Acting
Training Exercises and Resources

Practicing improvisation exercises can greatly help with communication skills and help reduce fear of being on stage. In a controlled environment of a class, you can easily get delegates to practice telling stories, acting out roles and performing for a small audience. Such improvisation exercises are useful for presentation skills, reporting or performing in meetings. Actors routinely use these exercises to train themselves.

A few exercises are provided here so you can get ideas of what they are about and how to run them. Aim to match the improvisation exercises to your specific training needs and maximise learning.

This is a creativity exercise that encourages delegates to create a story together as a group. It is ideal for team building, acting and creativity. You can also modify the exercise to limit its scope to match specific training needs. For example, the nature of the story can be limited to current affairs so that the focus is on journalism. Alternatively, you can limit it for marketing, branding or creative story telling.

This exercise helps delegates to understand and appreciate the power of eye contact and how it can affect emotional connection and emotional states. It is ideal in teaching emotional intelligence, body language and communication skills.

You can get the most from this exercise with the follow up discussions so make sure you allocate enough time for this.

This exercise helps delegates to understand the importance of acknowledging the view of a person they are having a conversation with irrespective of whether they agree with it or not. The exercise helps to create a vivid example which can then be discussed and explored further.

The main aims are:

• Develop rapport through having a friendly conversation as opposed to being antagonistic with opposing views
• Improve listening skills
• Learn to listen and show that you are listening

This exercise helps to test the creativity of delegates on their ability to make stories based on a series of images. Each delegate sees a series of images and needs to make an interesting story that will connects them all together.

This is entertaining exercise on getting delegates to quickly think of a story to tell based on a visual prompt. The options allow you to bias the exercise based on what you want delegates to practice on. They can then get feedback on their storytelling.

This entertaining exercise helps delegates practice their acting in front of an audience. Each person will be required to deliver a speech about a given topic. You can vary the exercise by expecting a specific style of speech or just leave it completely uncontrolled. It is ideal for training on acting, storytelling and public speaking.

Use this exercise to get the delegates design a story based on a single image. The choice of these images can greatly influence the exercise, so use this much like a template to craft a training exercise based on your specific needs.

This is powerful exercise in creative writing where delegates get to write a phone conversation based on certain limiting criteria. The structured approach to writing helps to make the task more creative and also showcases the power of creative narrative which can make communication more effective and concise.

This is an entertaining and creative exercise which can serve a variety of purposes. You can use it for subjects such as story making, storytelling, communication skills, acting and creative writing. You can also use it in a course on public speaking to get delegates practice making stories which they can then utilise in a speech.

The activity is designed to engage everyone at all times, so each member of the group is ultimately involved in all tasks while reducing the total length of the exercise. This shared experience helps delegates examine the subject from multiple angles and feel that they have contributed to all the stories developed in this exercise.