PSYCHOLOGICAL GESTURES

Psychological gestures are movements that carry the intention, feeling, objective, and personality of the character. It is one motion that expresses the character in its entirety and can be used before scenes to establish and become the character; adopting their walk, voice, thoughts, mannerisms, and expressions.

A psychological gesture can simply come to you when you first meet your character, or after reading their dialogue and directions, but if not, there are ways that you can find and create the psychological gesture for your character:

• By asking small and simple questions regarding your character that provokes a response. For instance, “if you are playing a villain, you might begin by asking what it is your character desires. Power? Okay, how do you go about getting power? By dominating? Okay, what is a physical movement that dominates? Pressing down. Start with your hands as high as possible and press them down against an imaginary resistance. Picture the characters opponents as you press down to the floor. Add to the press a quality: rage, frustration, sinister, conniving, fear, etc. Try different qualities until you feel the quality and desire to dominate in every cell of your being.” http://www.michaelchekhov.net/gesture.html
• By visualising your character, and asking them to share with you their psychological gesture, and then trying extremely hard to imitate that gesture. “Visualize a beam of energy (light) going up from your core through the top of your head straight into outer space. Now, visualize beaming the character down as in Star Trek. Imagine the details as the character materializes from the feet to the head. Now, imagine it shows you the PG.”

You can have an overall psychological gesture, similar to having a super objective. And likewise, you can have many psychological gestures; one for each objective - not dissimilar to actioning.