable you to repeatedly experience every conceivable combination of traits, habits, feelings, and actions at will anew. Starting with simple non-emotional and basic daily tasks and then following with more complex endeavours.

Breakfast Drink Exercise

Performing the exercise

Practising the Breakfast Drink Exercise, you use each of your five senses to imagine and explore every detail you can think of about having your morning beverage in your favourite cup if you have a favourite. It is imperative that you don’t imitate what you do with the real cup at home; instead, you are to experience the sensations anew.

Do not imitate yourself or others. Physically imitating how you normally deal with life is a bad and limiting habit. The exercise is not a miming of the activity but a detailed imaginary exploration using each of the senses individually. You use your imagination to create a new truthful, fresh experience each time.

Exercise, persevere, revise, and follow through, keep working. Allow your imagination and sense of memory recall to be the perfect team for an amazing creative experience.

Method Acting Breakfast Beverage Exercise Step by Step

• Begin by practising at home with the real cup and liquid for a good amount of time, a half-hour to forty-five minutes. Then start with the imaginary cup for about an hour to test your senses and concentration.

• Don’t use a cup that has a particular emotional value.

• The drink should always be at exactly the right temperature and how you like it. You don’t need to mime the preparation of the drink. Imagine the drink simply appearing.

• Start the exercise with the cup already full. Don’t stop because you finished the drink. Keep going for the entire duration of the time you have decided.

• Make questions about the drink: Listen to the sound of the liquid as you swish it around in the cup. Hear the scraping or clinking of the glass. How does the handle feel? What is the weight of the cup? What’s the shape of the cup, and what’s it made of?

• Sip the drink. Can you feel the heat or coldness against your lips? Be aware of swallowing and the feeling as it goes down your gullet or into your empty stomach. Feel its texture and temperature against your cheek or temples like a child experiencing something for the first time with a curious and inventive nature.

Smell the drink; inhale it. Allow it to permeate through your body. Lift the imaginary cup to your face.

• The cup doesn’t always have to be in your hand. It can float in midair or be placed anywhere you like. Experiment with the cup by doing imaginary things like having the cup fly around the space or be placed on your head.

• Your actions and how you experience the beverage don’t have to be logical. Anything you can imagine doing with the senses will help you stay connected and concentrated.

• After a while, you might feel that you’ve run out of things to do, or you might be distracted or bored. You will need to acknowledge this and deal with it as soon as you notice. As with any distraction, speak out the problem, make sounds, do the relaxation exercise then continue.

The Ultimate Actor’s Warm-up- Acting Masterclass will relax, condition, and energise your body, mind, and soul. It will enhance your creativity and awaken your senses.
Enrol here!

---

Ref:

The Method Acting Exercises Handbook – Written by Lola Cohen. Exercise Originally devised by Lee Strasberg. Inspired by Konstantin Stanislavski

---

---