Health and Safety as an actor

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Bodily H&S

Keeping the body healthy and safe is a very big part of being an actor. It allows you to use your body in many different ways so one can create many different characters and objects through both their body and their voices. Here are a few things we do to keep our bodies in order:

Warm-ups

Warm-ups help the body to get into a state where it can take up different shapes and characters. There are different types of warm-ups to work the different muscle groups in the body. This includes breathing exercises, vocal exercises,  static stretches, movement, etc.

Breathing

Breathing exercises help an actor open up their chest and diaphragm area. This helps the actor with their projection and also helps them to keep in character, for example if an actor has a role where the character is very panicked then they would need to be able to breath properly because the lines would have barely any pauses. Some examples of breathing exercises we do are:
  1. The laugh exercise - in this exercise we put our hand on our belly area and start to make these sounds 'ha ha, ho ho, he he' really putting stress on the 'h' sound. We do this to make sure that our diaphragm expands and not our chest because we should be projecting from out 'gut' area and less from our upper chest/throat.
  2. The snake exercise - in this exercise an actor plaes their hand on their  belly area and breathes in for 8 seconds, then holds that breath for another 8 seconds, after this the actor lets out the breath in a long 'hiss' sound for as long as they can. This again allows us to control where our breath is going to.

Vocal warm-ups

Vocal exercises help an actor to know how to project their lines and also helps relax the vocal chords. This helps us as actors to know how to change our pitch to a desired state and  also helps actors with their enunciation of lines, for example if an actor is playing a character who is very upper-class the stereo type is to bring up their pitch and over enunciate all words. Some examples of vocal exercise we do are:
  1. The chew & hum exercises - in this exercise we make chewing movements with our mouths and hum. once we do that for a few seconds we open our mouths as wide as possible and stick our tongues out while still making chewing moments making the sound 'ooo waa, ooo waa'. this again allows us to relax the muscles in our mouth while also relaxing our vocal cords.
  2.  The tongue twisters - we also say tongue twisters and over enunciate the words. This exercise helps us to work on our enunciation which helps an actor land his lines with an audience. 

Bodily warm-ups

Bodily warm-ups help an actor to relax the muscles in their body before a performance. This helps actors loose the tension gained from nerves, for example performing in front of a larger unfamiliar audience it could really tighten there acting and could either corpse ones character or really harm the story line. Some examples of bodily exercises we do are:

  1. The funky chicken exercise - in this exercise we shake our limbs. each had for 8 beats, then each leg for 8 beats. we then do it for 4 beats, then 2 and then 1. After this we bend down and shake up and stretch out as wide as we can. This helps loosen the muscle around the body so one can be able to portray their properly (as per the written circumstances).
  2. The shoulder roll exercise - in this exercise we roll our shoulders forward, back and then do the opposite on both arms (left forward, right back). This help us work on focusing on our bodily movements and also help us to relaxes our core movement muscles that help us to create our characters. 

Theatre H&S

There are a lot health and safety aspects to take into consideration when performing at a theatre this includes:

Lights

The lights on stage made it very hard for us to see exactly what was in front of while we performed, this is why during our on-stage rehearsal we had to study the staging around us so when it came to our performance we would have an idea of the mapping of the stage (e.g. where props were, where other actors were etc.) 

Backstage

Backstage holds a lot of danger hazards, including curtains, wires and props. These objects could cause a lot of accidents to actors (especially during blackouts). To combat this problem the theatre had marked out safe areas on the ground with white tape, this allowed us to see where the safest areas were even when there was a blackout. We also needed to know where exactly props were so we were able to bring them off and on stage safely.

Props

It is very important for an actor to know where exactly their props are, both on and off stage. This is because when we are off-stage it is very easy to trip over objects because of the dark, we as actors also need to know where our props are because if we need it for a scene it could really damage the scene if the location of the prop is unknown. to fix this problem there should always be notes in the script telling the acors which side of the stage them and their props should be.




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