“Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”
– Anthony Bourdain
At the most fundamental level, the actor has three primary tools to create their art: the body, the voice, and the face. You can think of them as the painter’s brushes and colors, the sculptor’s stone and chisel. My former professor, the brilliant singing-actor teacher Charles Gilbert, calls them the actor’s projective modes—the ways we send meaning into space so it can be received.
It’s a clean idea. Almost too clean.
Because actors—being human—have a remarkable talent for complicating what is simple. We intellectualize. We analyze. We theorize. We narrate our own process while it’s happening. We try to solve feeling with thought. As I often say to students: we are very good at mucking it up.
So we are going to begin here, with the body—not because it is more important than the voice or the face, but because it is the fastest way back to the truth.
Before you can overthink, your body has already told the story.
Why the Body Comes First
For the musical theatre actor of the twenty-first century, the body is not just one tool among many. It is the gateway.
We live in an age of screens. Heads tilted forward. Spines collapsed. Breath shallow. Attention fractured. We scroll, type, swipe, and stare—often for hours—while our bodies remain largely inert. This has consequences. Some of them obvious, some insidious.
“Tech-neck,” chronic tension, restricted breath, diminished awareness, habitual posture, stress patterns we no longer notice because they feel like home.
And yet, we ask the actor to step into rehearsal and be:
- present
- responsive
- spontaneous
- emotionally available
- physically expressive
- vocally free
These things are not compatible with disembodiment.
The body does not lie, but it does adapt. It learns shortcuts. It builds habits. It finds ways to protect us—sometimes at the cost of expressiveness. And because the body is complex beyond our full understanding—muscle, bone, memory, emotion, instinct, impulse—we are not going to treat it like a machine to be fixed.
We are going to treat it like an instrument to be listened to. This is why we begin here. Because nothing pulls an actor out of their head faster—or more reliably—than standing up and moving through space.
“I Move, Therefore I Am“
There is a quiet truth inside movement that thinking cannot reach.
When you move—truly move—you interrupt the endless internal commentary. The body occupies attention. Sensation replaces judgment. Breath organizes itself. Time becomes elastic.
Even arbitrary movement can do this. Especially arbitrary movement.
I have watched actors spiral in analysis for hours, only to find clarity in thirty seconds of physical engagement. The body does not ask permission from the intellect. It acts. And in acting, it reveals.
This is not a rejection of thought. We will need plenty of thinking. Musical theatre demands it. But thinking must not be allowed to dominate the process. Thought is a tool, not a tyrant.
Movement restores balance.
A Necessary Caution
Before we go any further, a reminder rooted in care rather than fear: nothing in this chapter is meant to replace medical guidance. If you are injured, in pain, or uncertain, consult professionals trained in bodies. What follows comes from years of studio work, rehearsal rooms, and performance spaces—not from clinical authority.
That said, there are methodologies that align beautifully with the work of the musical theatre actor. You may already know some of them. You may come to know others:
- Dance training in all its forms
- Alexander Technique
- Laban Movement Analysis
- Viewpoints
- Yoga
- Outdoor and athletic practices that reconnect play with strength
None of these are requirements. They are resources.
Your task is not to master them all. Your task is to remain curious enough to let the body stay alive.
The Body You Arrive With
Every actor enters the room carrying a body with history.
Not metaphorical history—literal history. Experiences, injuries, habits, posture learned from school desks and phone screens, joy learned from dance floors and playgrounds, shame learned from mirrors and comments and comparisons.
Before we ask the body to transform, we must first see it.
Not critically. Not judgmentally. Honestly.
Ask yourself:
- How do I inhabit my body when no one is watching?
- Where do I hold tension without realizing it?
- When do I disappear physically?
- When do I take up space?
This is not self-critique. This is awareness. And awareness is the beginning of freedom.
Habit: The Invisible Director
Most actors believe their physical choices are spontaneous.
They are not. They are habitual.
We all carry a small catalog of default behaviors—especially in musical theatre—choices that emerge under pressure, adrenaline, vulnerability, or emotional intensity. They are familiar because they have worked before. They have communicated something. They have protected us.
But familiarity is not artistry.
Over time, these habits become so ingrained that we stop seeing them. They feel like truth. They feel organic. They feel inevitable.
They are not.
Some of the most common ones will look painfully familiar:
- Arms extending forward in a gesture of pleading
- Arms spread wide in moments of intensity
- Hands pulled to the heart to signify sincerity
- Arms raised skyward in proclamation
- Hands on hips, hands in pockets
- Hands hovering at the front or back of the waist
These gestures are not “wrong.” They are just overused. And when they appear by default rather than necessity, they flatten the work. They turn moments into shorthand. They make the body predictable.
Nothing about what we do on stage should be pedestrian. Especially not the body.
Enter Laban: Permission Through Structure
One of the great gifts Rudolf Laban offers the musical theatre actor is relief.
- Relief from the pressure to be “organic.”
- Relief from the obsession with impulse.
- Relief from the fear of being “false.”
Laban gives us structure—not to limit expression, but to expand it.
He proposes that all movement can be understood through four elemental qualities:
- Flow (bound or free)
- Time (sudden or sustained)
- Weight (light or strong)
- Space (direct or indirect)
From these elements emerge eight action efforts—Punch, Dab, Press, Glide, Slash, Flick, Wring, Float—not as choreography, but as possibility.
Here is the radical permission Laban offers:
You do not need to feel something first in order to move truthfully.
You can move—and let truth arrive later.
This is liberation for actors trained to chase emotion. Movement becomes play. Exploration. Craft. And paradoxically, it often leads to deeper emotional truth because the actor is no longer strangling the moment with intention.
What is built deliberately can become instinctual. What is staged can become alive.
It’s not one or the other (remember!). It’s all of the things, all of the time.
The Actor’s History
Every actor brings something sacred into the room: their history.
Experiences. Empathy. Emotional intelligence. Memory. Fear. Courage. I will never ask you to abandon that history. It is part of what makes you capable of disappearing into another life.
But there will be moments—especially when working physically—when I will ask you to set that history gently aside. Not to erase it. To quiet it.
Because there is a higher calling at work here: to serve the text.
And in musical theatre, the text is not just words. It is music. Rhythm. Harmony. Choreography. Silence. Stillness. All of it.
Sometimes your instincts will align perfectly with the score. Sometimes they will not.
Your job is not to protect your instinct. Your job is to remain flexible enough to let craft support truth—and truth animate craft.
Practice: Let the Body Lead
There are moments when thinking fails you. When analysis stalls. When emotion feels unreachable.
This is when you move.
- Dance wildly to music that surprises you.
- Structure a physical performance with no sound.
- Imitate lives that are not your own—animal, human, imagined.
Do not rush this work. Do not judge it. Do not demand results.
Movement builds vocabulary. Vocabulary builds choice. Choice builds freedom.
And freedom—paradoxically—is what allows structure to breathe.
Looking in the Mirror
At some point, you will have to look.
Not at a role. Not at technique.
At yourself.
Actors are famously unkind to their bodies. We catalogue flaws. We narrate inadequacy. We compare.
This is not useful.
Stand in front of a mirror and observe without commentary. Notice posture. Breath. Weight. Presence.
Then say—out loud, without irony:
“This is my body. My body is flexible, inventive, resilient, strong. I release judgment and allow possibility.”
Repeat it when you don’t believe it. Especially then.
Where We Go Next
The body is not separate from the voice. It never has been.
Breath, vibration, sound, resonance—they live in flesh. They respond to tension and freedom alike. The voice does not need to be invented. It needs to be remembered.
You were born knowing how to cry out, howl, laugh, squeal with joy.
You did not forget. You adapted.
Next, we begin the work of reclaiming that instrument—not by adding something new, but by removing what no longer serves.
Next: the voice.
And how to let it live, truthfully, inside the wire.